Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years 022619356X, 9780226193564

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Between Mao and McCarthy

Between Mao and McCarthy Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years

CHARLOTTE BROOKS

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Charlotte Brooks is associate professor of history at Baruch College, City University of New York. She is the author of Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California, also published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-19356-4 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-19373-1 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226193731.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brooks, Charlotte, 1971– author. Between Mao and McCarthy : Chinese American politics in the Cold War years / Charlotte Brooks. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-19356-4 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-22619373-1 (e-book) 1. Chinese Americans—Political activity—History— 20th century. 2. Chinese Americans—Social conditions—History— 20th century. I. Title. E184.C5B736 2015 305.895107309’04—dc23 2014010243 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Pam And in memory of Gus

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments / ix List of Abbreviations / xiii A Note on Names and Translations / xv

Introduction / 1 ONE

/ New York and San Francisco: Politics in the Political Capitals of Chinese America / 13 T WO

/ War, Revolution, and Political Realignment / 51

THREE

FOUR

/ The Resurgence of China Politics / 89

/ Divergence: New York and San Francisco in the 1950s / 121

FIVE

/ The “Immigration Racket” Investigation and the Rise of a New Politics / 157 SIX

/ Chinese Americans, Orientals, Minorities: Politics in a New Era / 197 Epilogue / 243 Notes / 247 Who’s Who / 297 Index / 305

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

I could not have completed Between Mao and McCarthy without the assistance of a wide array of friends, family, colleagues, students, and staff at institutions in New York and across the country. Their help and support made the research and writing of this book possible. I am deeply grateful to the Eugene M. Lang Foundation, which through the Lang Junior Faculty Fellowship Program at Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY), provided much of the funding for my research. The Professional Staff Congress–CUNY Award Program also supported the research for this book, while the Macaulay Honors College enabled me to purchase Chinese-language reference materials. In the course of writing the book, I visited and used the resources of numerous archives, libraries, and presidential museums across the country. I am thankful to the staffs of the John F. Kennedy Library, the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum, the Harry S. Truman Library Institute, the Richard M. Nixon Library, the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the National Archives II facility in College Park, Maryland, the C.V. Starr East Asian Library and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, the Princeton University East Asia Library, the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, the Charles E. Young Library Special Collections Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Asian American Studies Library and the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the University Library Department of Archives and Special Collections at California State University, Dominguez Hills, the Hoover Institution, the J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections Department at the University of Utah, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Stanford University Special Collections and University Archives, the Arizona Historical Founda-

x / Acknowledgments

tion, the New York Public Library, the Special Collections and Manuscripts Library at California State University, Sacramento, the Special Collections Department at the University of California, Davis, the California State Library, the New York Municipal Archives, the San Francisco History Center at the San Francisco Public Library, the Department of Special Collections at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Center for Research Libraries, the Museum of Chinese in America, and the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. I also wish to thank the many colleagues at Baruch College, CUNY, who provided assistance and encouragement as I did the research for Between Mao and McCarthy. Louisa Moy, Brian Ross, and particularly J. Silvia Cho of the college library’s interlibrary loan department did their utmost to locate the unusual materials I requested. The college’s chief librarian, Arthur Downing, found the resources to enable Baruch to join the Center for Research Libraries consortium at a crucial moment in my research. My colleagues and the staff of the Department of History provided a collegial atmosphere in which to work and teach. While writing this book, I benefited from the help of undergraduate and graduate research assistants. Ethan Hong Zheng of Baruch College spent weeks poring over the 1949 numbers of the Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York and finding relevant articles for me. May Poh Lai from the Macaulay Honors College served as my summer research assistant and helped me locate important material in the Chinese Journal and the Chinese-American Weekly. At San Francisco State University, graduate student Samuel Wanless proved a particularly intrepid researcher, finding and photographing San Francisco election precinct counts and the maps that accompanied them. Over the past few years, I made significant efforts to contact the men and women whom I discuss in this book. Most had already passed away, and others either declined to be interviewed or chose not to respond to my inquiries. However, I was fortunate enough to locate and interview a handful of the men and women who participated in or reported on midcentury Chinese American politics in New York and San Francisco. I also received considerable assistance from many of the family members of the activists who appear in Between Mao and McCarthy. I am very grateful to Judge Harry Low, John Burton, Catherine Lee, William Yukon Chang, Cindy Gim, Dr. Edward Chow, Dallas Chang, Connie Young Yu, Amy Chung, and Burk Chung, for sharing their memories and documents with me. Edward Jew was particularly generous with his extensive knowledge of San Francisco Chinatown politics and with material about his friend T. Kong Lee. I want to extend special thanks to Dorinda Ng and Wayne Hu, whose assistance

Acknowledgments / xi

and cooperation were crucial to this book. Both shared memories of their parents’ activism with me; provided information, documents, and photographs unavailable in conventional archives; and introduced me to friends and acquaintances with considerable knowledge of Chinese American politics in the Bay Area. Equally important, they shared their own memories of growing up with politically active parents in midcentury San Francisco. I am also grateful to the many people who helped me as I completed the initial and final drafts of the manuscript. Brad Simpson provided invaluable assistance as I searched for additional Cold War–era source materials. Meredith Oda, Madeline Hsu, Shana Bernstein, Jason Chang, and Naoko Shibusawa offered useful comments on the conference papers that became part of the manuscript. Jonathan Soffer, Kristin Cellelo, Lara Vapnek, Vanessa May, Libby Garland, Jeffrey Trask, Randi Storch, Owen Gutfreund, Meredith Oda, Pam Griffith, Shana Bernstein, and Ellen Wu read portions of the book and pushed me to improve it in numerous ways. Shana’s encouragement and sense of humor buoyed me at key moments, while Ellen was always generous with her enthusiasm, suggestions, research materials, and admonitions to never forget dessert. Having been out of graduate school for more than a decade, I can no longer officially claim Nancy MacLean as my advisor, but she has never forced me to accept that fact. At the University of Chicago Press, Robert Devens and, later, Timothy Mennel patiently shepherded the book through the production process. I also wish to thank the two anonymous readers at the press for their valuable suggestions. My family’s love and encouragement sustained me as I researched and wrote this book. Jill Brooks-Garnett, Jennifer Tucker, Nancy Bowman, Jim and Marlene Bentzien, Joy Brooks, and Dara Griffith offered laughter and kind words at all the right moments. Richard Brooks cheered me with bad puns, groan-worthy jokes, love, and a microfilm reader. Bjorn Broholm-Vail and Lou H.H. Griffith-Brooks provided perhaps a few too many hours of diversion. And Pam Griffith remained my inspiration throughout, quietly doing the kind of work that makes the world a better place. I am deeply grateful for her love and unflagging support.

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

ACLU ARCI

American Civil Liberties Union Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals

CACA

Chinese American Citizens Alliance (also known as the Native Sons of the Golden State)

CADC

Chinese American Democratic Club of San Francisco

CCBA

Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of San Francisco (the “Chinese Six Companies”)

CCBA-NY

Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York

CCP

Chinese Communist Party

CDC

California Democratic Council

CDCP

CFA CPUSA CRA CWRA DNC

Chinese Democratic Constitutionalist Party (formerly the Chinese Constitutionalist Party and the Chinese Empire Reform Association) Committee for a Free Asia Communist Party of the United States California Republican Assembly Chinese War Relief Association Democratic National Committee

FBI

US Federal Bureau of Investigation

FCPO

Free China Political Organizations

INS JACL

US Immigration and Naturalization Service (formerly the US Immigration Service) Japanese American Citizens League

xiv / Abbreviations KMT

Kuomintang/Chinese Nationalist Party

NAACP

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

NCWC

National Chinese Welfare Council

NRA

National Recovery Administration

PCC

Chinese Political Consultative Conference of 1946

PLA

People’s Liberation Army

PRC

People’s Republic of China

ROC

Republic of China (on the Chinese mainland before 1949; on Taiwan after 1949)

WPA

Works Progress Administration

A N O T E O N N A M E S A N D T R A N S L AT I O N S

There are hundreds of dialects of Chinese, many of them mutually unintelligible but all written with the same characters. Today, scholars generally transliterate written Chinese into English using the pinyin system developed in the People’s Republic of China. Pinyin is a Romanization system for what is known as “standard Chinese,” or putonghua, a dialect spoken around Beijing and today the language of education and government in China. Before the 1970s, the vast majority of Chinese immigrants to the United States, as well as many of their descendants, spoke one of the dialects of Chinese known as Yue and used in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong Province. When Chinese immigrants arrived in America, they (or, more commonly, American officials) often transliterated their names in nonstandard ways. For example, the very common surname 陳, Romanized as Chen in pinyin, was rendered as Chan, Chin, Chinn, Chen, or even Tchen. Some but not all Chinese immigrants adopted English first names that they used only with English-speaking non-Chinese. In addition, American officials and non-Chinese frequently misunderstood the structure of Chinese names, including the way surnames precede given names, or the fact that certain words like “Ah” (阿) are not names but simply terms of familiarity sometimes used as name prefixes. The result of this confusion was that Chinese immigrants often became known in the wider community by “names” that were not names at all, or were not the names they used in Chinese. Many of them simply accepted these new names, and to avoid confusion, their English-speaking children did so as well. For instance, one of New York’s more prominent Chinese Americans in the mid-twentieth century was James Typond, the Americanborn son of Chinese immigrant Yip Typond. In Chinese, James Typond’s

xvi / A Note on Names and Translations

name was Yip Wingjeun (Ye Rongjin in pinyin), but because non-Chinese assumed that Yip Typond’s surname was Typond rather than Yip, he and his son James used it that way when interacting with non-Chinese. In this book, I use pinyin to transliterate names when I can find no record of the way the name was commonly transliterated at the time (a transliteration that would almost certainly have reflected a Yue dialect pronunciation rather than a northern Chinese pronunciation). When a person used different names in English and Chinese, I have referred to that person by the name that he or she used in English. Finally, I use the old WadeGiles system (widely employed before 1979) for transliterations of names associated with the Republic of China (Chiang Kai-shek instead of Jiang Jieshi, for example). Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this book are mine.

Introduction

In October 1952, Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson held a campaign rally in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where he spoke to a crowd of thousands of enthusiastic supporters, many of them Chinese Americans. At almost the same moment, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wife of the leader of the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan, arrived in Manhattan to urge Chinese Americans there to act as “cadres” for her husband’s regime. These two affairs were the year’s most important political events in the Chinese American communities of San Francisco and New York City, and they symbolized the complexity of Chinese American politics in the midcentury years. Long the target of discriminatory laws and practices, people of Chinese ancestry after World War Two enjoyed improved treatment but still yearned for a fairer and more equitable America. Events overseas deeply complicated their ability to organize politically to achieve this goal, particularly since much of the American public and government considered all of them surrogates for China, or even citizens of that nation. In 1949, the Chinese civil war ended after the Chinese Communist Party defeated the Chinese Nationalists (Kuomintang/KMT), who fled to Taiwan. A year later, the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC) entered the Korean War against the United States. In this context, what the Stevenson rally and Madame Chiang’s visit reveal is the degree to which the distinctive local political cultures of New York and San Francisco ultimately tempered the effects of the fraught ROC-PRC-US relationship on the Chinese American communities of each city. In short, the two events demonstrate the surprising and significant ways in which national and international politics intersected with local ones in the early Cold War years.1 This is a book about Chinese American politics during that era. The word politics can be singular or plural; in the case of Chinese Americans, it

2 / Introduction

was most definitely the latter. Chinese American politics were, in the simplest sense, the political choices and activities of people of Chinese ancestry in the United States, yet these politics were anything but simple: they involved both the politics of China and those of the United States. A mix of aliens and citizens, legal residents and unlawful entrants, the Chinese American population often maintained close ties to mainland China before the Korean War. Many Chinese Americans participated in Chinese political parties, and some even served in legislative bodies in China while living in the United States. By the 1940s and 1950s, however, thousands of Chinese Americans, especially American-born men and women, began to avoid “China politics” and participate in American electoral politics instead. During the period this book covers, China politics always remained a part of Chinese American politics. But by the 1960s, Chinese American politics became much less about China’s future and much more about winning elections in America and achieving greater civil rights for people of Chinese ancestry in the United States. The political experiences of Chinese Americans challenge current understandings of how Cold War foreign policy converged with domestic civil rights struggles after World War Two. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet Union and the PRC both preached racial equality, an issue that undermined American prestige across the developing world. In particular, the United States seemed to be failing in its attempts to win friends and allies in Asia. Throughout the region, many citizens and leaders of newly independent nations expressed admiration for communist China while regarding the United States, an ally of colonial powers Britain and France, as a defender of white supremacy. Participants in the burgeoning US civil rights movement often tried to highlight this issue. As Congressman Adam Clayton Powell pointed out, the United States could improve its appeal to the developing world only if it would “quit taking the side of colonialism . . . [and] clean up the race problem in the United States.”2 Occasionally, communist accusations pushed American officials to take the kind of positive action Powell desired. More often, the US government tried to cover up racial problems and suppress domestic critics, especially blacks who used anti-colonialism to understand and explain global white supremacy. Many African American activists responded by avoiding discussion of foreign policy altogether and instead focusing on purely domestic strategies for change. But because of their ancestry, Chinese Americans did not have this option. 3 For almost every Chinese American in the postwar United States, the

Introduction / 3

relationship between foreign policy and domestic politics was not just ideological and rhetorical but immediate and sometimes imperiling. US officials used the supposed threat of communism to investigate and harass thousands of Chinese Americans and to justify draconian security measures against them. Being perceived as potential racial enemies of the United States affected their ability to communicate with, visit, and support families in China, altered their future plans and careers, and gave some people tremendous power and status while undermining the citizenship and welfare of others. At the same time, US foreign policy and domestic anti-communism enabled the ROC to actively interfere in Chinese American communities and influenced the PRC regime’s ever-changing treatment of “overseas Chinese” families.4 Frustrated at this state of affairs, more and more Chinese Americans in the 1950s and 1960s began participating in American politics. Some did so specifically to defend the interests of the ROC regime; far more hoped to protect and enhance the rights of Chinese Americans in the United States. Scholars who look at Cold War Asian America tend to focus on the ways in which people of Asian ancestry shaped, deployed, and exploited Asian and Asian American images.5 But Chinese Americans were not simply image manipulators. They were eager political actors who sought fairer laws, lobbied public officials, and rallied voters around issues of common concern. Most were also liberals or moderates, and in contrast to previous studies that focus on community rightists or leftists, this book looks at Chinese America’s broad, active, and diverse political center. Home to the majority of Chinese Americans, it included supporters of ROC leader Chiang Kai-shek, his opponents in the KMT, third-party KMT opponents, liberals, moderates, Democrats, Republicans, and many who fell into more than one of these categories, or none at all. Current scholarship tends to portray the Cold War as either a period of Chinese American political apathy or an era during which repressive, right-wing KMT fossils attacked the heroic but doomed community Marxists who valued democracy and supported “New China.”6 This view not only flattens the complexities of Chinese American politics, but renders Americans of Chinese ancestry as passive victims and makes their energetic, centrist activism irrelevant. The anti-communist political climate of the early Cold War years certainly stifled many Americans’ freedom of expression and was particularly devastating for members of the Communist Party and those active in groups associated with it. Yet ordinary people never completely stopped criticizing the state or organizing for even controversial causes. Chinese Americans were no different. In

4 / Introduction

fact, their political positions and choices say as much about the complexity of American politics at this time as they do about the Chinese American experience in particular.7 As this book demonstrates, centrist Chinese Americans publicly expressed profound ambivalence about both the ROC and the PRC, frustrating the attempts of the two regimes to claim the allegiance of “overseas Chinese” in America. By 1951, few Chinese Americans defended the PRC, but not just because the Korean War and the Second Red Scare made praise for the country seem traitorous. Instead, the PRC’s own policies alienated many Chinese Americans by harming their families in China. The ROC had to contend with the contempt and criticism of many Chinese Americans as well, even members of the American KMT leadership. During the early Cold War, centrist Chinese Americans became some of the ROC’s most eloquent and consistent critics. This drumbeat of dissent worried the Chiang regime, which invested considerable resources to suppress it but never really could. After all, the KMT government was dealing with an increasingly vocal and confident group of US citizens, many of whom wanted to forge ties to American rather than Chinese political parties. Between Mao and McCarthy argues that the political activity of these citizens played a vital role in shaping Chinese American identity and community in the Cold War years, a period of tremendous economic and social change for people of Chinese ancestry. Before World War Two, many Chinese Americans saw themselves as Chinese rather than American, in large part because of the intense legal, social, and economic discrimination they faced in the United States. Numerous second- and even thirdgeneration people contemplated “returning” to China, prompted both by bigotry at home and loyalty to their ancestral land. Growing US sympathy for Japanese-occupied China in the late 1930s improved the image and treatment of Chinese Americans, as did the Sino-American alliance during World War Two. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, a Chinese American ethnic identity was increasingly emerging in the United States. In part, the communist victory in the Chinese civil war and the KMT’s retreat to Taiwan complicated plans to “return” to China, however one defined it. But Chinese Americans also found far more reasons than ever before to stay in the United States. Pulled into the mainstream workforce and the military during World War Two, thousands continued to enjoy better job opportunities after the conflict. Congress eliminated some of the laws that excluded Chinese from immigrating and that denied them naturalization rights, while larger shifts in American ideas about race eroded the white supremacy that stymied earlier generations of Chinese Americans. By the 1950s, a grow-

Introduction / 5

ing number of Chinese American citizens rejected Nationalist interference in community politics, and in spite of KMT pressure, embraced a Chinese American ethnic identity divorced from both the PRC and the ROC. Entering American politics, they insisted on recognition as citizens and voters, rather than as “Chinese,” and they punished candidates whom they deemed disrespectful or dismissive of this demand.8 These Chinese Americans became politically active at a pivotal moment in America, when population and thus political power was shifting west and the future of liberalism was under debate.9 This book shows that the changing local politics of the communities in which people of Chinese ancestry lived played an important role in determining the success of ROC attempts to prevent the development of a Chinese American ethnic politics distinct from China politics. The Nationalists dominated populations that local political systems helped disfranchise, but their mission proved less successful where community members enjoyed a degree of influence in mainstream party politics. While China politics remained very powerful in Chinese American politics in some places, elsewhere in America its influence diminished. The results of this disparity are apparent even today in the degree of political influence Chinese Americans wield—or do not—in communities across the United States.

By 1950, almost 120,000 Chinese Americans lived in the United States, excluding the Territory of Hawaii. Between Mao and McCarthy focuses on the American mainland’s two largest Chinese American communities: those of San Francisco, California, and New York, New York. Because of their size and geographical position, these two cities were the political, social, and economic capitals of East Coast and West Coast Chinese America. They housed their regions’ most important Chinese American merchants and businesses, immigration lawyers, community organizations, political party branches, Chinese-language newspapers and magazines, and Chinese government consuls.10 Because of San Francisco’s history, geographical position, and concentration of merchants and community organizations, it was also the “capital” of Chinese America as a whole. Chinese-language newspapers in the mid-twentieth century regularly referred to San Francisco not only as the sound-alike san fanshi but also as jiujinshan, or old gold mountain, and dabu, or great port. These monikers were no accident. The first Chinese arrived in San Francisco during the Gold Rush, and the city remained the port through which most Chinese entered America until the 1960s. For many

6 / Introduction

years, including the period this book addresses, San Francisco was home to the largest Chinese American population in the continental United States (around 40,000 in the mid-1950s). New York gained a sizeable Chinese American presence in the 1880s and by the twentieth century had become the main center of Chinese American life on the East Coast. By the mid1950s, its Chinese American population (about 32,000 in the metro area) was second only to San Francisco’s. As a result, half of the Chinese American population of the continental United States lived in the New York and San Francisco metropolitan areas by 1960. Chinese officials and party leaders recognized the special significance of San Francisco and New York to Chinese American life. Before 1949, Communist Party members in the two cities worked to organize Chinese Americans into leftist organizations, but the Second Red Scare and the Korean War ended their ability to operate openly. The KMT experienced no such restrictions in either place, although the cities’ relative value to the Nationalists changed markedly over time. In the prewar years, San Francisco was home to the most important Chinese American merchants, whose donations the Nationalist regime craved; the city’s KMT branch was large, active, and growing, and several papers in the Bay Area represented different party factions. After World War Two, the Nationalist government’s needs changed quickly. Determined to survive after the establishment of the PRC, the KMT regime on Taiwan shifted resources and attention to New York, home of the United Nations, much of the American media, and a growing collection of Nationalist backers and detractors. In Manhattan, the Chinese Nationalists fought to hold on to their UN seat and lobbied constantly in the press for more American aid and attention. San Francisco, while still important, no longer commanded nearly as much of the ROC’s attention or manpower. American immigration officials recognized the special importance of Chinese American San Francisco and New York as well. Authorities who sought to stem the unlawful immigration of Chinese into the United States identified the two cities as their main problem areas. In both places, sailors who jumped ship and students who overstayed visas could blend easily into sizable Chinese American communities. Of even greater concern to officials, extensive networks of Chinese American immigration attorneys and travel agents operated in both places and sometimes maintained offices in each; these immigration experts used their connections and knowledge to help Chinese slip into the United States unlawfully. For this reason, the Department of Justice and the Immigration and Naturalization Service

Introduction / 7

(INS) focused most of their resources on San Francisco and New York during a crucial 1956 investigation into immigration fraud among Chinese Americans.11 Of course, San Francisco and New York were not the only places where Chinese Americans participated in US and China politics, or where Chinese and American officials attempted to extend their authority over communities of Chinese ancestry. Cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Oakland emerged as other centers of Chinese and Chinese American political activism in these years. Diverse Hawaii, which contained a Chinese American population similar in size to San Francisco’s, occupied a unique position in the Asian American political world. American officials investigated immigration violations in Washington, D.C., Buffalo, San Diego, and a host of other communities. Still, no two places straddled the intersection of Chinese, American, and Chinese American politics quite like San Francisco and New York, and no two represented better the polarization of Chinese American politics by the 1950s.

Almost every Chinese American who called San Francisco or New York home traced his or her ancestry to the Pearl River Delta area of Guangdong Province in southern China. The delta counties grappled in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the impact of political unrest, natural disasters, Western imperialism, and new market forces. Since the region was located near major international ports, hundreds of thousands of its residents coped with these forces by migrating elsewhere. While some sought better opportunities in China itself, most traveled abroad, looking for work in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the United States, among other places.12 The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which Congress passed in an effort to bar these Chinese migrants from the United States, played an immensely important role in the composition of Chinese American communities after that time. Those whom the law allowed to reside in the United States included students, merchants, and their families. In contrast, until 1943 the exclusion law forbade Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States, and those already in the country could not bring in non-citizen wives and children. For this reason, the small population of native-born Chinese American citizens in the United States before World War Two were frequently merchants’ children. At the same time, thousands of Chinese sought ways around the law, purchasing fake identities that enabled them

8 / Introduction

to enter the United States as the alleged sons of American citizens or as dependents of “legally domiciled merchants.” By the 1920s and 1930s, some of the Chinese sailors who worked in the international merchant fleets were also jumping ship in US ports in violation of exclusion. Before the 1950s, the vast majority of the laborers, sailors, and merchants who came to the United States, whether legally or unlawfully, were boys and men, meaning that Chinese American politics were even more heavily male than US politics in general during this era. In the period this book considers, Chinese Americans in New York and San Francisco each developed a distinctive politics that grew further apart over time. To a certain extent, this evolution reflected the dissimilar demographics of the Chinese American population of each community, as well as the changing role leftists and the KMT played in both. But the startlingly different Chinese American political cultures that emerged in each place were hardly preordained, nor simply the product of Cold War repression. Instead, they reflected the importance of local politics, whose shifts shaped Chinese American political activity in significant and unprecedented ways. This book begins in the early 1930s, when the kind of token political influence that Chinese Americans enjoyed in Manhattan seemed completely out of the reach of their San Francisco peers. By the time the book ends, in the late 1960s, Chinese Americans in San Francisco had become an important political force in their city, while their New York counterparts exercised almost no influence whatsoever. Regional and national political changes also shaped Chinese American politics in New York and San Francisco in ways almost no one could have foreseen in the 1930s. In those years, New York State was the nation’s political and progressive powerhouse; its former governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, occupied the White House from 1933 until his death in 1945. New York City’s storied progressives, from Fiorello LaGuardia to Vito Marcantonio to Herbert Lehman, were the nation’s most prominent defenders of FDR’s New Deal state. But World War Two quickened an ongoing population shift from northeast to southwest, and New York City in the postwar years lost jobs, population, and political clout. As Democrats and Republicans created sophisticated new organizations on the West Coast, Manhattan’s old Tammany Hall Democratic political machine was in its death throes. New York’s loss was California’s gain—literally, in the Congress and the Electoral College, and symbolically in the emergence of Western politicians on the national scene and California conservatism by the late 1960s. Not all California politicians were conservatives, of course; in fact, by the 1970s, the San Francisco liberals closest to the city’s Chinese

Introduction / 9

American community had become the most passionate defenders of progressive politics in the United States.13 To explore the complex politics of both places, Between Mao and McCarthy draws on a host of federal, state, and local government documents and FBI files, the papers of civic organizations and political clubs, and interviews with politicians and activists and their children. The book also uses the diaries and papers of Chinese political notables, including Chiang Kai-shek, V.K. Wellington Koo, and Li Zongren, as well as documents from the Kuomintang archives; articles from newspapers in Taipei, Hong Kong, and Shanghai; memoirs of activists and bystanders; and community directories and commemorative publications. Above all, Between Mao and McCarthy relies on local Chinese-language newspapers and magazines to give voice to an array of community members. The great majority of Chinese American men and women in the early and mid-twentieth century understood Chinese, and most spoke it at home. The Chinese Americans active in politics in the 1950s and 1960s could often both speak and read Chinese, and many paid close attention to the Chinese-language press. This book includes almost all the publications they might have encountered, drawing on the journals that represented various factions of the KMT in New York and San Francisco, the newspapers of the anti-KMT “Third Force” in America, communist-backed and openly communist papers, and centrist and liberal journals not affiliated with any political party. Together, these organs chronicled news of interest to their communities, devoting space to political meetings and groups that the mainstream English-language press ignored. Political parties and factions also used newspapers to hash out their disagreements and even threaten other parties and factions. Independent publications in Chinese American communities often aired the views of activist editors and provided space for letters from ordinary Chinese Americans—especially, but not solely, immigrants—who discussed their passions, annoyances, and frustrations. Used together, these publications capture the vigor and diversity of Chinese American politics in a way that other sources cannot. The US-Taiwan alliance created significant political repression in Chinese American communities, but the high circulation numbers of the independent press confirm that a vibrant, diverse politics never disappeared from Cold War Chinese America. Nor did the Second Red Scare completely eliminate vocal dissent or progressive activism, unless “progressive” is simply a euphemism for “Marxist.” Despite what some historians maintain, the KMT never enjoyed complete control in any community, because even many centrists refused to bow to its dictates. In other words, the vast space

10 / Introduction

between Mao and McCarthy contained vigorous debates and many independent political voices.

In order to fully capture these debates and voices, this book begins in the 1930s and proceeds in a roughly chronological fashion up to the late 1960s. The first three chapters of the book examine the origins of Chinese American political activism in the New Deal and World War Two, as well as the impact of the immediate postwar years, when the civil war in China complicated political affinities. The final three chapters trace the evolution of Chinese American politics in New York and San Francisco after the founding of the PRC and its involvement in the Korean War. Chapter One examines the impact of New Deal politics on the Chinese American communities of San Francisco and New York. During the 1930s, Chinese politics remained an almost obsessive preoccupation in both communities, while the China-born segment of the community often derided the native-born citizens as “brainless” and weak, neither wholly Chinese nor American. Yet as the Depression increasingly affected Chinese Americans, New Deal programs offered them hope and a new vision of the way politics could affect their communities and give their citizenship actual meaning. Chapter Two explores the political ferment in Chinese American communities during and immediately after World War Two. Chinese politics remained a major obsession, and the Chinese civil war split the community; even many moderates who disliked communism criticized the repressive and incompetent Nationalist regime. But after the 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act gave Chinese immigrants the ability to become naturalized citizens, American politics began to attract the attention of more of the Chinese American population. An influx of thousands of China-born wives under the provisions of 1946 “war bride” legislation compounded this effect: war veterans of Chinese ancestry pleaded with Congress to allow continued family immigration and to end immigration officials’ harassment of their wives. By 1947 and 1948, the growing importance of American domestic politics, and the increasingly poor reputation of the Nationalists, signaled the declining power of conservative leaders and organizations in Chinese American communities. Chapter Three discusses the ways in which the communist takeover of the Chinese mainland and China’s involvement in the Korean War shaped Chinese American politics between 1949 and 1951. Leaders of the American KMT sought alternatives to Chiang Kai-shek, while American members of

Introduction / 11

the anti-communist and anti-Nationalist Third Force continued their quest to shape American policy towards China. While the Korean War eventually unified the American KMT, it hardly silenced Chiang Kai-shek’s critics in New York and San Francisco. Chapter Four explores the rapidly diverging politics of Chinese American New York and San Francisco in the early and mid-1950s. In New York, KMT activists and officials infiltrated almost every Chinese American organization, but their factionalism and disregard for community welfare frustrated many residents. In San Francisco during the same period, Chinese Americans increasingly focused on American domestic politics, which not only proved safer than Chinese politics but also touched their lives more directly. Growing numbers registered to vote, and a group of younger men and women participated in the liberal Democratic club movement, forging valuable ties to regional politicians. Chapter Five discusses the 1956 Justice Department crackdown on unlawful immigration and its aftermath in Chinese American New York and San Francisco. In New York, the investigation paralyzed the community and strengthened the very KMT leaders who proved unable to stop it. In San Francisco, Chinese American liberal Democrats used their connections to local politicians to fight the investigation and at the same time demonstrate to their peers the value of political participation. In 1958, they played a significant local role in the election that made Edmund G. “Pat” Brown governor and brought a host of other Democrats into state office. Some even began to envision pan-Asian American political solidarity as a route to greater influence in San Francisco. Chapter Six examines Chinese American political activity in the 1960s against the backdrop of the black civil rights movement, growing Asian American socioeconomic mobility, the Vietnam War, changes in US immigration policy, and the intergenerational tensions that the Asian American movement helped provoke. During this period, activist Chinese American youths increasingly rejected moderate politics and condemned as reactionaries the same community liberals who had long struggled against Chinatown conservatives.

Between the Depression and the late 1960s, local politics and American foreign policy converged to shape the rights, opportunities, and political activism of Chinese Americans. The starkly different experiences of people of Chinese ancestry in New York and San Francisco demonstrate the way that local and global conditions could mix to either limit or facilitate political activism. By the 1950s, Chinese American politics in San Francisco

12 / Introduction

were emerging from the shadow of China and its tumultuous relationship with the United States. Such a development took far longer in New York City, where a lack of robust party competition dovetailed with KMT imperatives to thwart real change. Even today, the Chinese American population of San Francisco enjoys far greater political influence than its New York counterpart, a legacy of the Cold War’s effect on midcentury politics in both places.

ONE

New York and San Francisco: Politics in the Political Capitals of Chinese America

Describing Chinese American San Francisco before World War Two, the journalist Gilbert Woo vividly recalled the way the politics of China divided the community. “There were disagreements over constitutional monarchy and constitutional democracy, there were debates over constitutionalism and dictatorship, there were arguments about Wang Jingwei versus Chiang Kai-shek, and there were disputes about Hu Hanmin versus Chiang Kai-shek,” he noted.1 China politics was a constant source of discord partly because Chinese Americans feared for the future of their ancestral nation. Racist American immigration laws also encouraged this fixation on China politics: because Asian immigrants could not naturalize, few Chinese Americans could vote. Even native-born Chinese Americans viewed American politics with skepticism, since white demagogues routinely used anti-Chinese sentiment to win elections. The result in both San Francisco and New York was that Chinese American politics and China politics were essentially the same. But shifts in local politics and Chinese American demographics, coupled with the onset of the Great Depression and Japanese encroachment in China, began in the 1930s to disentangle the two—at least in San Francisco. There, an emerging population of native-born activists started to participate in both the Democratic and Republican parties, even as Chinese New Yorkers grew more polarized and more suspicious of American politics. New York and San Francisco in the early twentieth century seemed fairly similar: major ports with cosmopolitan cultures, strong labor unions, and long histories of immigrant involvement in politics. In reality, their political cultures differed in numerous ways. Democratic political machines dominated New York’s boroughs, but socialism also appealed to the heavily immigrant working classes. Laboring under terrible conditions and en-

14 / Chapter One

countering the disdain of Protestant elites, many Jewish and some Catholic immigrants and their children engaged in radical politics that led them, by the 1930s, into the American Labor Party, or, sometimes, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. In San Francisco, working conditions were often better, the conservative American Federation of Labor wielded significant power, and the line between Asian and non-Asian defined desirability. Unquestionably “white,” European newcomers and their children largely eschewed socialism, although some cast their votes for Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign in 1934. Radicalism and socialism were not totally absent in prewar San Francisco, especially on the waterfront and during pivotal moments like the 1934 general strike, but they never influenced the city’s political culture to the same extent as in New York. Instead, San Francisco remained a solidly Republican city through the 1920s and early 1930s.2 In those years, Chinese Americans in New York fared better in local politics than their West Coast counterparts did. The San Franciscans struggled with the remnants of the anti-Chinese movement on the Pacific Coast, while the New Yorkers enjoyed a few token crumbs from the infamous Tammany Hall Democratic machine. But over the course of the 1930s, the situation shifted markedly. In San Francisco, the first sizable nativeborn Chinese American citizen generation came of age during the Depression. At the same moment, scores of younger California politicians, many of them former Republicans inspired by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, worked to revive the flagging Democratic Party in the state. Despite San Francisco’s long anti-Chinese history, white Democratic activists there began welcoming Chinese Americans into the party, with local Republicans eventually following suit. In contrast, the influence of Chinese Americans in mainstream party politics in New York declined during the 1930s. Still a heavily foreign-born community, Chinese New York offered little reward to politicians seeking votes. Chinese Americans with ties to Tammany thus bought their connections with a steady stream of bribes and payoffs to machine leaders. During the Depression, liberal Republican mayor Fiorello LaGuardia used his tremendous popularity to attack Tammany, undermining much of its power and undercutting the position of Chinese Americans in city politics at the same time. The different tenor and structure of local politics and the changing nature of party competition in the two cities meant that Chinese Americans who participated in mainstream political activism in San Francisco enjoyed new opportunities that their New York counterparts did not. In 1930s San Francisco, New Deal programs that benefited Chinatown enhanced the

New York and San Francisco: Political Capitals of Chinese America / 15

prestige of American party politics and Chinese American citizen activists. Many such men and women eventually discovered that their involvement in US party activism provided alternative routes to influence in a community that had traditionally favored the China-born and the well-connected. In New York, the political shifts of the 1930s played a different role. Despite the hopes of community liberals and leftists, the New Deal almost completely neglected Chinese American New York, as did LaGuardia’s reform coalition. Most Chinese New Yorkers who sought political power within their community thus opted to do so in time-tested methods: some joined a secret society, such as the On Leong Tong or the Hip Sing Tong, while a handful bought enough votes to become leaders in the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. Others gravitated toward radical alternatives to mainstream politics, including the kinds of Marxist-influenced organizations that attracted fewer adherents in the Bay Area. Chinese American New York, which in the early 1930s occupied a stronger political position than San Francisco, fell far behind its Western counterpart by 1940.

The Anti-Chinese Movement and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association San Francisco was both the center of American anti-Chinese political activism and the economic, social, and political capital of Chinese America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The city, which contained the largest ethnic Chinese population in the continental United States (around 20,000 in 1930), had been a hub of anti-Chinese agitation since the Gold Rush era. Throughout much of the late nineteenth century, white San Franciscans attacked and harassed the Chinese, threatened to burn the growing “Chinatown” area to the ground, and blamed “coolies” for economic problems in the city. Fearful of the anti-Chinese Workingmen’s Party of California, Democrats and Republicans in the 1870s and 1880s redoubled their anti-Chinese efforts in order to compete with the upstart group. Heeding the growing anti-Chinese unrest in California and other Western states, Congress in 1882 also passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting all Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States for ten years; lawmakers later extended the measure in 1892 and made it permanent in 1904. Earlier court decisions, together with the exclusion law, barred Chinese aliens from becoming naturalized US citizens.3 Politically and socially marginalized, Chinese immigrants turned to each other, creating organizations and clubs based on shared surnames, districts of origin, and professions. Some also formed secret societies, sworn

16 / Chapter One

brotherhoods that protected men who belonged to “small surnames” or who simply disliked the other associations. Many of the organizational names contained the Chinese word “tang,” meaning “hall,” and white observers took to calling all of them “tongs.” Most of these groups performed various types of charitable work for their members, feeding and sheltering the destitute and shipping home to China the bones of those who died in America. But a handful responded to the decline in economic opportunities for the Chinese by seeking control over illegal or semi-legal activities, such as prostitution and gambling. When these groups fought over economic turf, the resulting conflicts confirmed to white supremacists that all “tongs” were violent and all Chinese were criminal and undesirable.4 Chinese in nineteenth-century San Francisco also organized to defend themselves from anti-Chinese agitators and to govern a community that city officials almost completely neglected except when they needed a scapegoat. In the 1850s, several of the origin-district groups, or huiguan, in San Francisco joined in an umbrella organization that became known as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), or the Chinese Six Companies. The CCBA acted as the government of Chinatown, mediating disputes and raising money for its activities by charging fees to Chinese residents. The group also tried to protect the Chinese American population as a whole, corresponding with US officials and suing to prevent the deportation of arriving immigrants and the implementation of unconstitutional local laws. This function was particularly important because the imperial Qing dynasty government did not officially allow its subjects to emigrate until 1860. Even when the Chinese government finally endorsed emigration and sent diplomats abroad, it was too weak to protect the rights of Chinese in the United States.5 By the 1870s, thousands of Chinese were moving east to avoid hostility in the Western states and to seek new opportunities, and they created similarly structured communities from Denver to Chicago to Washington, D.C. In the larger settlements, Chinese immigrant leaders formed their own umbrella organizations, often borrowing the name “Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association” and loosely allying with the original in San Francisco. New York’s Chinese population, which began to grow quickly in the 1870s and early 1880s, created its own CCBA in 1883, although the Chinese name differed slightly from San Francisco’s (zhonghua gongsuo in New York; zhonghua huiguan in San Francisco).6 The structure of the two groups differed as well. By the 1930s, the San Francisco CCBA consisted of a fifty-five-member board of directors allocated by population. Members of the Ning Yung Association, representing

New York and San Francisco: Political Capitals of Chinese America / 17

the huge number of immigrants from Toisan (formerly Sunning), made up almost half the board, while seven other origin-district groups held the remaining seats. The presidency of the CCBA alternated every two months between the leader of the Ning Yung Association and the head of whichever of the other huiguan was next in line. The CCBA-NY consisted of sixty different groups, including huiguan but also trade organizations and similar associations. Its chairman served a two-year term and came from either the Ning Yung Association or the Lin Sing Association (the umbrella organization for Chinese from all the other districts). Although both CCBAs lobbied for better treatment of Chinese in the United States, neither organization was particularly egalitarian or representative of the community as a whole. Instead, the leaders of the constituent huiguan, and thus of both CCBAs, were generally wealthier merchants who tended to protect their own interests. By the 1930s, this protection increasingly came at the expense of ordinary Chinese Americans.7

The Chinese American Citizens Alliance and Generational Power Scapegoated immigrant groups in the United States have often sought recourse through involvement in electoral politics, but for many decades laws and demographic realities limited Chinese American access to the vote. Although alien Chinese could not naturalize, the US Supreme Court’s 1898 Wong Kim Ark decision confirmed that the American-born children of Chinese aliens were US citizens. Still, in the nineteenth century, most Chinese men left their wives in China because of anti-Chinese violence, the high cost of living in the United States, the tendency of immigration inspectors to harass Chinese women, and the traditional duty of Chinese wives to wait upon their parents-in-law. Even many of the few American-born men in the United States in these years dealt with the dearth of Chinese women in their communities by marrying in China, although immigration law prevented most of these women from ever setting foot in the United States. As a result, the American citizen population of Chinese ancestry was incredibly small even fifty years after the Gold Rush, and its political culture remained overwhelmingly male-dominated long after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.8 At the turn of the century, American politics had little to offer San Francisco’s handful of Chinese American citizens, for it provided almost no status or influence in their segregated world. Isolated and marginalized, they lived in a community still organized into groups based on district,

18 / Chapter One

surname, and trade, with the CCBA continuing to serve as the umbrella group for many of the traditional associations. When local officials needed to deal with the residents of Chinatown, they did so through the CCBA, further empowering the community’s unelected, foreign-born merchant elites. Leadership in the traditional organizations, particularly the CCBA, was thus one of the only markers of prestige and success that a Chinese American could hope to obtain in a ruthlessly segregated and discriminatory society, and San Francisco’s China-born men monopolized such positions. Often contemptuous of the American society that rejected them, they ridiculed the tusheng, or native-born American-citizen Chinese, as weak, brainless, and lacking proper ethnic identity. Some China-born men jokingly likened tusheng to locally processed opium, which was far less desirable than the purer type of opium imported from China. They usually blocked the native-born from leadership of the traditional organizations that served as economic referees and networking centers in the ethnic economy. To the frustration of the American-born population, China-born men even dominated the new Chinese Chamber of Commerce, which was founded after the turn of the century.9 In the late 1890s, a handful of Chinese American citizens interested in American politics sought to change the marginal position of the tusheng in both Chinatown and San Francisco by founding an organization called the Native Sons of the Golden State. They had originally tried to join the Native Sons of the Golden West, a group of white, California-born men, including many leading politicians, who exerted considerable power in the state and routinely lobbied for anti-Chinese measures. Unsurprisingly, the white supremacist NSGW rejected the Chinese American applicants, who then founded their own group. Although the Chinese American organization folded in the late 1890s, some of its founders revived it in 1904 under the name Chinese American Citizens Alliance (CACA). The CACA pushed its members to vote in American elections and fined them when they did not.10 For years the CACA remained outside the main community power structure, unable to challenge the primacy of the traditional organizations. Historian Sue Fawn Chung has noted that while China-born residents initially scoffed at the group, it eventually earned their respect through its energetic lobbying for fairer immigration laws. Although leaders of the traditional organizations may have respected CACA members—some of whom were their own sons—they did not include the American-born men in the community’s leadership circles for decades. The closest CACA members came was occasional service as English language secretaries to the CCBA, a role that involved explaining the group to the white press. As a result, the alien-

New York and San Francisco: Political Capitals of Chinese America / 19

dominated CCBA, not the American-citizen CACA, served as the community’s mouthpiece and liaison with US officials in the early twentieth century.11 Chafing under this system, some CACA members and other tusheng in San Francisco saw China politics as a way of potentially exerting influence in their community. By the late nineteenth century, the Chinese empire was in rapid decline as it struggled to resist internal rebellion and Western and Japanese encroachment. In 1898, two Western-influenced scholars, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, briefly became advisors to the Guangxu Emperor until his aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi, moved to suppress their reform activities. Fleeing China, Kang and Liang eventually arrived in North America and founded the Baohuanghui (Chinese Empire Reform Association), later known as the Chinese Constitutionalist Party and, after 1945, the Chinese Democratic Constitutionalist Party. Around the same time, Sun Yat-sen, a native of Guangdong who traveled around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries raising money to fund an anti-Qing revolution, created the rival Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance), the forerunner of the Kuomintang (KMT/Chinese Nationalist Party). Branches of both the Tongmenghui and the Baohuanghui operated in San Francisco, where they recruited Chinese and Chinese Americans, including several CACA leaders.12 Tusheng participants in the new parties did not find them ready avenues for greater power in a community wary of reformers and revolutionaries. In the early twentieth century, scholars from China served as CCBA presidents and received diplomatic passports from the Qing government, an arrangement that tied the CCBA to the Qing state. After 1911, when the “Xinhai Revolution” ended imperial rule, the CCBA grudgingly recognized the new government, but political upheavals in the young Republic of China soon split the community again. While younger Chinese and Chinese Americans tended to support the KMT, merchant elites and other community leaders backed the internationally recognized government of China—often a regime that suppressed the KMT.13 During this era, Chinese American politics in San Francisco mixed the politics of the United States and of China, a situation few in the community found at all odd. Numerous Chinese American citizens had grown quite accustomed to the contradictions and inconsistencies that characterized their political activities and affiliations. The CACA’s various branches endorsed local, state, and national candidates during every election cycle, but the practice generally forced these groups to choose the lesser of two evils. In the 1910s and 1920s, for instance, many local branches repeatedly

20 / Chapter One

supported Hiram Johnson, the onetime California governor and senator known for his outspoken anti-Asian views. In the end, CACA leaders saw Johnson’s record on China as generally preferable to the positions of his various opponents, who were often even worse on racial and immigration issues than he.14 For many of the same reasons, CACA members by the 1920s leaned Republican, as did the Chinatown community as a whole. Republican policies did not necessarily benefit Chinese Americans, even the merchant classes. The GOP supported tight immigration controls, while measures like the Republican-backed 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff raised the price of goods imported from China. But after Herbert Hoover’s election in 1928, Chinese foreign minister C.T. Wang affirmed that “China views the Republican Party as a consistent friend,” and many Chinese Americans appeared to agree. Hoover himself spent a considerable period working as an engineer in North China, where his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, learned to speak the local dialect. Casting a further pall on the Democratic Party, patriotic Chinese reviled the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which Democrat Woodrow Wilson helped frame with other Allied leaders and which recognized Japanese claims to former German-held territory in China.15 Although neither party courted the Chinatown vote, many Chinese Americans also identified the GOP as friendlier to nonwhite minorities. California’s Democratic Party nurtured closer ties to organized labor, a major political player in San Francisco and a leader of the anti-Chinese movement for many decades; through the 1940s, most unions in San Francisco refused to accept minority members. While Chinese Americans of this era sometimes disdained blacks, they were also well aware of the one-party South’s white supremacist policies, making the Democrats even less attractive. Moreover, Republicans retained control of California’s state government and legislature for almost the entire prewar period, often by overwhelming majorities. Association with them seemed a smarter strategy for a marginalized and reviled group.16

New York: Chinese Tammany In the 1920s, when Chinese American San Francisco was a heavily Republican community that mainstream Republicans completely ignored, its New York counterpart leaned Democratic and enjoyed slightly more relevance in local politics. The Tammany Hall Democratic Party machine dominated Manhattan politics into the 1930s, and despite a history of corruption and self-interest, it routinely painted itself as the defender of the city’s immi-

New York and San Francisco: Political Capitals of Chinese America / 21

grant masses. Unlike in San Francisco, Democratic leaders did not consistently single out the Chinese for scapegoating. Indeed, they occasionally offered Chinese Americans a few patronage crumbs through the On Leong Tong.17 The On Leong–Tammany connection stretched back to the founding of the tong’s New York branch in the 1890s. At that time and for decades after, few Chinese were citizens and voters, but elections never played much of a role in the On Leong-Tammany relationship anyway. Instead of rounding up votes, the tong made “contributions” to police and other officials so that they would ignore its vice businesses. In recognition of such “support,” Tom Lee, one of the first On Leong Tong leaders in the city, secured a low-level Tammany patronage post in the mid-1890s, serving as a deputy sheriff of New York County.18 By the turn of the century, the On Leongs’ rival, the Hip Sing Tong, sought American political allies to counter the On Leong–Tammany tie. At one point, the Hip Sings furnished information about On Leong gambling establishments to Dr. Charles Parkhurst, a well-known minister who carried out a long crusade against Tammany Hall. In 1901, the Hip Sings were likely responsible for a blaze that killed three of the six Chinese Americans registered to vote in New York at the time; all of the dead were friends of Tom Lee and associates of Tammany boss Tom Foley. A few years later, federal officials—Republicans all—arrested Tom Lee, an immigrant, for fraudulently naturalizing and trying to vote. Despite such tactics, the Hip Sings never managed to destroy the valuable relationship the On Leongs had cultivated with the powerful Manhattan political machine. By the 1920s, On Leong leader Louie Do Fook even joined the Downtown Tammany Club and the Thomas F. Foley Association, another Democratic club. After Do Fook’s death in 1926, New York Governor Alfred E. Smith and other prominent politicians publicly paid their respects to him at a grand funeral.19 Tong involvement in Manhattan politics reinforced Tammany’s rough and tumble image in the Chinese American community. Wu Yangcheng, a laundryman who lived in New York at this time, lampooned Tammany in a memoir he later wrote. To Wu, the “American electoral farce” mixed gaudy showmanship with empty claims and counterclaims and occasional hooliganism. Because of Chinatown’s proximity to City Hall, Wu often walked by political orators haranguing, and in his mind, fooling, passersby. Friends told him as well that Chinese Americans faced discrimination at the polls when they tried to vote. Wu, who published his memoir in 1957, parroted Chinese Communist critiques of American democracy and claimed that voting brought no benefits to ordinary citizens. Still, Chinese New Yorkers

22 / Chapter One

did sometimes encounter hostility when they attempted to cast their ballots for candidates that the machine opposed. In 1932, a group of Chinese American Republicans even reported that Tammany thugs beat them when they tried to vote for Herbert Hoover. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the longtime Chinese American Republican leader Wilbur Wnee H. Pyn, a court translator, lawyer, and inventor, lived and worked in the relative safety of Northern Manhattan, as did several of his party colleagues.20

Demographic Change on the Eve of the Great Depression Chinese American San Francisco could not buy crumbs of recognition from a political machine, but by the late 1920s the population of potential voters in Chinatown was beginning to grow for the first time. In an odd twist, Chinese alien merchants (a status determined by wealth as well as profession) could bring China-born family members to the United States even when Chinese American citizen men could not. Beginning around 1910, merchants increasingly sent for their wives from China. Their children, if born on US soil, were American citizens, despite their parents’ inability to naturalize. Hundreds of such youths filled the streets and schools of San Francisco’s Chinatown by the late 1920s.21 Some in the emergent second generation were not born in the United States, however. A significant number were “derivative citizens,” the Chinaborn children of American citizen fathers whom US law recognized as citizens too—even though their mothers could not immigrate. Others entered the United States unlawfully. When a Chinese merchant or Chinese American citizen visited his wife in China, he usually reported to immigration officials upon his return that the woman had given birth to a son, even if she had not. This created a paper record of a boy who had the right to enter the United States as the son of a citizen or a merchant. Many Chinese men who wished to immigrate to America but could not do so because of exclusion purchased such slots, becoming “paper sons” of merchants or citizens. And some others simply snuck across the border from Canada or Mexico, or jumped ship (many Chinese worked as sailors on merchant fleets in the 1920s and 1930s).22 By the mid-1930s, the average Chinese American citizen of San Francisco was far likelier to be American-born and educated than his or her counterpart in New York, where a significant second generation did not emerge for decades.23 American citizens (both native-born and derivative) had become a majority of the population in Chinese American San Francisco by 1940, while citizens made up only one-third of New York’s Chi-

New York and San Francisco: Political Capitals of Chinese America / 23

nese population. As historian Adam McKeown has noted, this was consistent with the eastern United States as a whole, “reflecting both the shorter history of [Chinese] settlement [there] and the fact that it was the preferred region for much new migration in the twentieth century.”24 The population divergence was even greater than bare census statistics showed and had tremendous significance for the future of politics in both places. The stark difference in education rates between the American citizen populations of the two cities suggests that most Chinese American citizens in San Francisco were native-born, while most in New York were derivative—and thus far likelier to be paper sons. Few such men had attended American schools and gained more than a rudimentary familiarity with the US political system. Fewer still, including those who could vote, showed any interest in it.25 The political consequences of this divergence were far from apparent in 1930, however. Despite CACA prodding, even most Chinese Americans in San Francisco at the dawn of the Great Depression paid little attention to American politics, except for the immigration and naturalization measures that directly affected their families. In the 1920s, anti-Asian rhetoric, although increasingly aimed at Japanese immigrants, remained a staple of both parties’ platforms in California. Even if local politicians avoided attacking Chinese Americans, they rarely reached out to them or sought their votes. Few Chinese American citizens in San Francisco bothered to register, and although they lived in a segregated neighborhood, the at-large election of city supervisors denied them the chance to vote as a bloc. In a largely Republican city, the GOP did not need their votes, while the white supremacists still powerful in Democratic circles did not want them.26 The economic catastrophe of the Depression sparked greater interest in American politics in Chinese San Francisco, although most of the initial enthusiasm came from the community’s tiny band of largely immigrant Marxists. As the historian Him Mark Lai has carefully documented, the Chinese American left wing in San Francisco consisted of a small but dedicated group of students and workers, a number of whom joined the Communist Party USA. The local Marxist organizations they founded, including the Kung Yu Club and the Resonance Association, claimed that hundreds of Chinese Americans read their publications. They probably greatly exaggerated these figures, since the groups generally counted only a few actual members—several dozen at most. The left’s most successful attempt at community organizing in the early 1930s came when activists created the Chinese Unemployed Alliance and organized a hundred-person march on the CCBA to demand relief for the jobless. Usually, though, local Chinese

24 / Chapter One

Marxists faced considerable harassment from San Francisco authorities, who cracked down on the leftists because of their pro-communist activity. They also struggled in their attempts to organize Chinese Americans in a sustained and numerically significant way, even in the midst of the economic catastrophe that prompted so many other Americans to reject capitalism. As historian Judy Yung points out, “Ironically, the segregated economy and community resources of Chinatown—developed as an outcome of Chinese exclusion and exploitation in America—protected residents from the worst effects of the economic downturn.” The Chinese American left thus found its message a harder sell in San Francisco than in Chinese New York and other communities that felt the Depression more keenly.27

Immigrant Broker and Power Broker: Albert K. Chow and the Chinatown Democrats Like his community’s Marxists, Democrat Albert Kam Chow also struggled to convince San Francisco Chinatown to support his party in the early Depression years. Chow eventually became one of the most famous Chinese Americans in the country, befriending Senator Harry S. Truman in the early 1940s and later visiting him at the White House. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, the American-born and educated Democratic leader sought influence and prestige in a way common among the few adult native-born Chinese men of his generation who were fluent in English and educated in the United States: as a “broker.” Brokerage in this era meant representing the Chinese American community, but it also involved interpreting (literally and figuratively) to other Chinese Americans the demands and requirements of outsiders, especially US authorities. Early brokers were usually Chinese immigrant merchants fluent in English and familiar with American institutions; they tended to represent organizations, such as CCBAs, that claimed to speak for entire communities. But after the turn of the century, as anti-Chinese hostility diminished or increasingly flowed through official channels like the immigration system, brokers were just as likely to be individuals either working on their own or attached to groups with narrower agendas. And increasingly they were tusheng, a cohort that while small until the 1930s had much readier access to American education than most immigrants. Such brokers encountered resentment from all sides. They regularly used their English fluency, biculturality, and connections to their own benefit, extracting money to perform services for less acculturated Chinese Americans. At the same time, brokers’ claims to represent their commu-

New York and San Francisco: Political Capitals of Chinese America / 25

nities sparked the suspicions of outsiders, particularly American officials who doubted their trustworthiness. Chinese interpreters for the hated Immigration Service likely earned the most enmity from both sides. Their job was to help US immigration inspectors interrogate new arrivals, but white officials distrusted the interpreters, whom they believed (correctly in some cases) coached Chinese immigrants in the right way to answer inspectors’ questions. For their part, Chinese American community members occasionally saw the brokers as disloyal because they served the US government and profited from a system that treated Chinese immigrants as undesirable. Some interpreters even demanded bribes from the newcomers. The fact that so many interpreters were tusheng grated as well: the power they wielded within the Chinese community came largely from their outside connections, placing them somewhat beyond the control of traditional leaders and bolstering widespread views about their lack of ethnic consciousness. Yet without the interpreters’ assistance, numerous immigrants would have faced deportation, while Chinatown would have been even more dependent than it already was on white lawyers familiar with the immigration system. In other words, the brokers were needed and important, although not beloved, figures.28 Albert Chow never worked as an Immigration Service interpreter, but his brokerage career still depended on the tangle of laws meant to keep Chinese out of the United States. Born in Fresno in 1904, and thus several years older than most of the emergent second generation, Chow grew up in the town’s segregated China Alley near where his father Hon Chow ran a grocery. Chow, his younger brother William Jack, and his father all moved to San Francisco in 1923, probably after the death of Hon Chow’s wife. In Chinatown, Hon Chow opened a travel agency, which sold train and steamship tickets to community residents. Since Hon Chow did not speak English, he likely relied on his sons’ fluency in the language to help customers navigate paperwork issues to ensure that those traveling to China could return to the United States without difficulty. For this reason, both Chow sons got a taste of brokerage at a fairly young age, dealing not only with Chinese-speaking residents but also with white immigration officials and lawyers.29 The charismatic, bilingual Albert Chow soon caught the attention of attorney Stephen M. White, who was just setting up a new Chinese immigration practice. By the 1910s, as historian Erika Lee has shown, the CCBA’s role in bankrolling anti-exclusion cases had declined, in large part because of the dwindling success of such suits. Merchants with enough money now hired lawyers on their own to challenge the government as they sought to

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bring wives and children (both paper and real) into the United States. This shift helped Chow secure his position at White and White, since the firm needed an interpreter for the growing volume of Chinese American immigration appeals it was handling.30 As his career developed, Chow sought to enhance his status and prestige inside the Chinese community. Although a native Californian, he avoided the CACA, knowing that it was not one of the real power centers of Chinatown. Instead, at some point in the late 1920s or early 1930s, he became an active member of the Yeung Wo Association, which represented his family’s ancestral district. In addition, he joined the increasingly influential Chinese Chamber of Commerce, which mixed China-born and native-born people. In the late 1930s, Chow also enlisted in the San Francisco branch of the Kuomintang (KMT), since membership in the party no longer carried the risks it had before the revolution; now, the KMT symbolized the Chinese state.31 Chow originally jumped into US politics for reasons of expediency, but his American political development highlighted the new opportunities arising for Chinese Americans because of California’s changing political terrain. Quite likely Chow had little interest in mainstream party politics when he arrived in San Francisco in 1923, and at 19, he was not yet old enough to vote anyway. Still, politics were hard to avoid at White and White. Stephen White was the nephew of a popular US senator and the son of former Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Edward White, who served as San Francisco’s immigration commissioner during Woodrow Wilson’s administration. When Edward White left office in 1923, his son began practicing Chinese immigration law almost exclusively, using his father’s connections and knowledge to his advantage. Albert Chow registered to vote in San Francisco immediately after joining White and White, probably lying about his age in order to do so. Although initially declining to state a party preference, he corrected the error in 1924 and followed his employer into the Democratic Party. In 1928, Chow even organized a “Chinese Improvement Club,” whose name and political bent put it in direct competition with the CACA: the short-lived group endorsed Democrat Al Smith for president. Despite the ties of family and tradition, Stephen White was a practical man, and during the Hoover administration he switched parties, perhaps hoping for a little patronage from the Republicans who controlled San Francisco, Sacramento, and Washington, D.C. Chow followed suit, becoming a Republican for a handful of years. Both men reregistered as Democrats during the Roosevelt campaign.32 Still a fairly lowly tusheng in 1932, Chow sensed potential in the Demo-

New York and San Francisco: Political Capitals of Chinese America / 27

crats that year and chose not just to switch his registration but to work actively for the party’s candidates again. He and Edwin Owyang, a college student who later became a physician, tried to rally Chinatown voters to the Democratic Party; both understood that the national economic catastrophe was creating new opportunities for the organization, which had struggled through the 1920s as voters across the country shifted to the Republicans. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover in California, which had voted for Democratic presidential nominees only three times in the previous forty years. Republicans remained powerful, holding on to the state legislature, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and the Congressional delegation. Regardless, party competition was returning to the state, as the hotly contested 1934 gubernatorial election made apparent. Although Republican Frank Merriam won that contest, his two opponents split more votes than he received.33 Chow and Owyang’s efforts to organize a Democratic group in their community initially yielded little. Fewer than half the Chinese Americans in San Francisco at the time were American citizens, and most of those were not yet old enough to vote. Even many who were viewed American politics as a waste of time, for it yielded little or nothing in terms of influence or power inside or outside of Chinatown. Finally, the CACA, although not particularly powerful in the Chinese community, tended to attract the few men interested enough in American politics to register, and most, of course, were Republicans. In 1932, Chinese American voters in San Francisco bucked the state and national trend, supporting Hoover two to one, despite Chow and Owyang’s organizing attempts. Chow persisted, for working in White’s office had taught him about the importance of political connections in smoothing immigration matters; in addition, the Roosevelt victory and the tumultuous 1934 gubernatorial election hinted that the era of total Republican dominance might be ending in San Francisco. If the Democrats did rebound in California, the traditionally Republican orientation of Chinese American voters would become a liability for Chinatown and Chinese immigrants seeking entry to the United States. Chow rightly sensed that volunteering to lead the Chinatown party organization for the underdog Democrats might be a smart investment in his own future.34

Two-Party Competition in San Francisco Chinatown Chow’s gamble, which put him in direct opposition to the CACA, introduced real two-party competition to Chinatown. In 1936, former San Francisco city supervisor Franck Havenner, a onetime Hiram Johnson aide and,

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like many Californians, a newly minted Democrat, challenged incumbent Congresswoman Florence Prag Kahn. Kahn, whose district included Chinatown, was the first Jewish woman to serve in the House, succeeding her husband after his death in 1925. During the long period of Republican dominance, Kahn had often cross-filed and defeated her Democratic opponents in the primary, but her narrow victory in 1934 underscored her new vulnerability in the New Deal era. Seeking every vote possible in 1936, Kahn welcomed the assistance of the Republican-leaning CACA more publicly than ever before, sparking an enthusiastic response from the citizens’ organization. Kahn’s gambit was particularly noteworthy because her late husband had been a staunch proponent of anti-Asian measures and in 1906 described Chinese as “a canker in the heart of American civilization.”35 Kahn’s courting of Chinese American voters reflected an ongoing shift in San Francisco politics from egregious anti-Chinese agitation to greater tolerance, if not really acceptance, of people of Chinese ancestry. Chinese Americans remained segregated in the city’s Chinatown, barred from most jobs and unions, and socially isolated. Still, by the mid-1930s anti-Asian activists largely focused their energy on Japanese Americans and frequently saw Chinatown as quaint and even valuable for its tourist potential. Kahn knew that the San Francisco CACA claimed to have close to one thousand members and that their votes could prove valuable in her reelection bid; even better, seeking CACA support no longer carried the stigma it would have during her husband’s time in Congress. In late October 1936, Kahn hosted a dinner for Chinese American supporters, most of them CACA members thrilled by the invitation. Seizing the opportunity to show Kahn and other Republicans that Chinese Americans could influence a close election, the CACA responded by endorsing her, organizing a ten-car Kahn for Congress caravan through Chinatown, and holding a rousing banquet in her honor, complete with musicians and speeches.36 Casting about for ways to thwart the CACA push, Albert Chow tapped into the small but growing group of active Democrats in the community. Many were students enthusiastic about FDR’s liberal policies, or simply friends of William Jack Chow, Albert Chow’s younger brother and a recent law school graduate. A few were progressive merchants in the community, including Way Wong, a printer who produced Chinese-language handbills reminding the community of Roosevelt’s accomplishments. One or two were Chinese Americans who had received jobs from the Works Progress Administration and the State Relief Administration, which employed Chinese Americans as laborers and as relief caseworkers in Chinatown. Chow’s group failed to sway many Chinese American voters, who favored Kahn by

New York and San Francisco: Political Capitals of Chinese America / 29

a huge percentage. Still, the Chinatown Democrats had picked the right side. Havenner defeated Kahn in a landslide, energizing the Chinatown group and making it more attractive to the community’s growing population of voting-age citizens.37

San Francisco Chinatown’s Political Realignment Events in China and the Roosevelt Administration’s response to them soon convinced far more San Francisco Chinese Americans to support the Democrats. In mid-1937, Japan invaded China, and while many Americans expressed disgust at the move, few had any desire to get involved in the crisis. This deep isolationism limited Franklin Roosevelt’s options; he drew condemnation from American peace groups simply for labeling Japan an “aggressor nation” and calling for discussions with Japan and China. Republicans also criticized the administration’s decision to not declare that a state of war existed between China and Japan, since this would result in automatic invocation of America’s neutrality act and further limit the administration’s already constrained options. Deeply concerned about the fate of their ancestral nation, Chinese Americans wished Roosevelt would do more to help China, such as ban the sale of American scrap metal to Japan. Still, many Chinese Americans contrasted FDR’s cautious but positive moves to the complete neutrality of Republican leaders.38 While the largely China-born merchant elite maintained its dominance in the community, the war overseas provided new opportunities for tusheng of all backgrounds to gain some influence and show their ethnic consciousness. In 1938, the CCBA created an organization called the Chinese War Relief Association (CWRA) to coordinate various Chinese American communities’ fundraising drives for refugee relief. B.S. Fong, then president of San Francisco’s CCBA, chaired the group both because of his position in the Six Companies and because his brother-in-law was Fang Chen-wu, a well-regarded former Nationalist general. But the CWRA also enlisted many second-generation Chinese Americans, whose English skills and familiarity with American society gave them the ability to communicate with the wider public. As historian Judy Yung has shown, the CWRA included not only male citizens but also representatives from community women’s groups, marking the first time any major Chinatown organization had allowed women to participate.39 The CWRA’s choice of Albert Chow to be its public relations director marked the convergence of Chinese and American politics, with Chinaborn elites recognizing not only the need to speak to the public through

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the second generation but also to cultivate political influence in the United States. Chow received the post in part because of his rising status within the Yeung Wo Association and because of his membership in the Chinese Chamber and the KMT. But his leadership of the local Democrats played an important role too: China desperately needed any assistance it could get from the United States government, and by 1938, the Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress and were gaining in popularity in California.40 Exploiting this momentum, Chow, his brother William Jack Chow, Arthur B. Chinn, and Lim P. Lee founded a more permanent Democratic Party group in Chinatown in 1938. Democratic organizations had existed in Chinatown in the past, but they generally disbanded after each election. The time now seemed right to create something more enduring in an increasingly united and attentive community. The political environment statewide was also promising, with racial liberals making headway in the primaries. A progressive attorney named Sheridan Downey had defeated incumbent William Gibbs McAdoo for the Democratic senatorial nomination that August, and Culbert Olson, a liberal state senator from Los Angeles and a New Deal supporter, emerged victorious from his primary battle to be the Democrats’ gubernatorial candidate. In San Francisco, the popular Franck Havenner challenged mayoral incumbent Angelo Rossi, while a progressive young union leader named John F. “Jack” Shelley aimed for the state senate.41 Throughout the fall of 1938, Chow’s group worked to round up votes for the Democratic ticket and sell liberalism to a community suspicious of government. Chow, Lee, Chinn, and their counterparts passed out Way Wong’s Chinese handbills calling for the election of Franck Havenner and stumped for Olson, Downey, Shelley, and other Democrats. Although Havenner lost (but retained his Congressional seat), the party largely triumphed in November, making Olson the first Democrat to serve as California governor in the twentieth century. As one of his first official actions, Olson named Albert K. Chow a notary public. Although a seemingly tiny nod to the Chinatown Democrats, it was the first political patronage any Chinese American had ever received in California. The appointment also enhanced Chow’s already growing status in the community and likely prompted the Yeung Wo Association to elect him its president, making him the first Chinese American citizen to serve in that post.42 The Chow appointment not only rewarded the Chinatown Democrats’ work but also marked official recognition of the significant political

New York and San Francisco: Political Capitals of Chinese America / 31

realignment occurring in San Francisco Chinatown at the time. In 1936, about one thousand people of Chinese ancestry were registered to vote in San Francisco, and 65 percent of these were Republicans. During the next four years, a marked shift occurred: another 500 Chinese Americans registered to vote, and almost all of them joined the Democratic Party. Fifty-five percent of San Francisco’s Chinese Americans were Democrats by 1940, a stunning change and one that party leaders noticed and applauded.43 The marked shift in Chinatown’s registration patterns was somewhat reminiscent of changing African American voting behavior at this time. Until the 1930s, African Americans who could vote (in other words, those outside the South) overwhelmingly chose the Republican Party, the “Party of Lincoln,” even as GOP leaders increasingly distanced themselves from blacks and took their votes for granted. When hundreds of thousands of blacks moved to the urban North during the Great Migration of the 1910s and 1920s, political machines in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities used patronage and recognition to woo them away from the Republican Party at the local level. After 1932, the New Deal provided some support for many black families struggling to survive the Depression, and in 1936, African Americans deserted the Republican Party by the hundreds of thousands to cast ballots for FDR. By 1940, the Democratic rather than Republican Party was the choice of black America.44 Chinese Americans’ relationship to the two major parties was not quite the same, for Republicans and Democrats alike had a history of sustained and outspoken hostility to the very existence of Chinese in the United States. Both parties endorsed exclusion in Congress and, at the state and local levels, passed egregiously racist laws aimed at Chinese Americans. The easing of the worst anti-Chinese sentiment in San Francisco and elsewhere in the country by the 1930s did little to change the impact of such legislation. Indeed, the tortured relationship of the CACA to the candidates it endorsed was a bleak reminder of how little either major party cared for those lumped under the label “Orientals.” And unlike African Americans, Chinese Americans received no patronage from the Roosevelt administration; they simply could not provide enough votes. Still, Democrats like Albert Chow found themselves in a very advantageous position as they sought to sell Chinatown on their party in the late 1930s. Leading San Francisco Democrats largely avoided the anti-Asian pronouncements so common in the past, while one of the party’s new stars, union leader Jack Shelley, endorsed integration of new federal housing projects. The Roosevelt Administration also won the support of Chi-

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nese Americans for resisting Congressional isolationists, terminating the 1911 US-Japanese trade agreement, and imposing a fairly effective “moral embargo” of aircraft and metals on Japan.45 The administration’s domestic agenda eventually attracted as many Chinese American votes as its foreign policy. By the late 1930s, Chinese Americans in San Francisco had begun to receive WPA jobs. In addition, the Housing Act of 1937 authorized the construction of public housing projects, prompting Chinese American activists such as Lim P. Lee, Samuel D. Lee, Gilbert Woo, Theodore Lee, and Chingwah Lee to lobby local groups and city, state, and federal officials for Chinatown’s inclusion in the program. In 1939, with the public help and private involvement of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, these young advocates gained official backing for a Chinatown project. Of course, the elimination of racial discrimination in housing and employment would have benefited Chinese Americans far more, but activists sensed what they could achieve and what they could not. In an overcrowded district like Chinatown, with its slum conditions and high tuberculosis rates, the promise of sanitary and affordable modern apartments almost certainly won the Democratic Party scores of new voters—especially since San Francisco’s Republican mayor blocked the project more than once.46 By the early 1940s, then, the political culture of San Francisco’s Chinatown was undergoing significant changes that would have seemed unthinkable a decade earlier. Democratic politicians and officials had reached out to reward party members in Chinatown and to provide social welfare benefits to community members. A realignment from the Republican to the Democratic Party had taken place, especially among those just reaching voting age. And while the traditional organizations and the merchant elite remained dominant in the community, even they had responded to changing circumstances, relying on the help of American-born citizens to carry out fundraising for the war and to curry political favor with officials. When the CCBA presidency rotated automatically in 1940 to Yeung Wo Association head Albert Chow, he became the first American-born man to ever lead the umbrella organization.47

Lim P. Lee and Challenges to the Traditional Chinatown Power Structure Albert Chow’s rise to the presidency of the CCBA did not fundamentally challenge the structure of Chinese American society in San Francisco. Of course, Chow’s influence in the community initially came in part through

New York and San Francisco: Political Capitals of Chinese America / 33

his shrewd gamble on the future of the Democratic Party of California. But while born and raised in Fresno, Chow was not an outsider when he arrived in San Francisco in 1923. Generally, Chinese merchants like Chow’s father, Hon, dealt with suppliers from their own lineage and served as bankers and moneylenders for their clansmen as well. When Hon Chow and his children moved to San Francisco, they were already participants in a web of surname and native-place groups that eased their arrival. Albert Chow’s status as a community broker thus stemmed not just from his job with White and White and his Democratic Party activism but also from his family’s merchant status and connections to community networks. After all, his involvement in the Yeung Wo Association was what enabled him to become the first American-born president of the powerful CCBA.48 Albert Chow’s rise thus highlighted both the transformation of some aspects of Chinatown’s leadership structure and the continued rigidity of others. Few native-born Chinese Americans could easily follow Chow’s path, usually because they lacked the necessary family wealth or connections. The war overseas had opened up other opportunities for community influence, but China-born merchant elites largely dominated the leadership of the relief groups. Even Chinese political activism now seemed to be a dead end, because after the Japanese invasion, almost every faction and party in Chinatowns across America preached unity. For San Francisco Chinese Americans, especially native-born people who did not belong to the merchant elite of the community, the dynamic Democratic Party offered an attractive avenue for activism in the 1930s. The Democrats’ strong recent record on issues related to both China and Chinatown made involvement in the party a respectable pastime in the eyes of the community. Albert Chow’s prestige also burnished the organization. But perhaps most satisfying of all to the tusheng Democrats was the fact that China-born men could not dominate the local party, as they did almost every other group in the community. After all, they could not vote. These factors, together with personal idealism and a strong belief in the New Deal, were what first attracted Chow’s colleague Lim P. Lee to the Democratic Party. Lee, who helped found the influential Chinese American Democratic Club of San Francisco in 1958, later rose to become the first Chinese American postmaster of the city. But he came from far humbler roots than Albert Chow, with whom he worked for years. Born close to a decade after his Democratic counterpart, Lee came of age in the 1920s and early 1930s as part of the cohort of second-generation Chinese American citizens who were reversing San Francisco Chinatown’s long population decline. As a teen, he spent much of his free time at the Methodist-run

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Gum Moon women’s residence hall, which he later remembered as “the only place where you could meet a girl in Chinatown in those days.” There, Lee attracted the attention of a minister who converted him to Methodism and helped him secure a scholarship to attend Stockton’s church-affiliated College of the Pacific (now University of the Pacific); after completing his bachelor’s degree, Lee won another scholarship to do graduate work in sociology at the University of Southern California. In the mid-1930s, the State Relief Administration hired him and a handful of other Chinese American college graduates to serve as social workers, organizing public relief in Chinatown. At the same time, Lee wrote about community problems for Chinese Digest, a new English-language newspaper published for and by Chinese Americans. By the mid-1930s, he had become convinced that Republican opposition to FDR’s social welfare programs was not only misguided but detrimental to his own community.49 Lee’s exposure to contemporary sociology and the early New Deal shaped his outlook, as did his own background. Unlike Albert Chow, Lee did not come from a well-to-do merchant’s family. A laundryman’s son, he had no hope of rising very far in the traditional merchant-dominated Chinatown leadership, and even worse, he was actually a “paper son.” Most paper sons came to the United States as teenagers or young men, but Lee entered the United States in 1912 as an infant. His immigration at such a young age meant he identified as an American-born citizen, which, together with his actual status, gave him much about which to be insecure. Gilbert Woo, a derivative citizen born in Toisan the same year as Lee, remembered him in the 1930s as possessing the “inferiority complex” so common among the less privileged tusheng.50 Although Albert Chow and Lim P. Lee worked together to promote the Democratic Party, they represented two different political styles, one of them still immersed in traditional networks and the other determined to circumvent those networks. While a pioneer for the native-born, Chow never really challenged the overall organization of Chinatown; as an immigration and political broker, he depended for his living on his knowledge of traditional networks in the community. Lee had no hope of climbing to power in Chinatown’s traditional groups—his family background precluded that—so for him, American politics provided a way to rise despite Chinatown’s fairly closed power structure. The New Deal, the resurgence of the California Democratic Party’s liberal wing, and Lee’s scholarshipfunded education enabled him to become active in politics, giving him the kinds of opportunities his community did not. By the late 1930s, he had also grown increasingly disenchanted with some Chinatown residents,

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particularly the wealthy landlords who owned much of area’s terribly substandard housing. Lacking Chow’s connections to Chinatown’s merchant elite, Lee became a far more outspoken critic of inequality and discrimination, not just in immigration policy but in housing, employment, and other areas.51 Lee also broke new ground by avoiding China politics, an unusual choice in the community. Like virtually every Chinese American, he opposed Japanese aggression in China, but he offered no comment on the factionalized Chinese state. Instead, he joked that “in Chinese politics, I am mute and play dumb.” This in itself was most unusual; before the war pushed Chinese Americans to unite behind the Nationalist Party’s Chiang Kai-shek, community members passionately and endlessly debated China’s political situation and the competence of its leaders. Gilbert Woo exasperatedly noted that people “argue over the most miniscule political questions until they’re flushed with anger and part on bad terms, and it seems that they all belong to their own factions.”52 The divergence between Lee and Chow’s approaches foreshadowed the ways that American party politics reshaped San Francisco Chinatown’s political culture in the 1940s and especially the 1950s. In the late 1930s, the traditional power structure remained the most powerful force in the community, with the CCBA in particular continuing to claim the right to speak for everyone in Chinatown. The most influential tusheng in San Francisco were brokers who made a living through their biculturality, which arguably gave them a considerable stake in their community’s continued isolation. China politics also played an important role in San Francisco’s Chinatown, compelling an ambitious man like Albert Chow to cover all his bases by joining the KMT as well as the Democratic Party. However, the Democrats’ social welfare programs, which aided Chinatown through WPA jobs, baby clinics, and public housing, subtly challenged the power and functions of the CCBA. Even less perceptibly, local white Democrats’ slowly changing perceptions of Chinese Americans in San Francisco hinted at a political system in which they might play a more robust part, not as scapegoats or brokers but as voters, citizens, and even officials.

Losing Ground in New York: Tongs, Brokers, and the Decline of Tammany The party shifts that ultimately benefited San Francisco’s Chinese Americans had a far different impact on New York and its tumultuous and confusing political scene. In the 1930s, many Tammany Hall Democrats publicly sup-

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ported Franklin Roosevelt but quietly opposed the New Deal, liberal Republican Fiorello LaGuardia championed FDR’s programs, and the regular Republican organization kept its distance from the mayor. Meanwhile, the left-wing American Labor Party and the Communist Party both enjoyed significant growth during the Depression years. Unlike in San Francisco, however, Chinese Americans in New York were poorly positioned to take advantage of this enhanced, if sometimes confounding, competition. In the heavily alien community, relatively few people could legally register to vote. Under New York State law, even eligible voters had to prove English literacy, another strike against the Chinese. And the growing tensions between Fiorello LaGuardia and Tammany Hall began to erode the relatively privileged position of New York’s Chinese American Democrats.53 At the outset of the Depression, New York’s On Leong Tong continued to overlap with the Chinese American Democrats in the community, yet many of the tong’s American citizen members made little mention of that fact. Bicultural On Leongs still bribed police to turn a blind eye to the tong’s gambling interests and other illegal industries. However, as business regulation increased in the 1930s, these mainly tusheng brokers also became crucial to more legitimate businesses, linking Chinese American entrepreneurs to the city’s laundry, liquor, and restaurant boards. Unsurprisingly, many restaurant owners and managers were also On Leongs and Democrats. As tusheng brokers earned more of their money from legitimate business mediation, they sought to change their own image and the way outsiders perceived their community. In the 1920s and early 1930s, lurid accounts of On Leong–Hip Sing tong battles still regularly appeared in the New York papers and portrayed the Chinese community as sinister and criminal. While earlier On Leong members like Tom Lee flaunted their tong membership, the new generation of tusheng brokers avoided doing so; in an era when public pressure could affect the decisions of the liquor and restaurant boards, open affiliation with a tong was not good for business. Increasingly, tusheng brokers who quietly relied on their tong ties downplayed them to outsiders.54 In their bid for respectability, a group of tusheng brokers and On Leong men sought to recast the image of Chinese Americans in politics as well. In 1932, the On Leong Tong changed its name to the On Leong Merchants Association in a bid to shed its negative image. That same year, an On Leong–affiliated restaurant manager named William D. Lee created a new political club supposedly distinct from both the On Leong Tong and Tammany Hall. Dubbed the Chinese-American Voting League, it sounded utterly nonpartisan. In reality, it was an On Leong–dominated, Tammany-

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affiliated Democratic political club that urged voters to support the straight party ticket and organized a banquet for Tammany mayoral hopeful John O’Brien. And it was largely a publicity stunt.55 When the club backed the reelection of Governor Herbert Lehman in 1934, William D. Lee called a press conference to promise Lehman 5,000 Chinese American votes from the city—at a time when the entire Chinese American citizen population of New York, including adults and children, paper sons and real citizens, hovered around 5,000.56 Other Lee family members demonstrated a similar knack for publicity. By the mid-1930s, two of the most successful American-born men in New York’s Chinese community were William Lee’s cousin James “Shavey” Lee, and Shavey Lee’s business partner, James Yip Typond. Although Shavey Lee, who lived in Chinatown, was a member of the Lee Family Association, the Hok Shan Society (representing his ancestral county), and similar groups, his participation in the On Leong Merchants Association was what helped him forge ties to city agencies and build his business, known as the TypondLee Agency. Since much of the firm’s business involved “fixing” license, tax, and similar issues with which Chinese American entrepreneurs contended, the Lee family’s political connections proved extremely valuable.57 The Typond-Lee Agency skillfully navigated the changing political and regulatory waters of 1930s New York. When Governor Lehman’s administration required small businesses to purchase workmen’s compensation insurance for their employees, Lee and Typond quickly signed on as the exclusive Chinatown agents for a number of major insurers. After Fiorello LaGuardia defeated John P. O’Brien and began attacking Tammany, the partners looked to Brooklyn, Typond’s home turf, to escape city reformers. By the mid-1930s, Typond had forged a working relationship with the Brooklyn Democratic machine, even securing for his brother-in-law Clifford Wong an office job with Democratic Assemblyman Edward S. Moran Jr. Typond himself helped Moran collect bribes until the assemblyman’s 1939 conviction for corruption.58 The difference between Shavey Lee’s carefully cultivated public persona and the reality of his quieter associational life highlighted the contradictions that tusheng faced in New York at the time. “From his loud ties to his two-tone shoes, Shavey is as American as baseball and hot dogs,” wrote a contemporary journalist. “He has a New York accent, his slang is American and his outlook is peculiar to the millions who have lived in the world’s greatest metropolis.” In the early 1940s, Lee and Typond exploited Lee’s local fame, opening a City Hall–area restaurant that welcomed a string of big name Democrats and Republicans and stayed in business for decades.

Figure 1.1: James “Shavey” Lee poses with his daughter Ruth upon her arrival from China in 1945. New York City reporters often referred to Lee as the “Mayor of Chinatown” for his fame and flamboyance. He and his business partner James Typond owned the Typond-Lee Agency and the well-known Tung-Sai Restaurant, known locally as “Shavey Lee’s.” (From the Fang Family San Francisco Examiner Photo Archive, courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)

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Although the restaurant’s official name was “Tung-Sai,” everyone called it “Shavey Lee’s.” Rotund, cigar-smoking, and jovial, Lee reveled in the publicity he received, yet he downplayed the foundations of his business success. Relatively few people knew of Lee and Typond’s political connections; by letting William Lee and others act as spokesmen for the Chinese American Democrats, the partners projected political neutrality and made their restaurant a favored gathering spot of both Republicans and Democrats. Equally significant, few outside the Chinese community realized that Lee was a member of the On Leong Merchants Association. Even for a flamboyant man like Shavey Lee, the group that offered access to community networks and, sometimes, wealth, was not an affiliation he wished to broadcast to the white world.59 Like Shavey Lee, Sing Kee Lau (Liu Chengji), widely known simply as Sing Kee, also carved out a niche for himself in the intersection between New York’s Chinese American community and government agencies. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he moved in his teens to New York City and likely joined the On Leongs at that time, given his lack of community ties. Drafted into the army during World War One, he fought in France and won a Distinguished Service Cross before returning to Manhattan. Almost immediately he became an interpreter for the Immigration Service—a classic broker position. He worked for the service for a decade, learning the ins and outs of the immigration system before leaving his job in 1929 and becoming a partner in and the manager of a restaurant. By the 1930s he had also opened a travel agency, drawing on his immigration experience to help Chinese Americans navigate government bureaucracy. Like other tusheng, Sing Kee derived most of his initial influence from his position as an interpreter; in the On Leong Merchants Association, he rose to the position of English secretary but, like most native-born men, found other doors in the group closed. Still, American politics offered him a secure niche in the On Leongs as well as a decent avenue for his ambitions. He played a quiet role in the local Democratic Party organization, sharing his office with the group and, in the 1940s, receiving a few choice patronage plums.60 Although tusheng On Leongs like Shavey Lee and Sing Kee formed the backbone of the Chinese-American Voting League and subsequent Chinese American Democratic groups in New York, they worked to further obscure their tong ties by choosing for their titular leader an influential non-tong figure. The man they selected was locally known tusheng George Chintong (Chen Shutang/Chin See Tong), owner of the import firm Cathay Food and sometime writer for the KMT’s Chinese Nationalist Daily. Chintong embraced his position with gusto and remained a Tammany loyalist for the

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rest of his life. He used the Chinese Nationalist Daily to instruct Chinese American citizens to vote Democratic, included laudatory stories about the Democratic Party in the paper’s local news section, and even printed a study that cited the partisan Voting League endorsement of the Democrats as evidence of overwhelming Chinese American support for FDR. In return for his trouble, he received in the 1930s and 1940s a handful of minor patronage positions on the city police commission, the health commission, and the local school board.61

Tammany, the CCBA-NY, and the Laundry Alliance George Chintong’s political career lasted into the 1960s, but his influence in the Chinese community crested in the early 1930s when he was elected English-language secretary of the CCBA-NY. Indeed, On Leong tusheng in the community likely selected Chintong to lead the local Democrats because the secretarial position gave him the veneer of respectability they sought. The organization lacked the power of the San Francisco CCBA, since other groups, including the Hip Sing and On Leong tongs, wielded more influence in New York than on the West Coast.62 Still, the CCBA-NY enjoyed considerable authority through outsiders’ perceptions of it as the government of Chinatown, and it raised significant sums of money by collecting fees from individuals and businesses in the community. Anticipating a cut of such fees, Chintong bribed his way into the lucrative secretary position in 1932 despite his poor command of English. Local journalist Y.K. Chu, who emerged as one of the most trenchant critics of Chintong and the CCBA-NY, referred to him as the “grafted-leg English secretary,” since he had to use his own translator (“grafted” on to Chintong to give the English secretary a leg to stand on).63 In New York, the CCBA-NY election system made the organization more accessible to tusheng office seekers than it was in San Francisco, but the CCBA-NY was no more representative of the community as a whole than its Western counterpart. Because the group’s chairmanship, like the English secretary position, included a percentage of the many fees the CCBA-NY charged, it was a lucrative prize. Candidates for the post routinely bribed the organizational representatives, mostly members of the merchant elite, who chose the chairman in the biennial election. During the same cycle in which George Chintong bought himself an office, the American-born K.C. Wu (Wu Qianchu) bribed voters to support his own bid for the chairmanship of the CCBA-NY. The cynical twosome soon pro-

New York and San Francisco: Political Capitals of Chinese America / 41

voked anger in the community for their mercenary approach to the CCBANY’s responsibilities.64 The community that the CCBA-NY claimed to represent consisted largely of working-class men, most of them aliens or derivative citizens, who toiled in small hand laundries and restaurants throughout the five boroughs. The laundries were a particularly large sector of the ethnic economy, and their owners struggled as the Depression worsened. They eventually lowered prices to drum up business, a move that angered other laundry owners. A number of white-owned laundries struck back by posting cartoons that portrayed the Chinese as undesirable and filthy—a crude but effective tactic. Addressing the ensuing crisis, the CCBA-NY under Wu and Chintong demanded a fee from all Chinese American laundries to cover the cost of their defense, although the organization simply banked the money and appealed to the Chinese consul-general for assistance. The consul intervened, asking the police to make white laundries remove the cartoons.65 Although the police were fairly successful in their attempts to get rid of the racist posters, the white laundry owners responded by bribing Dennis J. Mahon, acting chairman of the city’s Board of Aldermen, to introduce an ordinance that hiked licensing fees and security bonds on all laundries, especially those owned by noncitizens. Since the move would have forced almost every Chinese American laundry out of business, Chinese laundrymen demanded once again that the CCBA-NY take action. The CCBA-NY promised to help but only if all the laundries in the community contributed an additional one dollar fee to pay for a lawyer—even though the organization already charged each hand laundry in New York an annual sum of between four and sixteen dollars. In this context, the CCBA-NY’s demand for yet more money infuriated many laundrymen, who wondered what their annual payment was for.66 Despite their anger, the laundrymen might simply have capitulated again if a crusading community journalist had not urged them to break with the CCBA-NY and fight the ordinance themselves. A native of Guangdong, the writer and editor Y.K. Chu had left China in 1927 to attend Haverford College in Pennsylvania. When the Depression began, Chu dropped out of college and moved to Philadelphia’s Chinatown, where he gained an unusual perspective on electoral politics: Philadelphia’s powerful political machine was a Republican one and its reformers Democrats. This idealized view of the Democratic Party shaped Chu’s views when he arrived in New York to become editor of the popular, business-oriented Chinese Journal of Commerce (Shangbao).67

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Chu, an occasionally self-aggrandizing writer who saw the “overseas masses” as his constituency, considered Wu and Chintong’s CCBA-NY a corrupt cabal uninterested in the problems of regular Chinese Americans. Other community members likely shared his beliefs, but Chu’s position at Shangbao gave him an almost unique ability to publicly criticize the CCBA-NY. Unlike the community’s other Chinese-language newspapers, including George Chintong’s Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, Shangbao was not a political party organ but a commercial venture with the backing of an American publisher. Upon learning of the proposed laundry ordinance, Chu quickly drew community attention to it and then helped the city’s disunited and competitive Chinese hand laundries organize the New York Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance. Raising funds on its own, the group hired a lawyer and took its case to the Board of Aldermen.68 By waging its own fight against the ordinance, the Laundry Alliance threatened the CCBA-NY’s prestige, its ability to collect fees, and the quiet political alliances it had forged to Tammany through George Chintong. Fearful of losing its money and influence, the CCBA-NY began to use its Tammany and On Leong ties to fight back. When the Laundry Alliance tried to obtain a charter in New York State in 1933, Chintong pulled strings to prevent it (the laundrymen eventually incorporated in Washington, D.C., instead). Li Jiemin, an On Leong Merchants Association leader who helped Chintong run the Chinese American Democrats, also demanded that On Leongs who had joined the Laundry Alliance drop out of the group. Chintong then used his relationship with Tammany to convince the city’s laundry licensing bureau to fingerprint all applicants for laundry licenses. According to historian Renqiu Yu, Chintong wanted to enable officials to “expose the illegal status of some Chinese laundrymen,” at least those who were members of the Laundry Alliance. Although the Laundry Alliance unsuccessfully sought to block the regulation, it embarrassed the CCBA-NY by exposing Chintong’s involvement in drafting the measure.69 Thwarted in its attempts to vanquish the Laundry Alliance, the CCBA-NY eventually decided instead to eliminate the laundrymen’s main champion, Y.K. Chu. Early in 1934, the CCBA-NY filed suit against the Shangbao for libel, claiming that Chu had defamed the group in his editorials and coverage of the laundry struggle. Given Tammany’s continued hold on the judiciary, George Chintong probably hand-picked the men chosen to translate the disputed passages into English for the court (something he could not do himself). Reading the inaccurate and skewed results, the first judge in the case slapped an injunction on Chu’s paper forbidding it to criticize the

New York and San Francisco: Political Capitals of Chinese America / 43

CCBA-NY again. The Shangbao only managed to get the injunction overturned three years later.70 Yet throughout the struggle, neither Y.K. Chu nor Laundry Alliance leader Louis Wing seemed to have fully understood the forces arrayed against them. Chu idealized the American electoral system, particularly the Democratic Party, which he equated with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal rather than Tammany Hall. Chu encouraged Wing and other Laundry Alliance members to take part in New Deal programs, such as the National Recovery Administration (NRA), and hundreds of the group’s members joined a quarter million other New Yorkers in a huge parade celebrating the NRA. Louis Wing himself became an enthusiastic New Dealer, speaking at an NRA rally at Carnegie Hall in which trade leaders called for higher wages and better treatment for service workers. Wing also accepted an invitation to sit on the city’s laundry code board, the local group charged with putting together regulations for the trade in New York City. Chu even contended at one point that because Louis Wing was a “full-fledged member of the Democratic Party,” he had been able to “arrange police protection” for the Laundry Alliance’s first mass meeting. Both men apparently had no idea that the local Democrats were in fact helping sabotage the Laundry Alliance and the Shangbao.71

Attack on Tammany Their confusion was understandable, for the New York political scene was evolving at dizzying speed and in ways that confounded party labels. Between 1930 and 1932, Judge Samuel Seabury’s famed Seabury Commission uncovered massive corruption in the Manhattan court and police system. Seabury’s findings resulted in Mayor Jimmy Walker’s resignation and provoked widespread public disgust with Tammany Hall. Machine hack John O’Brien still managed to win the 1932 special election to fill the remainder of Walker’s term, but by 1933, O’Brien gained a new and formidable foe: Fiorello LaGuardia, who promised to attack the machine’s corruption. After winning the 1933 mayoral election with a coalition of reformers from all parties, LaGuardia vowed to clean house and work with the federal government to stabilize New York’s economy. Although nominally a Republican, LaGuardia embraced the New Deal even as many Tammany Democrats opposed it because of their dislike of Franklin Roosevelt and their belief that social welfare programs would undermine Tammany’s influence.72 George Chintong, William D. Lee, and other leading Chinatown Dem-

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Figure 1.2: George Chintong, center, sits with other Tammany Hall loyalists at a 1945 campaign banquet for Democratic mayoral candidate William O’Dwyer. Chintong led the Chinatown Democrats from the early 1930s until 1964. (Courtesy NYC Municipal Archives)

ocrats quickly grasped that Mayor LaGuardia posed a real threat to their interests. Almost immediately after the new mayor took office, Chief Inspector Lewis Valentine, a LaGuardia ally in the police department, purged more than one hundred Tammany-appointed detectives from the force. The mass dismissal removed from the department some of the officers who protected tong gambling interests in exchange for regular bribes. Then Valentine launched a crackdown on gambling establishments and targeted a number of On Leong Merchants Association properties, arresting numerous Chinese in the process. In some cases, Tammany-appointed judges released the gamblers or fined them a few dollars, but the campaign hurt business. And the Chinatown Democrats could do almost nothing about it, since they were affiliated with the very machine that LaGuardia wanted to destroy. Illegal tong-backed gambling continued in Chinatown for many years, but the easy bribery of the Walker and O’Brien eras was over.73 As Manhattan politics changed, the Chinatown Democrats publicly aligned themselves with the popular Franklin Roosevelt while attempting

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to preserve their business interests and Tammany relationships at the local level. Although George Chintong’s Democrats watched the gambling crackdown with dismay, they achieved one of their major goals: gaining recognition as an entity publicly different from the On Leong Merchants Association. In the midst of LaGuardia’s attacks on gambling, the maintenance of this distinction became particularly important for the second-generation brokers who composed much of the Democratic group and whose clients now included many legitimate enterprises. Through the exertions of Chintong, the Chinatown Democrats received the blessing of the Democratic National Committee, which included the club in its 1936 campaign efforts. Unsurprisingly, the composition of the Manhattan Chinese American Roosevelt for President Committee that year reflected the vested interests of the Chinatown Democratic group. Members included George Chintong; one of William D. Lee’s brothers; Seeto Meetong, an On Leong Merchants Association leader and Chinese immigrant ineligible to vote; and Lee Du, a Chinese American citizen, On Leong Merchants Association member, head of the Chinese American Restaurant Association, and longtime Tammany patronage beneficiary. Manhattan politics may have changed, but in Chinatown, On Leong men and restaurateurs—often the same people—continued to dominate the Democratic organization.74 Although Y.K. Chu never abandoned his faith in the New Deal, Louis Wing and other like-minded Chinese Americans grew disillusioned by its empty promises and the behavior of those community members who claimed to represent the Democratic Party. The US Supreme Court ruled the NRA unconstitutional in 1935, disappointing Wing and other Laundry Alliance members who had hoped that cooperation with the code agency would counter longtime arguments about Chinese undercutting white workers. By then, it was also apparent that the New Deal was doing nothing for ordinary Chinese Americans in New York. Families without American citizen heads did not qualify for the new public housing projects, while WPA jobs also went to citizens alone. Census takers found that only eighteen Chinese Americans in all of New York State worked for the WPA in 1940—in contrast to several hundred in San Francisco. At a moment when the Democratic Party was finally offering some social welfare benefits to second-generation Chinese San Franciscans, their New York counterparts received no such assistance. Not only did CCBA-NY officials and Chinese Democrats make no attempts to challenge any of these restrictions, but clueless city officials actually commended the Chinese for not using relief money.75 Other parties, whether reform Democrats, LaGuardia Republicans, or

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the new American Labor Party, completely neglected Chinese American New York as well. A largely immigrant community, it offered scant rewards for vote-seekers. Even the Chinese American Republican organization under Wilbur Wnee H. Pyn made no attempt to whip up community enthusiasm for the GOP despite the anti-Tammany sentiment surging in Manhattan. While the Chinese Republicans occasionally defended voters disfranchised by the state’s English literacy test, the group’s leaders avoided stumping for their candidates in Chinatown—perhaps out of fear of the On Leong Merchants Association. Furthermore, they showed little interest in Fiorello LaGuardia, a party renegade, gravitating instead towards more conservative Republicans such as Thomas Dewey and showing a rightward tilt that characterized their group into the 1970s.76 In the end, only sympathetic leftists consistently reached out to the Chinese community’s immigrants and citizens, or at least to the Laundry Alliance. In 1934, city officials created another new regulation, which required Chinese laundrymen who obtained or renewed licenses to prove that they had entered the United States legally. Non-Chinese leftist groups organized a successful petition and letter-writing campaign arguing for the regulation’s repeal. Unsurprisingly, Laundry Alliance leaders gravitated towards these activists, whose help and support they needed and appreciated.77

Anti-Japanese Sentiment and the Politics of Chinese New York Although the CCBA-NY’s political machinations harmed its reputation in New York’s Chinese American community, the organization managed to regain its influence after Japan invaded China in 1937. Like their peers in San Francisco, Chinese Americans in New York watched events in East Asia with growing alarm, especially after Japan seized Manchuria in 1931. Within a year of the Laundry Alliance’s founding, the group had already begun to mobilize around the issue of Japanese aggression, indirectly strengthening the organization’s ties to leftist anti-fascist groups outside the community. In 1934, the Laundry Alliance helped found the AntiJapanese Society, whose other members included Marxists like the staff members of the Chinese Vanguard and backers of the Unemployed Councils, Communist-supported groups that protested at government agencies for better treatment of the poor. At that time, Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist government, preferred using his military to “exterminate” Chinese Communist forces while maintaining a policy of nonresistance to Japan—even as gradual Japanese encroachment sparked nationwide protests and anger in China. This policy divided the KMT, already split among

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various factions, including those loyal to Chiang Kai-shek, Hu Hanmin, and Wang Jingwei. KMT members in the United States also disagreed about the proper approach to use with Japan, but the CCBA-NY, which historically supported the sitting government of China, officially opposed groups such as the Anti-Japanese Society.78 Japanese encroachment in China and the Chinese government’s attitude toward Japan divided the community, fostered tensions within many Chinatown groups, and unnerved the CCBA-NY. The Anti-Japanese Society received moral support from large numbers of Chinese American New Yorkers and, eventually, the formal endorsement of the Chee Kung Tong (Chinese Freemasons). The Chee Kung Tong traced its roots to anti-Qing groups in nineteenth-century China and counted members in just about every community organization, so its involvement in the Anti-Japanese Society gave the latter group significant prestige. Seeto Meetong, head of the Chee Kung Tong and a major supporter of the Anti-Japanese Society, was also a leader of the On Leong Merchants Association. As tong men followed Seeto into the Anti-Japanese Society, CCBA-NY leaders who were aligned with outgoing chairman K.C. Wu of the Lin Sing Association continued to oppose the popular patriotic group. Still, they counted few allies outside the Chiang faction of the local KMT.79 The new CCBA-NY chairman, Louis Fong (Lei Feng), acted quickly to align his administration with community sentiment. Fong, who represented the Ning Yung Association, was the second native-born man to serve as CCBA-NY chairman. Conscious that his tusheng status and work for the hated Immigration Service made his ethnic consciousness questionable, he embraced Chinese nationalism with vigor.80 As CCBA-NY chairman, Fong publicly welcomed General Cai Tingkai, a native of Guangdong, a national hero, and a critic of Chiang Kai-shek, during the soldier’s 1934 visit to New York. Fong also rode in Cai’s motorcade and allowed the general to make a speech at the CCBA-NY headquarters. In early 1936, near the end of Fong’s term as chairman, he pushed the CCBA-NY to join its community opponents in an umbrella group called the All-Chinatown Anti-Japanese Salvation Association.81 Fong sensed that if the CCBA-NY ceded leadership on the Japan issue to groups such as the Laundry Alliance, its status in the community would suffer even more than it already had. Since 1934, hundreds of laundrymen, members of the city’s largest Chinese occupational group, had stopped paying dues to the CCBA-NY, which seemed incapable of and unconcerned with defending their interests. Mayor LaGuardia was successfully undermining Tammany Hall, a vital ally of both the On Leong Merchants Association

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and the CCBA-NY. Japanese encroachment in China also split the community, with more and more ordinary Chinese Americans demanding an end to the nonresistance policies of the Chiang administration. The issue even divided the CCBA-NY executive board and left leaders such as Louis Fong struggling to demonstrate the organization’s nationalist mettle. CCBA-NY leaders were no doubt relieved when Chiang Kai-shek formed an antiJapanese united front with the Chinese Communist Party in early 1937.82 The Japanese invasion of China that same year helped restore the prestige of the CCBA-NY, which suddenly became indispensable to the war relief effort in New York. After the Japanese attack, Chinese Americans of many political persuasions called for unity and began to support the Chiang government, whose local surrogates included not just the Chinese consul but the CCBA-NY as well. As the community’s umbrella organization, the CCBA-NY could also more easily coordinate fundraising and publicity efforts than smaller and more narrowly focused groups, including the Laundry Alliance. The CCBA-NY’s connections to other CCBAs, including the powerful San Francisco group, enabled it to work with them at the national level in areas such as outreach and public relations; no other community group in Chinese New York could tap into such networks or command so many resources. Unsurprisingly, when New York’s Chinese American organizations formed the New York Overseas Chinese Association to Raise Military Funds for Resisting Japan and National Salvation, the CCBA-NY became its leading member, collecting millions of dollars for war refugees and coordinating rallies, parades, and speakers.83 As the CCBA-NY gained a new lease on life, the Laundry Alliance struggled to overcome growing dissent within its own ranks. In 1936, a number of the organization’s members protested the presence of communists in the group. Scholars Renqiu Yu and Peter Kwong have alleged that community conservatives, determined to undermine the Laundry Alliance, infiltrated the organization and stirred up trouble.84 Whatever the case, the fight for control of the Laundry Alliance escalated through a series of court battles and even some fistfights at meetings. In 1937, the Laundry Alliance finally expelled its most vocally anti-communist members, but in the two years that followed, many of its other members decided to quit. Even in the midst of a KMT-communist united front, the presence of communists in the Laundry Alliance apparently worried more than just a handful of conservative infiltrators.85 Y.K. Chu, who helped the laundrymen organize in 1933, had once hoped the Laundry Alliance would become a beacon of community liberalism, cooperating with New Deal agencies to improve Chinese American

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workers’ lives. He also predicted that challenges to the CCBA-NY would prompt “the beginning of internal reform” in the group. Neither aspiration became a reality. The Laundry Alliance leadership by the late 1930s had lost its faith in liberalism and was moving to the left. And the need for wartime unity had rehabilitated the image of the CCBA-NY, enabling it to avoid internal reform or democratization. Despite the two groups’ disavowal of politics, to many residents they represented the community’s two political poles: the right-wing merchant elite and the leftists. Most Chinese Americans existed somewhere in between, and almost no one spoke for them.86 A political center of the type that emerged in 1930s San Francisco failed to develop in New York over the same period, nor did an enthusiastic and growing group of citizen voters. In 1933, Manhattan’s communist Chinese Vanguard warned readers that the New Deal would benefit only “overseas Chinese capitalists, [while to] we toiling masses . . . it will feel like a deadly toxin.” Such pronouncements were common in the communist press before the 1935 advent of the Popular Front, yet this one must have seemed prophetic to many Chinese American New Yorkers. The New Deal largely turned on citizenship status and thus left untouched a heavily alien community. By the late 1930s, Democratic Party reform clubs that rejected the Tammany machine and allied with Mayor LaGuardia popped up across the city, and African Americans and Jews became the backbone of the New Deal in New York. But for Gotham’s Chinese Americans, the Democratic Party did not come to represent progressive change. Instead, Tammany hacks like George Chintong remained the face of the party in the Chinese community, where they used their connections to suppress the “toiling masses,” especially the laundrymen.87 The result by the late 1930s was an extraordinary level of distrust and political detachment in Chinese American New York, where an infinitesimal number of people ever bothered registering to vote. In San Francisco in 1940, more than 25 percent of Chinese American citizens over the age of fifteen were registered. Since the voting age at the time was 21, that meant probably around one-third or more of those who were old enough to vote signed up. New York’s numbers are harder to determine because of the sheer size of the city and the relative dispersal of its Chinese American citizens. However, three census tracts in Lower Manhattan contained more than half the city’s Chinese American population, and of this group, only about 3 percent had registered to vote. That number is incredibly low, even taking into account the high percentage of non-citizens and minors in the area and the use of language tests in New York to disqualify those illiterate in English. During the 1930s, the overwhelming majority of Chi-

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nese American New Yorkers remained almost completely disengaged from mainstream party politics, and the CCBA-NY’s machinations only stoked their cynicism.88

New Deal or Same Old Deal? The Roosevelt Administration’s New Deal changed the relationship between American citizens and their government, creating new entitlement programs and convincing millions of voters to support the Democrats. Those who flooded into the party included industrial workers, struggling homeowners, and African Americans in the urban North. Less visibly, Chinese Americans in San Francisco joined the New Deal coalition, wooed by local Democrats trying to rebuild their party and willing to disavow the “Yellow Peril” politics of the past. A similar process never took place in New York, however. Demographically, the eastern city simply lacked enough Chinese American voters to make their support worth seeking, in contrast to the growth of a numerically significant American-born second generation in San Francisco at the same time. But local politics played as much of a role as demographics. New York’s Tammany Hall had longstanding ties to Chinese community elites, links that shielded tong members and enriched community brokers but rarely benefited ordinary Chinese Americans. The political transformation of 1930s New York did little to change the situation. The only outsiders willing to support Chinese Americans before the Japanese invasion were leftists, especially communists who advocated racial equality. In contrast, city officials and their New Deal agency partners rarely reached out to Chinese Americans in New York. During the 1930s, California’s shifting politics and San Francisco’s growing second generation forced traditional elites there to share some of their power. In contrast, New York’s CCBA-NY overcame many of the decade’s setbacks to regain much of its influence in the community. America’s entry into World War Two altered the relationship of Chinese Americans to the US government and to other Americans. Thousands of Chinese American men and women entered the military and the mainstream defense workforce, mingling with other Americans and gaining new perspectives on their place in society. The United States itself was changing rapidly, with massive internal migration and, by war’s end, growing agitation for nonwhite civil rights. In addition to these shifts, the renewed Chinese civil war seemed likely to recast the political terrain of Chinatowns in America. The one wildcard was the growing importance of the Chiang regime to the US government’s plans for postwar East Asia.

T WO

War, Revolution, and Political Realignment

In April 1947, Shing Tai Liang and his wife Yung Fen Chao arrived in San Francisco from Shanghai. Unlike most newcomers from China, the couple breezed through immigration, for Liang’s passport indicated that he was a member of the Chinese government. The two then headed to New York City, where Liang, a Kuomintang (KMT/Chinese Nationalist) official trained in overseas Chinese affairs, became editor of the Chinese Journal, while Chao after a stint at Columbia University went to work in China’s United Nations office.1 In the 1930s and 1940s, the Chinese Nationalist government began trying to increase its presence and influence in Chinese American communities, sending trained party members and government officials like Liang to take over local organizations and coordinate proKMT propaganda. These efforts proved somewhat successful during World War Two, when Nationalist representatives helped organize fundraising and channel donations to the Chinese government. But during the Chinese Civil War, which began anew in 1946 and ended with the Communists’ 1949 victory, KMT efforts to exert influence over Chinese American communities often failed. World War Two had helped erode Chinese American isolation from mainstream American society, while the Nationalists’ conduct during the civil war prompted growing criticism of the one-party KMT state. Although Chinese political interference in Chinese American politics increased in the 1940s, so did independent Chinese American activism for civil rights and a place in US society. By 1948, declining KMT influence signaled that a Chinese American politics distinct from China’s factional struggles might be developing not only in San Francisco but also in New York City. The KMT regime attempted to gain greater control of Chinese American communities at the same moment that US officials for the first time

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sought to make Chinese Americans part of the nation’s citizenry, workforce, and army. While the military segregated African American and Japanese American soldiers, commanders during World War Two placed most of the 12,000 Chinese American men who served in the US armed forces in white units. Thousands of other Chinese Americans, especially on the West Coast, worked in the defense industry, building ships and planes for the US military. By 1942, some white citizens and politicians were even questioning the Chinese exclusion law.2 The debate over Chinese exclusion was part of the larger discussion of American racism that the war provoked. The conflict created immense manpower needs and sparked a mass migration of people of all backgrounds into defense production centers, particularly urban areas that offered plenty of jobs but rarely enough housing, recreation, or transportation. Beginning in 1942, tensions in such places led to several full-blown race riots and thousands of smaller racial incidents across the United States. Many government officials who previously ignored the protests of nonwhite Americans now saw racial friction and violence as imperiling war production; others understood that reports of violence against nonwhite Americans undermined the nation’s claim to be fighting for democracy and freedom across the world. Although Chinese Americans were not a target of race riots, the Chinese Exclusion Act became yet another example of US racial hypocrisy, and the Japanese government made repeated references to the law in its propaganda. In 1943, such factors, together with the American public’s deep admiration for ally China’s war against Japan, made possible the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act. The legislation allowed a token quota of 105 Chinese a year to immigrate to the United States and enabled the naturalization of alien Chinese—the first Asian ethnic group to gain that right.3 Steadily shifting American racial views touched Chinese Americans in other ways as well. In 1946, Congress included Chinese American veterans in war brides legislation and passed another law allowing Chinese American citizens to bring China-born wives to the United States as nonquota immigrants. While postwar reconversion and recession undermined some Chinese American wartime economic gains, the G.I. Bill provided financial and educational assistance to many veterans of Chinese ancestry. More subtly, altered views of Asian Americans created greater economic opportunities for Chinese Americans across the United States. San Francisco journalist Charles Leong, who served in the military during World War Two, remembered that because of the changes the conflict set in motion, for the

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first time “men of my generation . . . felt we could make it in American society.”4 In seeking to increase its influence and control over Chinese San Francisco and New York at this moment, the KMT-controlled Republic of China (ROC) government hoped both to shape these changing communities and to use their newfound connections to American politicians. This was particularly the case during the late 1940s, when KMT officials and party members in America attempted to rally Chinese Americans to the Nationalist side and also to suppress supporters of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In the 1950s, the US government essentially endorsed this campaign, but American KMT leaders in the 1940s received little active support from US officials. President Harry S. Truman provided assistance to the ROC but privately thought Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek both incompetent and corrupt. Many members of Truman’s administration shared these feelings and believed that Chiang’s days were numbered. They had little incentive to assist the ROC’s agents in America.5 Despite a growing ROC political presence in their communities, Chinese Americans between 1945 and 1949 spoke with increasing openness and anger about their dissatisfaction with the KMT regime. Greater media candor helped fuel these sentiments; during the war against Japan, journalists had muted their criticism of the Chiang government in order to promote unity, but now a number of independent Chinese-language papers in New York and San Francisco published unvarnished accounts of life in the KMT-held areas. Chinese Americans also received firsthand reports from family members in China, where KMT corruption, economic mismanagement, and inflation threatened the livelihood of even those Chinese with jobs, and refugees from the civil war starved on the streets of major cities. Allowed to remit money to relatives only through the official Bank of China, Chinese Americans fumed about the wildly unrealistic exchange rates that allowed KMT officials to profit from the hard work of the overseas population.6 Between 1946 and 1948, then, KMT officials like Shing Tai Liang and his colleagues seemed to be waging a losing battle for power in the Chinese American communities of New York and San Francisco. During World War Two, KMT members tried to dominate both cities’ traditional organizations; after the conflict, party officials and affiliates continued their work in San Francisco but focused particular attention on New York, the new home of the United Nations and thus a key site for lobbying on the ROC’s behalf. In the two cities, new Chinese American groups, such as veterans’ asso-

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ciations and civic organizations, increasingly competed for the time and interest of the second generation. Although personally interested in China’s affairs, members of these groups often sought to delink China politics from Chinese American politics. And many community members, both US citizens and China-born people, grew more and more skeptical of the KMT, the American branches of which publicly splintered over Chiang’s leadership by 1948.

The Growing Influence of the Kuomintang in America After establishing itself in 1927 as China’s ruling party, the KMT focused considerable attention on wooing ethnic Chinese around the world. According to historian Stephen Fitzgerald, “The KMT claimed the Chinese abroad as nationals of the Republic of China, it encouraged them to think of themselves as Chinese, to be loyal to China, and actively serve the interests of the Chinese Government.” The historical role of the overseas Chinese, who helped fund Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary activity, made attracting their support particularly important to the KMT regime as it sought legitimacy. Equally significant, overseas communities sent millions of dollars each year to relatives and charities in South China; Nationalist officials wanted to keep this money flowing and to tap into some of it for national development.7 The number of KMT activists in Chinese American communities grew throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, as the Nationalist government consolidated its power in China and moved to assert its authority among the overseas. Certainly, many members of the American KMT were simply longtime residents, mostly aliens but occasionally citizens, who remained deeply loyal to the party of Sun Yat-sen and his “Three People’s Principles.” A growing number, however, were trained party officials—often graduates of KMT cadre schools such as National Sun Yat-sen University—sent to the United States specifically to manage the overseas Chinese communities there. Such people hoped to usurp for the ROC (and thus themselves) some of the functions of the informal brokers who represented Chinese American communities to outsiders; after all, the Nationalist regime claimed to speak for every person of Chinese ancestry. Coming from rightist, and leftist or centrist, factions of the KMT (groups often referred to as the rightKMT and the left-KMT), some of these activists migrated as students, others as holders of official government passports, a few as merchants, and a handful as Chinese-educated Chinese American citizens. Those who arrived from China during this crucial period included Woodrow Chan, a gradu-

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ate of the KMT’s National Sun Yat-sen University and a future CCBA-NY chairman who came to the US on a student visa in 1928 but never completed a degree at any of the universities he supposedly attended; San Francisco’s Pei Chi Liu (who also called himself B.K. Law), another National Sun Yat-sen graduate who traveled on a government passport and became a KMT journalist in San Francisco; Wensan Wang, a KMT central committee member and education official who received his Ph.D. in the United States and came back to America in 1939 at the behest of the party; Ting-Yung Hang, a Nationalist colonel who later became editor of a right-wing New York Chinese-language paper; William T.S. Wu, an ROC overseas committee member sent to New York to manage the KMT youth group there; Shing Tai Liang and Yung Fen Chao; Kock Gee Lee, who came on a merchant visa but simultaneously served on the ROC’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission and the administrative committee of the US KMT; Louis F.S. Hong, a merchant-journalist; and the American-born, Chinese-educated businessman and educator James H. Loo. Dozens of similar KMT members sent to American cities during this period show the importance the Nationalist government attached to the United States, especially after the 1937 Japanese invasion of China. The ROC valued Chinese Americans not just for the millions of dollars such people donated to the anti-Japanese cause but also because they could bring the Sino-Japanese conflict to the attention of the American public.8 During the same period, Nationalist officials redoubled their efforts to reach Chinese Americans through education, the media, and community institutions. In the late 1930s, Woodrow Chan became principal of the Chinese Central High School in San Francisco and quickly adopted a Nationalist-approved curriculum that stressed patriotism to China and the leading role of the KMT. He also used his position to build up the San Min Chu I (Three People’s Principles) Youth Corps, an organization that aimed to train and indoctrinate future KMT members. Around the same time, a Hawaiian-born political scientist and KMT central administrative committee official named Kalfred Dip Lum traveled to San Francisco to reconcile the city’s feuding KMT factions. He tied the CCBA and other traditional organizations firmly to the ROC leadership by making their leaders officials in the newly reorganized party branch. Within the next two years, the China News Service, a propaganda arm of the Nationalist government, established a New York office, and it opened a San Francisco branch shortly after the United States entered World War Two. Both offices aimed to reach not just the overseas Chinese but also an American public increasingly sympathetic to wartorn China.9

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Until America entered World War Two, KMT officials enjoyed distinct advantages in their efforts to bind Chinese Americans to the ROC. America’s continued neutrality in the Sino-Japanese conflict meant that KMT officials offered one of the only channels in the United States for anti-Japanese fundraising. Certainly, a number of Chinese Americans, especially on the political left, complained about the tendency of ROC representatives to take over grassroots anti-Japanese organizations and attempt to control community donations. The issue of money was a particularly sore point, since millions of dollars that Chinese Americans donated to help China’s army defend Shanghai in the early 1930s disappeared without explanation. Once the KMT and CCP established a “United Front” in 1937 to fight the Japanese invaders, community conservatives in American Chinatowns had to moderate their criticism of political opponents; however, the United Front also encouraged unity under Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership. In New York and San Francisco, Chinese and Chinese Americans began to work side by side, regardless of political orientation, to raise money for the ROC and public awareness of Japan’s brutality.10 The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ended the KMT’s monopoly on patriotic activities, drawing America into the war and reinforcing for many Chinese Americans their status as US citizens. Of course, Chinese Americans never faced the hostility with which people of Japanese ancestry contended during World War Two, nor did US leaders publicly characterize the community’s pro-China activities as subversive. However, America’s entry into the war quietly redirected the attentions and energies of many Chinese Americans into work specifically on behalf of the US war effort. Those who had once donated money to buy bonds for the Chinese government or aircraft for its military now saved their money for US war bonds and stamps as well. New York’s Chinese American women signed up to participate in a unit of the American Women’s Voluntary Services organization, registering residents for the draft and sugar rationing. In San Francisco, Chinese American Citizens Alliance (CACA) members held rallies to raise money for the American war effort, flying the US flag at their meetings to emphasize their loyalty. The CCBAs on both coasts also shifted their fundraising focus to collecting money for US war bonds. Most Chinese Americans saw no conflict between their work for China and for the United States; indeed, they usually viewed their support for the American war effort as part of the larger anti-Japanese struggle. At the same time, their participation in activities that they shared with the majority of the nation’s citizens and that emphasized unity subtly drew them closer to the rest of the American population.11

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Changes in the Wartime Economy In the San Francisco Bay Area, the war pulled Chinese Americans into the mainstream economy for the first time, further eroding their isolation. Even before Pearl Harbor, the defense buildup helped the Chinatown economy, with restaurateurs profiting from the influx of defense workers and soldiers, who crowded the streets searching for recreation and a meal at all times of the day. Once America entered the conflict, wartime employment gains benefited a cross-section of San Francisco’s Chinese American community, including women and older men. In 1942, Chinese Americans from San Francisco began finding work as welders, shipfitters, and draftsmen at Bay Area shipyards such as Moore Dry Dock and Mare Island. Others served as clerks and laborers at the Oakland Army Supply Base, Fort Mason, and Bethlehem Steel. Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond hired Albert Chow, the prominent San Francisco Democrat and broker, to recruit Chinese Americans from around the country to work in the East Bay. Samuel D. Lee, the United States Employment Service official in charge of the Bay Area’s Chinese American workers, estimated that one-third of San Francisco’s 20,000 Chinese residents worked in defense jobs by the end of 1942. Discrimination against Chinese American employees remained a major problem throughout the Bay Area, however. Once hired, Chinese Americans rarely earned promotions to supervisorial positions, while housing segregation forced many to commute long distances to factories in the East Bay. Still, as Lim P. Lee, who served as a YMCA secretary in wartime Chinatown before joining the military, pointed out: “For the first time among the Chinese there is an inter-racial contact. . . . this intermingling breaks down racial barriers, it makes for a better relationship in the future.” And many of the younger Chinese American workers, especially educated women, used their wartime work experience to secure better jobs in the mainstream economy after the conflict.12 The war’s impact on Chinese New Yorkers differed because of their community’s demographics and the city’s relative unimportance as a center of defense production. As with a number of older Northeastern urban centers, New York’s existing military facilities and shipyards thrived during the war, but the city could not provide defense contractors the space they needed for new plants. In addition, many employers in the defense industry refused to hire aliens, especially non-English speakers, to work in warrelated production. As a result, only a small number of Chinese Americans left the restaurant and laundry fields for well-paid jobs in defense-related industries outside the city, such as in Long Island’s aircraft factories.13

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The booming wartime economy both benefited and undermined aspects of the Chinese American niche economy of New York. A number of shopkeepers in Chinatown renovated their storefronts to draw in new customers with defense wages to spend, while a handful simply shut down their businesses, unable to find workers even when offering better pay than in the past. Other small companies flourished by changing their hours and hiring practices. Numerous Chinese-owned hand laundries stayed open late to accommodate shift workers, including many women who no longer had time to do their own washing. Chinese American laundry owners also hired outsiders, usually black women, to help complete each long day’s laundering and ironing. Similar conditions prevailed in the restaurant industry, where Chinese American owners grappled with a shortage of manpower and too many customers by hiring African American dishwashers. However, the front of the house staff remained Chinese, reinforcing the supposed authenticity of dishes such as chop suey.14 New York’s Chinese American business owners began hiring black women because, just as in San Francisco, many of the city’s Chinese American men joined or were drafted into the military during the war. Even before aliens became draft-eligible, numerous Chinese men from the New York metro area simply volunteered to serve despite their inability to become citizens. Many of these immigrants enlisted because they hoped to help defeat the Japanese who had invaded China. By 1942, observers noted the dearth of young, military-age Chinese American men on the streets of New York’s Chinatown.15

New York: The KMT Struggles for Influence While the United States and China shared a common enemy in Japan, service in the American military bound men of Chinese ancestry more tightly to the United States and sometimes alienated them from the ROC government. As ordinary Chinese Americans, both US- and China-born, enlisted in the American armed forces in large numbers, they could not help but see that men attached to the Chinese government in even the smallest capacity often attempted to avoid military service. US officials noticed this as well and privately worried that “such persons are creating ill will for the Chinese Government among not only American citizens, but among Chinese in the United States.” Those for whom the Chinese government claimed exemption from the US draft included not only employees of the Bank of China and editorial staff of the Chinese News Service but also the cooks, servants, and children of prominent officials. Selective Service authorities noted that

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at least the ROC government “has not a leg to stand on in attempting to obtain exemption from military service for American citizens of Chinese race,” but Nationalist officials still sought deferrals for American-born KMT members like Central News Agency employee James H. Loo. Even the most fervent supporters of the KMT regime grew alarmed at the situation. In a confidential letter to T.V. Soong, who served as Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek’s personal envoy to President Roosevelt, scholar K.C. Li pointed out that his American friends had started to “wonder whether [such class] discrimination extends to the Motherland.” He noted that “the young American boys now serving will become the most powerful pressure group in this country after the war, [so] it seems advisable that they get their impression of China and Chinese not only from cooks and laundrymen but also from engineers, economists, chemists, doctors.” Chinese Americans in New York became particularly aware of the class discrimination at which Li hinted, for the well-heeled families of Chinese Nationalist leaders streamed into the city during and after World War Two.16 The 1942 murder of a Chinese sailor in New York created another source of tension between high-ranking Nationalists in the city and the community they claimed to serve. At the time, a large number of British and Dutch merchant ships employed Chinese crewman, routinely paying them less than white men for the same work. Making matters worse, shipping companies almost never allowed Chinese sailors arriving at US ports to leave their ships; the US government held the firms liable for desertions, which violated the Chinese Exclusion Act. Since Chinese seamen could not easily visit their wartorn homeland, they had few opportunities to go ashore at all. The situation grew so intolerable that two separate Chinese crews from ships docked in New York tried to fight their way to land in April 1942—the first at Staten Island, and the second at Brooklyn. In the Staten Island incident, thirty-seven Chinese sailors briefly reached the dock, but policemen soon detained all of them. In Brooklyn, a group of Chinese sailors pleaded with their English captain to let them go ashore; one, Ling Young Chai (Lin Yangqi), allegedly attacked the captain with a marlin spike and injured the first mate, after which the captain shot and killed Ling. The mainstream New York press and the local courts called the killing a justified response to a mutiny, and the British government refused to punish the captain. Chinese Americans around the country erupted, for the murder epitomized to many the racism of immigration laws and the contempt with which white “allies” treated China. Several Chinese American journalists felt angry enough to break the silence they had previously maintained in the interests of wartime unity. As popular San Francisco Chi-

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nese Times columnist Gilbert Woo contended, the murder and official responses to it proved that “part of the United States population has one face that opposes Hitler, but one face that believes in Hitlerism.”17 ROC representatives publicly seized on Ling’s death to display their authority in the community, but their unwillingness to demand real improvements for seamen on British ships frustrated many Chinese New Yorkers. The KMT’s Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York accused Western reporters of ignoring the real facts in the case, while the city’s Chinese consul general and his staff conducted their own probe with the assistance of CCBA-NY leaders. The Chinese Nationalist Daily assured readers over and over that China’s representatives were tirelessly working to investigate the death and negotiate a just conclusion. Despite such claims, China’s diplomats did nothing substantive to change the poor treatment that Chinese sailors endured on foreign ships; instead, they privately blamed the seamen themselves for causing trouble. This outcome disappointed and angered many Chinese New Yorkers. The historian Him Mark Lai has written that “the war gave the KMT an excellent opportunity to expand its influence into all areas of the Chinese American community, and its political rivals could do little to stop it,” yet in New York, the Ling murder, together with community resentment about the draft status of elite Chinese, undercut rather than enhanced such KMT efforts.18 Nationalist leaders in New York discovered that a growing number of community members simply refused to consent to or obey KMT leadership. Party activists found they could do little to subdue the independent, leftist Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, which throughout the war years refused to remit funds for China war relief through official channels. After US officials loosened restrictions on Chinese sailors in 1943, almost a thousand men deserted British and Dutch ships and went into hiding in New York City, despite criticism from the Chinese government. KMT efforts to rouse and regiment local youth through the San Min Chu I Youth Corps proved equally ineffective. FBI officials conducting surveillance in Chinese American communities noted that “many other attractions . . . are of interest and appeal to the young Chinese people in the United States. . . . [and] it is common knowledge that the San Min Chu I organization is operated strictly for the benefit of the Kuomintang, which for the most part is made up of elders.” Very few Chinese American youths in New York chose to become involved in Chinese political organizations of any stripe; those who did, however, tended to choose the leftist Chinese Youth Club. While the Communist Party backed the Youth Club, it appeared to operate with much greater independence than the KMT’s Youth Corps.19

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KMT officials also struggled unsuccessfully to control the New York community press and faced a growing number of challengers from both the left and the center. Initially, the Japanese invasion of China strengthened the KMT’s Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, for its competitors either dissolved or muted their criticism of China’s leaders. The Communist-backed Chinese Vanguard closed in 1938 when its staff returned to China to fight the Japanese; the new China Salvation Times, a Communist Party paper once based in Paris, opened the same year but folded in 1939. Meanwhile, the independent Shangbao supported the Nationalist government, and editor Y.K. Chu even traveled to Chongqing, the wartime KMT capital, to participate in the one of the Chinese government’s economic committees. Dissatisfied with the Shangbao’s tone, Chu’s old allies in the Laundry Alliance finally bankrolled their own community newspaper, the China Daily News, in 1940. For a couple years, it remained the only leftist Chinese-language paper in New York and the only newspaper critical of the Chiang regime—in part because it received quiet backing from the Chinese Communist Party, although it was not openly communist the way the defunct Chinese Vanguard had been.20 As the war dragged on, though, the KMT press increasingly faced, if not quite dissent from within its ranks, then at least some dissatisfaction. In 1942, Chin-Fu Woo, one of the more liberal staff members of the party’s Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, covered the Ling Young Chai murder. In an editorial about the case, Woo commended the Chinese consul general for his handling of the affair; still, he said, “simply leaning on the Consul General is inadequate,” and he urged Chinese American organizations to demand racial justice both in America and on the high seas. In arguing this way, Woo not only envisioned a Chinese American identity separate from the KMT regime but also alluded to the Nationalist government’s unwillingness to push its allies for better treatment of Chinese sailors. KMT officials likely found Woo’s ideas and mild, indirect criticism intolerable. Woo quit the paper shortly afterwards and started an independent magazine, the Chinese-American Weekly, which eventually became a regular critic of the Nationalist regime. In 1943, Yun Shan Yu, another writer for the Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, also left the paper to start the China Tribune, a centrist daily. Initially bankrolled by moderate KMT members, the Tribune eventually became linked to the Chinese Hongmen Party, an anti-KMT political organization formed after the war. Unable to staff Shangbao in the tight labor market, Y.K. Chu finally closed the paper in 1944. By that time, the community boasted three other publications offering alternatives to the KMT’s official line. When Chu began publishing a new magazine, the

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China Post (Da Hua Xunkan) in 1946, Chinese New Yorkers seemed on the verge of gaining the kind of political center that had never coalesced in the 1930s.21 Concerned about this new array of voices, the rightists in the local KMT scrambled to compete with the emerging independent and leftist press. In late 1944, party member and businessman Louis F.S. Hong made a deal with the publisher of the Shangbao, who sold the paper’s equipment and typeface to Hong and a group of his right-wing KMT associates. The next year, the organ reopened as the Meizhou Ribao, or Chinese Journal. Although the Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York was also a KMT paper, the Chinese Journal represented the party’s rightists—the group closest to Chiang Kaishek—and soon overshadowed the older party paper. But this new rightist voice could not silence an increasingly critical community press, with which the KMT paper continued to contend until it went out of business less than two years after Chiang’s 1975 death.22 The KMT’s greatest failure was its unsuccessful attempt to dominate the CCBA-NY. The organization had never even had a KMT member as chairman until 1938, when in a burst of patriotism, the CCBA-NY board elected Franklin Wong, a Columbia University graduate and onetime translator for the party’s Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York. The honeymoon proved short-lived. Details of the 1940 election are scarce, but for some reason the CCBA-NY deadlocked on a choice of candidate. Perry Tu (Du Buxiu), a prominent businessman and KMT leader, stepped in temporarily and served for three months, but when the CCBA-NY finally made its permanent selection, members picked someone outside the KMT: Frank T.F. Young, a political centrist who later joined the Chinese Hongmen Party and wrote for the independent China Tribune. During the 1942 election, the CCBA-NY acted similarly, selecting Lau Ying-cho, another political independent who later joined the Chinese Hongmen Party. During most of the war, then, KMT members consistently failed to win CCBA-NY elections, a sign of growing disenchantment with the party even among traditional organization leaders.23 Thus thwarted, KMT officials in the city used wartime fundraising and national salvation activities as part of a larger strategy to win future CCBA-NY elections by slowly but surely taking over the group’s constituent organizations. In San Francisco, the CCBA chairmanship rotated bimonthly among the leaders of the organization’s seven key groups. When KMT leader Kalfred Dip Lum wanted to increase Nationalist influence in the San Francisco CCBA, he did so quickly by appointing some of these seven leaders to the

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party. In New York, the Lin Sing and Ning Yung Associations took turns selecting two candidates from their ranks every two years, after which representatives of the CCBA-NY’s fifty-five constituent groups voted to make one of the selected men chairman. To win the CCBA-NY election, the KMT thus needed to place loyal members in the Lin Sing and Ning Yung Associations and the fifty-five constituent organizations. Wartime fundraising activities made this easier and faster. After the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, Chiang Kai-shek received almost universal support from Chinese Americans in New York. Even those frustrated with the KMT over issues like the mistreatment of sailors or the draft status of Chinese officials rarely questioned the need to back the national government during the war. The KMT regime used this pro-unity sentiment to raise money but also to make party members, especially rightists, instrumental channels for these community contributions.24 The result was that a number of KMT party activists, particularly trained cadres, rose to prominence in the CCBA-NY constituent groups after 1937 by serving as national salvation fundraisers. Toisan native Kock Gee Lee, who led the CCBA-NY for two terms in the 1950s, was a member of the KMT’s Overseas Affairs Commission; he claimed merchant status to get a visa but spent all of his time on party-related activities. Lee immigrated to the United States around 1930, and by the early 1940s, his involvement in national salvation fundraising activities helped him become chairman of both the powerful Ning Yung Association and the influential Lee Family Association. Woodrow Chan, another KMT official who chaired the CCBA-NY in the late 1940s and early 1950s, arrived in New York from San Francisco in the late 1930s. He joined the Ning Yung Association as well, rising to prominence by raising money for the Nationalist government’s war efforts. Other KMT members, especially non-officials, followed more circuitous routes into the traditional organizations but gained stature through wartime fundraising. Future CCBA-NY secretary Louis F.S. Hong, the right-KMT activist who helped purchase the old Shangbao plant, immigrated to the United States in 1911. While studying at Northwestern University, he married into Chicago’s most prominent Chinese American family and helped run the KMT in that city in the 1920s. After working in China in the 1930s, Hong resettled in 1938 in New York, remained active in the KMT central committee, and managed China fundraising for the Soo Yuen Association. William T.S. Wu came to the United States in 1914, studied at the City College of New York, and married a Chinese American citizen. During the 1930s he served as Eastern US director of the San Min

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Chu I Youth Corps, but it was his work raising money for China during the war that helped him become chairman of the influential Eng Suey Sun Association, one of the CCBA-NY’s constituent groups.25

Emerging from Isolation: Chinese American San Francisco As KMT officials struggled to exert influence in Chinese New York, their counterparts in San Francisco grappled with a different set of problems. In New York’s Chinese community, aliens still outnumbered citizens two to one, the CCBA-NY retained some of its links to the fading Tammany Hall Democratic political machine, and the war enhanced the profitability of Chinese American economic niches rather than creating opportunities in new fields. The conflict helped erode some of Chinese New York’s isolation, but the shift occurred slowly. In San Francisco, on the other hand, secondgeneration Chinese Americans were forging ties to mainstream American political parties and finding relatively well-paid jobs in the growing defense sector of the Bay Area economy. Furthermore, the Sino-American wartime alliance helped undermine anti–Chinese American sentiment in San Francisco, a longtime anti-Asian bastion. While the KMT sought to dominate San Francisco’s Chinese American leadership, that leadership and its community were already beginning to change in ways that defied dominance. One of the war’s first casualties was the acceptability of open antiChinese racism in mainstream politics in San Francisco. In mid-1942, the California white supremacist group Native Sons of the Golden West filed suit in San Francisco to stop Japanese American citizens there from voting and declared in opening arguments that citizenship was for whites alone. The ensuing public outcry forced the group to backtrack quickly and suggest that perhaps Chinese should not be barred from citizenship. After all, China was not only America’s wartime ally but had in fact been fighting Japan since 1937; before Pearl Harbor, China’s struggle not only attracted American sympathy but also admiration and donations. As the San Francisco Chronicle observed during the Native Sons’ lawsuit, “A Constitutional amendment to specifically enfranchise Chinese, or to disenfranchise Japanese, doubtless would be approved and ratified in record time.”26 As public opinion of Chinese Americans improved, San Francisco’s Chinese American organizations also continued to evolve. In 1940, Albert K. Chow became the first American-born head of the CCBA, stepping into the role when the chairmanship rotated to the Yeung Wo Association, which he led. Most of the other constituent groups’ chairmen were still Chinaborn men, but they were no longer homogeneous guardians of tradition.

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By 1940, a derivative citizen, the St. Mary’s Chinese School teacher John Yehall Chin, was serving as chairman of the Hop Wo Association, another of the organizations to which the CCBA chairmanship rotated periodically. A China-born Christian minister, Tso Tin Taam, led a third such group, the Sam Yup Association. Henry Kwok Wong, an American citizen, served as the CCBA’s executive secretary.27 While the CCBA slowly diversified, the American citizen portion of the community also participated in electoral politics far more than it had in the past, attracting in the process the attention of local political party leaders. In the 1942 election, candidates and ballot initiative campaign organizations flooded the Chinese American Citizens Alliance (CACA) newspaper Chinese Times with advertisements. As in prewar days, some of the pitches included merely a picture and an assurance that a politician was a “friend of the Chinese.” However, a growing number of candidates and organizations included detailed arguments, a nod to the increasing political sophistication and partisanship of Chinese Americans in the city. The CACA recognized the partisan and Democratic trend in the community, endorsing Republican Earl Warren for governor and Democrats Ellis Patterson for lieutenant governor and Robert Kenny for attorney general. The 1943 mayoral contest brought a fresh wave of attention and campaigning to the community. Among others, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who later served as California’s governor, actively sought and won the CACA’s endorsement in his bid to become San Francisco’s district attorney, as did Angelo Rossi, the public housing opponent and mayoral incumbent.28 Albert Chow and his Democratic protégés reaped significant benefits from the growing attention to their community. Chow, whom Governor Culbert L. Olson named a notary public in 1938, was the first Chinese American in California history to receive any kind of political patronage. After 1940 this kind of official recognition began to flow to others as well, and Chow used his position as the head of Chinatown’s Democrats to determine who received it. When new district attorney Pat Brown appointed the city’s first nonwhite deputy district attorney in 1943, he chose William Jack Chow. At least three other Chinese American lawyers practiced in San Francisco—Charles Jung, Kenneth Fung, and Ngai Ho Hong—and given the limited client base for such men, the city position was a coveted one. Hong and Jung, although Republicans, were leading members of the CACA, which endorsed Brown. But only William Jack Chow was Albert Chow’s younger brother. Similarly, when federal officials created the Bay Area Advisory Committee on Discrimination in 1942, they invited Charles Leong to serve along with representatives of other communities. Publisher

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of the English-language Chinese Press, Leong was less of an activist for racial equality than his friend Lim P. Lee or the popular Chinese Times columnist Gilbert Woo; he was, however, Albert Chow’s nephew by marriage, a connection that also helped him win a job writing press releases for the local Democratic Party. During the war, Albert Chow himself forged valuable new relationships that greatly enhanced his status. When Missouri senator Harry Truman came to San Francisco in 1942 on an investigative trip, San Francisco’s most prominent Chinese American Democrat showed him around Chinatown. Two years later, Chow became the first Chinese American to serve as an alternate delegate to the Democratic National Convention, traveling to Chicago to watch his friend Harry Truman receive the vice presidential nomination. By then, Albert Chow had demonstrated that Chinese Americans could earn status and reap economic rewards through American party politics, not just through membership and leadership in the traditional organizations.29 Albert Chow’s success in attracting attention and recognition from Democratic leaders inspired Chinese American Republicans, who began

2.1. Albert Chow dines with Senator Harry S. Truman and his staff during a visit Truman made to San Francisco in 1942. (Courtesy Harry S. Truman Library)

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actively working for candidates outside the old CACA bipartisan framework. By 1940, a core of Republican activists, including but not limited to CACA members, started to coalesce in Chinatown and take part in campaign activities. One of the most active of these partisans, T. Kong Lee, was a Chinese immigrant who graduated from college in Canada and then moved to the Bay Area to pursue a Ph.D. While living in San Francisco and working at the Chinese Times, he became frustrated with what he saw as Franklin Roosevelt’s tax and spend policies, so he threw himself into Republican Party political activities despite his inability to naturalize and vote. Earl Sun Louie, the California-born co-owner of the import-export Shanghai Bazaar on Grant Avenue, also played an active role in Republican politics beginning in 1940. As a citizen, Louie did have the right to vote, and he and his wife Bessie Chin Louie became energetic supporters of the GOP throughout the state. Initially, however, Republican politicians in San Francisco bypassed such newcomers and stuck with the CACA when making appointments. After the war began, for example, Mayor Rossi rewarded CACA leaders for their past support and endorsements by naming Republican lawyers Charles Jung and Kenneth Fung to the city’s selective service board.30 By the early 1940s, as Chinese Americans became more active in US politics, they also started to join civic organizations not rooted in San Francisco Chinatown’s traditional leadership structure. In addition to local influence, some of these associations offered second-generation Chinese American businesspeople and activists the chance to meet and network with influential outsiders. Having been largely shut out of the traditional organizations, many Chinese American citizens eagerly sought such opportunities, particularly as the war widened their economic horizons. Some of the groups that formed at this time stuck to the segregated pattern so widespread in the city. In 1938 a group of young Chinese American men, with the encouragement of the San Francisco Junior Chamber of Commerce (Jaycees), founded the separate Chinese Junior Chamber of Commerce. Aligned with the Jaycees rather than the influential Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the Chinese Jaycees worked closely with outside organizations to investigate housing conditions in Chinatown and push for a public housing project for the district. A handful of other groups mixed Chinese Americans with people of different backgrounds. In early 1941, a group of white San Franciscans, together with numerous citizen and alien Chinese Americans, formed the Chinatown Improvement Association, whose members pushed city leaders to increase the amount of playground space in the overcrowded Chinese community. Under pressure to respond to China-

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town’s demands for decent homes, the city’s new Housing Authority also created a Chinese Advisory Committee that brought Chinese Americans into direct contact with local and federal officials.31 The slowly growing involvement of San Francisco’s Chinese Americans in US political and civic activism complicated the KMT regime’s attempts to assert itself as the community’s central authority and representative. To be sure, a number of the men whom Kalfred Dip Lum had tapped for important positions in the local KMT played major roles in the community leadership structure, and the wartime emergency inadvertently assisted the KMT’s project; many of the younger and more liberal men in the community, including Lim P. Lee, Charles Leong, John Yehall Chin, and William Hoy, joined or were drafted into the military at a time when politics remained a heavily male preserve. Still, Chinese American men and women increasingly looked outside their community for jobs and recognized sources of authority other than the traditional organizations. They sought opportunities and influence outside the control of their elders, disrupting the established channels of intracommunity power, and in doing so threatened the influence of groups such as the KMT and its allies in the CCBA. While the KMT in New York thus confronted a more complicated local leadership structure, the Chinese government’s representatives in San Francisco found themselves scrambling to compete for the loyalties and affinities of a rapidly changing community. Certainly, New York’s Chinese Americans received some token patronage during the war, but it was far more limited and simply bolstered the existing power structure. The fading Tammany machine made party loyalist and On Leong Merchants Association member Sing Kee a member of Draft Board 1, and he also received a lucrative government contract to arrange transport for Chinese American soldiers. Shavey Lee’s sister Emily Lee Shek, who joined the Women’s Army Corps, accepted a temporary appointment to Draft Board 1 as well. However, neither position really helped Chinese Americans forge closer ties to other New Yorkers. During the war, New York’s African American civil rights activists and their allies organized to protest employment discrimination, police brutality, and housing segregation in increasingly effective ways. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia scrambled to appear responsive to their demands. In contrast, Chinese Americans remained largely absent from the growing multiracial wartime civil rights coalition; government agencies and civic unity committees generally ignored people of Chinese ancestry, who received at least token attention in San Francisco. Thus, while KMT activists in New York struggled to suppress dissent and infiltrate a sufficient number

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of traditional organizations, they could at least do so without much competition from groups outside the community.32

The Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act Although Chinese Americans, especially in San Francisco, grew increasingly aware of their political rights during World War Two, most of them focused on making public assertions of patriotism or loyalty to America. The West Coast Japanese American internment, which reinforced the fact that even Asian American citizens did not enjoy many rights in the United States, probably prompted some of the most public displays of Chinese American fidelity. To celebrate Independence Day in 1942, San Francisco Chinatown leaders organized a patriotic parade in which they represented China and San Franciscans of appropriate ethnicities stood in for the other United Nations, with Governor Olson leading the procession. With the urging of the CACA, Chinese Americans in the Bay Area also purchased enough US war bonds to fill the quota originally set for the entire region.33 New Yorkers rushed to demonstrate their loyalty as well, albeit in ways that sometimes showcased the KMT’s desire to enhance party influence in the community. KMT journalist Louis F.S. Hong’s wife Josephine, leader of the local branch of Madame Chiang’s New Life Movement, shifted the group’s emphasis from promoting a Chinese version of fascism to sewing socks for Chinese American servicemen and helping Chinatown residents register for food ration coupons. The KMT-dominated groups that had once raised money exclusively for China now hawked US war bonds as well. In addition to KMT members, native-born politicos embraced with particular enthusiasm the chance to show their patriotism. Republican Party leader Wilbur Pyn presented Governor Thomas Dewey and the press with a plan to use Chinese resident aliens for farm work upstate. As Pyn energetically recruited agricultural laborers, Shavey Lee’s sister Emily Lee Shek arrived back in New York and set up a Women’s Army Corps recruitment station in her brother’s Chinatown office in the hopes of enticing other Chinese American women to join the group.34 Chinese Americans on both coasts, determined to preserve the public’s esteem, played only a small role in the battle to pass the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act, one of the few civil rights measures Congress considered during the war. In the summer of 1943, race riots broke out in Los Angeles, New York, and Detroit, sending tremors through equally tense cities across the country. Urban leaders, civil rights activists, and progressives formed civic

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unity councils and similar groups, but their achievements were largely limited to local and state ordinances. In contrast, the passage of Chinese exclusion repeal, a federal measure, seemed possible for the first time, as well as less controversial than it had ever been before. Earlier that year, American pro-China sentiment crested as Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Soong Mayling), wife of China’s wartime leader, toured the United States, speaking to massive rallies and waving to adoring crowds. Working through sympathetic legislators, participants in a growing movement to end Chinese exclusion used the moment to introduce a repeal bill to Congress. The bill’s proponents did not allow Chinese Americans to join the main repeal group, which argued that their presence might diminish support for the legislation.35 Whether despite or because of this strategy, backers of the bill triumphed, demonstrating in the process the slow erosion of anti-Chinese sentiment even in its old bastions on the West Coast. The California American Legion took the unusual step of supporting repeal; a Chinese American post commander had eloquently argued for the bill in one of the few instances in which Chinese Americans took an active public role in the fight. Even prominent white California politicians supported repeal, including the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Congress agreed, finally voting to back repeal in late 1943. In December of that year, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act, which allowed 105 Chinese a year to immigrate to the United States and enabled alien Chinese to naturalize.36 Chinese Americans celebrated exclusion repeal, but its actual impact on them was fairly limited. Between 1943 and 1948, around four thousand Chinese naturalized, which equaled only about 10 percent of the estimated 37,000 Chinese aliens living in the United States in 1940. Many Chinese aliens saw no reason to naturalize, since thousands planned to return to China after having earned enough money to retire. In addition, repeal created no relief for the far larger number of Chinese who had entered the United States in violation of the exclusion laws. The biggest groups of unlawful entrants—the paper sons who claimed derivative citizenship— could not use the law, since they were already supposedly citizens. Thus, they continued to bear fake names and carry the burden of illegality. As a result, the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act mostly benefited Chinese community elites, including merchants and students, who had come lawfully to the United States.37

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Postwar Activism The thousands of Chinese American veterans who streamed home in 1945 and 1946 proved far more willing to enter the political arena and fight directly for beneficial legislation than people of Chinese ancestry had been during the war. Cooperating with established community leaders, Chinese American veterans showed increasing confidence in their right to demand fair treatment, especially in terms of immigration. Their status improved right after the war, for the passage of the 1945 War Brides Act enabled Chinese Americans, like other veterans, to bring wives into the United States as non-quota immigrants. This was hugely beneficial for Chinese American veterans, since China-born wives would otherwise be chargeable to the tiny 105-person annual Chinese quota established during repeal in 1943. However, the law had two major shortcomings: first, it did not apply to nonveterans; and second, it was set to expire at the end of 1948, which meant that beginning in 1949, even veterans’ Chinese spouses would become chargeable to the quota once again. In 1946, many Chinese American veterans worked to push for the passage of a better law, which became known as the “Chinese Alien Wives of American Citizens Act.” The legislation enabled Chinese American citizens, whether veterans or not, to bring their alien spouses to America as non-quota immigrants. As historian Xiaojian Zhao has shown, this legislation reunited thousands of Chinese families and resulted in an influx of Chinese women into previously “bachelor” Chinatowns. At the same time, the new law did not make Chinese equality part of the immigration system: Congress did not tinker with the tiny quota of 105 immigrants a year for China and refused to include most China-born children as non-quota immigrants. But for Chinese Americans separated for decades from their families, the legislation was still a major victory.38 Activists from San Francisco led the battle, while the leaders of New York’s traditional organizations barely played any role in the fight. In part, this reflected the primacy of the San Francisco CCBA, which other CCBAs recognized as the national representative of the country’s ethnic Chinese population. However, the CCBA-NY’s general absence from the struggle also highlighted the political shifts underway in the group, for the KMT’s strategy of planting operatives in the constituent organizations was finally bearing fruit. In 1944, Ting-wing Chu, a member of the Eastern US committee of the KMT and a former translator for the San Francisco KMT paper Young China, became chairman of the CCBA-NY. Chu had come to the United States long before the KMT began its push to assert authority over the overseas population, but his loyalty to the party was deep, dating to his

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participation in China’s local politics right after the 1911 revolution. He and his successors, all but one of them KMT members, steered an organization formerly focused on local issues—whether for good or for bad—more and more into China politics.39 Those in the New York community who had once served as the group’s bridge to the Tammany political machine—in other words, the nativeborn men in the On Leong Merchants Association—found their influence greatly diminished as a result. Not only was Tammany in decline citywide, but the ascendant KMT bloc in the CCBA-NY viewed the On Leong Merchants Association with suspicion. Many tong members had backed leader Seeto Meetong’s demand that Chiang Kai-shek fight the Japanese in the 1930s; furthermore, Seeto, who returned to China as the war ended, soon founded a new opposition party. KMT members also sought to replace the On Leong Merchants Association’s tusheng brokers as representatives of the community, reaffirming the ROC’s claim to speak for all Chinese Americans. By 1945, then, the CCBA-NY’s ties to Tammany had begun to fray. It was an unfortunate development, because Tammany Democrat Samuel Dickstein, whose district included New York’s Chinatown, served as chair of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. Tellingly, the CCBA-NY apparently made no effort to lobby him to support more liberal immigration for the spouses and dependents of Chinese American citizens.40 In contrast, Chinese American activists and organizations headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area targeted sympathetic Democrats, building on the local political connections people of Chinese ancestry had cultivated since the 1930s. Three members of California’s Congressional delegation—George P. Miller of Alameda, Franck Havenner of San Francisco, and Helen Gahagan Douglas of Los Angeles—eventually introduced bills that the House and Senate collapsed into the single piece of legislation known as the Chinese Alien Wives of American Citizens Act. Miller, Havenner, and Douglas were all racial liberals who owed their electoral success to the Democratic Party’s resurgence in California during the 1930s and early 1940s. Havenner and Douglas also served districts with substantial Chinese American populations.41 The San Francisco Chinese American leadership group that pushed for the legislation blended China-born and tusheng men and incorporated their viewpoints and political styles. Traditional organizational heads and people like Albert Chow, who straddled the worlds of Chinese and American politics, generally remained the most influential figures in the leadership cohort. Still, the tusheng CACA’s stature was growing, as was the influ-

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ence of activist veterans of World War Two like Lim P. Lee. These different leadership groups cooperated closely in the push for the bill but sometimes differed in their tactics. The veterans, led by both the San Francisco Cathay Post of the American Legion and the CACA, proved far more willing than the older leaders to seek assistance from outside organizations—including interracial activist groups like the San Francisco Council for Civic Unity, which urged Dickstein to send the bill to the floor and fight for it. CACA president Kenneth Fung also went before Congress in mid-1945 to testify about the unequal treatment of Chinese spouses under the current immigration law.42 Once the traditional leaders took over the fight, however, they proved almost as cautious in their tactics as the 1943 Citizens Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion, a group that barred Chinese Americans from membership. Fearful of the anti-Chinese racism of certain legislators, the traditional organization leaders sought to obscure Chinese American involvement in the newest immigration battle. Albert Chow and Doon Wong, his sometime business partner, energetically lobbied friendly congresspeople, going from office to office to plead for the Chinese American community and discuss strategy with sympathetic House members. But when the House immigration committee held actual hearings on the three almost identical bills from Miller, Havenner, and Douglas, Chinese Americans dispatched a white lawyer named Peter Snyder to appear on their behalf. Along similar lines, Franck Havenner, one of the sponsors of the bill, emphasized the involvement in its drafting of only the CACA and the Cathay Post American Legion—although Chow and Wong belonged to neither group. In other words, those fighting for the bill sought to convey the idea that Chinese Americans were not active participants in the legislative struggle; similarly, Chinese American allies like Rep. Havenner placed the bill’s beneficiaries into race-neutral categories like “veteran” and “citizen.” While this strategy failed to win over some committee members, the bill eventually reached the floor and won House approval. The Senate backed it as well, and President Truman signed it in early 1946.43 This Chinese American victory quickly caught the attention of other communities of Asian ancestry, who began to lobby for parity with the Chinese. Although Filipinos and South Asians won naturalization rights and small token quotas in 1946, Japanese and Koreans remained ineligible for citizenship or immigration. In 1947, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) began a concerted campaign to gain naturalization rights for tens of thousands of Japanese immigrants, many of whose children had served in World War Two. Under the leadership of lobbyist Mike Masaoka,

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the JACL targeted a different set of legislators than those who worked with Albert Chow and Doon Wong in 1945 and 1946. Knowing he had the support of Democrats like Havenner, Miller, and Douglas, Masaoka collaborated with Republican congressman Walter Judd, a onetime missionary and doctor in China who sympathized with some Asian American immigration goals. Masaoka also focused his resources on “internationalist” Republicans, whose party had just won the 1946 elections. A few of these legislators proved sympathetic to Masaoka, but they demanded that Judd rewrite his initial bill to make Chinese alien wives chargeable to the Chinese quota. After more than a year of back and forth debate, Masaoka and Judd reluctantly agreed.44 Oblivious to the JACL campaign and its potential impact on the special status of Chinese immigrants, Chinese American activists turned instead to lobbying for improved treatment of incoming Chinese women and children. Despite the recent string of Chinese American legislative victories, immigration officials in the late 1940s still viewed all Chinese immigrants as likely frauds and treated them accordingly. Having already sparred with hostile American consuls in China, Chinese immigrants arriving in San Francisco experienced long waits, intrusive interrogations, and poor conditions in holding facilities. In early 1947, the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage of the issue prompted a public outcry and forced the Immigration and Naturalization Service to defend itself in the press. Attorney General Tom Clark, facing pressure from Bay Area members of Congress, dispatched a deputy to investigate the situation and promised improvements. Immigration officials were less forthcoming, protesting that any problems were isolated and stemmed from understandable mix-ups. The agency’s practices did not change after Clark’s intervention, however. In fact, they remained remarkably consistent—and consistently anti-Chinese.45 Newly confident in flexing their political muscle, Chinese American veterans across the country successfully enlisted a number of prominent allies to push the INS into action. Inspired by the activism of their San Francisco counterparts, New York’s Chinese American veterans stepped out of the shadow of the traditional Chinatown organizations for the first time. In 1946, they chartered their own American Legion post and quickly entered the immigration fray, sending telegrams to their representatives in Congress and to the INS and other federal agencies to demand fair treatment for Chinese female immigrants. San Francisco Chinese Americans received direct assistance from Rep. Havenner, California Senator Sheridan Downey, and the American Civil Liberties Union, all of whom placed intense pressure on the INS to expedite the processing of Chinese wives. San Francisco’s

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Chinese American veterans also got the backing of the Disabled American Veterans and other groups interested in the treatment of ex-servicemen. The community press kept the issue front and center and attacked the INS with vigor, almost uniformly accusing it of blatant racism—a charge with which ACLU head Ernest Besig privately agreed.46 Matters came to a head in the summer of 1948, as the INS continued its practices while publicly denying them. In June, Wong Loy, a woman detained at the San Francisco INS’s Sansome Street facility and facing deportation, almost succeeded in jumping off the 14th floor to her death. Two months later, Leong Bick Ha, the wife of US Army veteran Ng Bak Tueng, hanged herself in despair when officials informed her that she would be deported soon. Following her death, one hundred other Chinese women held at the facility staged a hunger strike to protest conditions there. The head of the facility shrugged off the strike, claiming that it was not the first such action and did not merit serious concern. Despite hearings in which representatives of the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the ACLU all testified against the INS, the agency largely continued its policies. Although the INS finally began to improve its treatment of new arrivals after 1950, its officials still regarded Chinese entrants with an extreme degree of suspicion and, often, contempt.47 For Chinese Americans, especially the newly active veterans’ groups, this situation remained a frustrating and painful reminder of their inequality in America. It also impelled many to continue their activism, determined to enjoy the democracy for which they had fought in World War Two. Like many other nonwhite activists at this time, they felt that their service in the war had entitled them to make such demands on Washington. “The American citizens of Chinese ancestry deserve . . . consideration from their government,” New York lawyer Edward Hong, a Signal Corps veteran, argued. “They have demonstrated beyond any doubt that they are law-abiding and staunch citizens. . . . [by] serv[ing] faithfully and patriotically in the Army of the United States.”48

The Renewed Civil War and the Third Force in America While numerous Chinese Americans demanded greater rights in America, others, especially in New York, looked to China for their future. In fact, the end of World War Two set off a full-scale exodus of optimistic Chinese New Yorkers to the “motherland.” Journalist Y.K. Chu claimed that “the majority of overseas Chinese planned that after victory . . . they would take what they had set aside through sweat and toil, and return with it to

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[rebuild] their homeland.” The leaders of many traditional organizations even wondered if their groups would cease to exist, since so many Chinese New Yorkers had decided to go back to China.49 But events in China soon complicated those plans. Shortly after the 1945 Japanese surrender, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong met in the Nationalists’ wartime capital of Chongqing in an attempt to prevent the resumption of the CCP-KMT conflict. After almost two months of negotiations, the men announced that in January 1946, a new “Political Consultative Conference” (PCC) would convene to create the framework for a possible coalition government and unified army. Those who took part in the PCC included not just the Communists and Nationalists but also numerous independent delegates and members of China’s minor parties. Despite the optimism of the public, the KMT-CCP attempt to create a united government soon collapsed because of the parties’ mutual distrust, suspicion, and willingness to violate the terms of the PCC agreements. In April 1946, the CCP-KMT civil war broke out once again, derailing the plans of many “old overseas” who during World War Two had finally earned enough to “return home in splendid garments,” in the words of the popular Chinese saying.50 As the KMT and CCP maneuvered for position, a Chinese American editor named Dai-ming Lee emerged as one of the most ferocious critics of both parties. Lee, a Chinese Hawaiian, was a longtime participant in China politics as a member of the Chinese Democratic Constitutionalist Party (CDCP), once known as the Chinese Empire Reform Association (Baohuanghui) and the Chinese Constitutionalist Party. During World War Two, Lee edited the CDCP’s New China Daily Press of Honolulu and, despite his opposition to KMT rule, refrained for much of the war from publicly criticizing the Nationalist government. In 1944, he moved to San Francisco and took over the venerable but faltering Chinese World newspaper, a CDCP organ that he first helped run in the 1920s. Shortly afterwards, Lee decided to break his silence about his frustration with the Nationalist regime. In early 1945, he convinced the editors of several non-KMT newspapers across the country to publish a scathing critique of the corruption and poverty in the Nationalist-held areas; participants included not just CDCP newspapers but also nonparty publications such as the China Tribune of New York. The move enraged KMT members and Chinese officials, who quietly complained about the centrist Lee’s alleged “collaboration” with the CCP, but their rumor-mongering had no impact on the editor. Indeed, he disliked and distrusted the Communists just as much as he did the KMT. After Japan’s surrender, he and his colleagues in the CDCP publicly called for

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“immediate reorganization of the [Chinese] government along the lines of a true democracy,” a not so subtle swipe at both the Nationalists and the Communists.51 In 1946, Lee gained a formidable ally and coworker, a middle-aged former Nationalist politician and banker named Jun-ke “J.K.” Choy. Another Hawaiian, the Columbia-educated Choy had spent most of his adult life running various ministries, industries, and agencies in China before going into hiding during the war against Japan. In 1945, he returned to the United States almost penniless but still interested in China’s future. He joined Lee at a time when the CDCP was in the process of merging with Carsun Chang Junmai’s National Socialist Party to become the Democratic Socialist Party. That union did not last more than a year, but Lee and Choy’s partnership endured, and they became the most outspoken American members of the so-called “Third Force” small party movement in opposition to both CCP and KMT rule of China.52 Choy and Lee both believed that cultivating the American public and its politicians was essential to their goals, but they experienced little success despite many attempts. Lee urged the State Department to stand up for China’s small parties, wrote directly to General George Marshall, and worked with Choy to push for United Nations mediation of the Chinese civil war. Choy in particular understood American politics and kept a close eye on both the Democrats and Republicans in Washington, D.C., noting with alarm the resurgence of the GOP’s isolationist wing after the war. Federal officials did not see the CDCP as an important player in China or as a constructive political force and thus ignored its leaders’ entreaties. Time and again, staff at American agencies sent terse, formulaic responses to Lee and Choy, but in mid-1947, the men finally managed to schedule a meeting with State Department official John Carter Vincent. Vincent treated them dismissively and derided the patriotism of the CDCP and the other minor parties, which he accused of failing to unite for the best interests of the Chinese nation.53

The American KMT Loses Its Grip By 1946, the need to lobby for American aid and thwart the attempts of Third Forcers changed the dynamics of the KMT’s US work, which began to focus far more on New York City than ever before. In the years after 1945, more and more KMT officials shuttled back and forth between Washington and New York, arguing their case not just to Congress and the president but to the many major newsmagazines and opinion leaders based in Man-

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hattan. In late 1946, the United Nations made New York its permanent home, reaffirming the city’s importance to Nationalist officials. From the UN, they could argue for the legitimacy of their regime and thwart Chinese Communist attempts to question their credibility. In New York, they could also try to silence or at least intimidate the many Chinese Third Force members who were settling in the city. Even though San Francisco was more significant to Chinese American life in the United States—its population, history, and institutions demonstrated as much—the KMT worried far more about the Chiang regime’s survival than the welfare of the “overseas Chinese.” And that meant pouring far more resources into New York than ever before. Yet as the civil war dragged on, anti-KMT sentiment continued to limit the party’s hold on Chinese New York. In 1946, after the unexpected death of new CCBA-NY chairman and KMT San Min Chu I Youth Corps leader Mo-arm Kong, Woodrow Chan took his place, determined to shift the CCBA-NY’s emphasis more toward China politics. The election in rapid succession of Kong and then Chan suggested a resurgence of proKMT sentiment in New York among even the independent leaders of the CCBA-NY constituent groups after the PCC’s apparent success. But these triumphs were short-lived. As dissatisfaction with the Nationalists grew, the CCBA-NY again spurned the KMT and in 1948 selected Koon Lai Loo of the Chinese Hongmen Party as chairman. Unbowed, KMT members and officials in the community pressured Loo into expressing full support for the Chiang regime despite his own apparent misgivings.54 Regardless of the KMT’s ability to pressure some community leaders, the party came under increasing criticism from much of the independent press and the Chinese American public between 1946 and 1948. In the two years after the civil war resumed, the situation in the Nationalist-held areas deteriorated rapidly, prompting an extraordinary degree of candor from independent Chinese American newspapers and magazines. The moderate Chinese American Weekly of New York published numerous complaints from Chinese Americans nationwide, including this scathing critique of KMT exchange rate manipulation from an angry reader: “I daresay that the [Nationalist] government . . . is always cheating the overseas Chinese.” In San Francisco, liberal journalist Gilbert Woo’s new Chinese-Pacific Weekly publicly debated the civil war as well as the justice of American involvement in it. “Chinese don’t have the right to go vote and decide whether the civil war should continue, but a large number of soldiers have surrendered,” concluded one editorial. “People have deserted the military. Isn’t that clearly saying that they detest the war?”55

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To respond to growing public criticism, KMT officials in the United States reinforced the staffs of party papers and tried to pressure the independent press into silence. After Dai-ming Lee’s 1945 newspaper critique of the Chinese government, KMT officials in New York descended on a CDCP convention and unsuccessfully pushed delegates to “unanimously support the government.” When an editor at the moderate San Francisco paper Chung Sai Yat Po used both “communist soldiers” and “communist bandits” in a story, instead of employing only the latter term, KMT members pressured the board into forcing him to resign. But former Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York editor Chin-fu Woo censored himself less and less as the civil war dragged on. In response to a reader’s question about the wealth of T.V. Soong, Madame Chiang’s brother and the governor of Guangdong Province, Woo flatly replied, “The wealth of T.V. Soong’s family obviously comes from corruption.” Answering another query about the civil war, Woo contended that “all good-hearted citizens oppose the civil war, but the KMT and the CCP pay no heed to the life and death of the people.” Meanwhile, the KMT papers increasingly constructed their own version of reality, as the leftist China Daily News pointed out: “Supposing an overseas Chinese only read the [KMT] party newspaper Chinese Journal, and never looked at the other papers, then this reader up until now would not know that Jinan had been liberated [by the CCP], would not know that Changchun had been liberated, would not know that Poyang had been liberated.”56 As the situation in China deteriorated, even angry moderates and leftists within the American KMT expressed dissatisfaction with Chiang Kaishek’s leadership, a development that prompted alarm in Nanjing, the Nationalist capital. The growing anti-Chiang movement in 1947 and 1948 revealed the persistence of the factionalism that had long plagued the KMT and threatened the position of Chiang. Before the Japanese invasion, many party members in China and the United States supported Chiang rivals like Hu Hanmin and Wang Jingwei. Hu died in 1936, and Wang’s eventual decision to serve as leader of the puppet Japanese government in China completely destroyed his appeal. Chiang’s leadership thus seemed assured after World War Two, but the Nationalists’ civil war setbacks sent many in the KMT, especially in its centrist and left wings, looking again for better alternatives. Deeply concerned over this growing chorus, the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission in Nanjing dispatched a number of officials to the United States to silence intraparty dissent. Among others, KMT cadres Kuang Yaopu and Cheng Tianfang arrived to “inspect party affairs” in America, while overseas bureau chief Chen Qingyun and his wife toured

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the United States to “investigate” the situation. But Chen Qingyun’s trip prompted even greater anger among many Chinese Americans, including KMT members. News of his lavish spending quickly leaked out and triggered memories of his earlier mismanagement of wartime national salvation funds. As one Chinese New Yorker complained, “It is said that on this trip to the United States, Mr. Chen Qingyun is staying everywhere in very fine hotels, eating Western food, flying from place to place, and submitting expenses for reimbursement that are more than US$10,000. . . . [even though] right now the nation is very poor.” Instead of eliminating community and intraparty unrest, visits by Chen and other officials merely created more skepticism about the Chiang regime’s honesty and competence.57 KMT members and other Chinese Americans who hoped to preserve the Republic of China made their frustration and anger readily apparent later that year. In November 1947, several thousand Chinese in the United States voted to elect representatives to the new KMT-dominated National Assembly. The electoral process itself, created to bind overseas Chinese to the “motherland,” signaled instead the weakening hold of the ROC on people of Chinese ancestry in the United States. Few Chinese Americans, especially members of the second generation, chose to participate in an election that might cast doubt on their citizenship. But even though most voters were thus KMT members and participants in the traditional organizations, the outcome was hardly a victory for the Chiang regime. In San Francisco, a center of anti-Chiang sentiment, voters chose Doon Wong, Tuck Chow Chan, and Florence Chow as their delegates. At least two of the three elected—Florence Chow, Albert Chow’s wife, and Doon Wong, Albert Chow’s business partner—were anti-Chiang in their leanings. New Yorkers picked Woodrow Chan, who ran as a KMT candidate, and William T.S. Wu, who despite his longtime KMT activities and rightist views cast himself as “unaffiliated.” Even these results suggested the growing disillusionment among certain KMT factions in the city: voters rejected the even more rightwing Kock Gee Lee, president of the Chiang mouthpiece Chinese Journal, in favor of Chan and Wu, who despite their support for Chiang were tied to the slightly more moderate San Min Chu I Youth Corps.58 When the Chinese American delegates arrived in Nanjing, the antiChiang members found considerable support for their views. Chiang Kaishek himself still wielded enough power to prevent any public opposition to his position as president and party leader. However, the National Assembly vented its anger at Chiang by snubbing his chosen vice presidential candidate, Sun Fo, in favor of Li Zongren. A liberal general from Guangxi

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Province, Li advocated eliminating corruption and factions from the KMT and pushing land reform to improve peasant living standards. After Li’s election, liberals in the KMT and members of the small parties alike began to focus on the general as a possible savior. J.K. Choy even reported to Dai-ming Lee that “all Kuomintang veterans in Nanking are disgusted with Chiang. His early death for the survival of the nation is widely hoped for by all thinking people.”59

The KMT and the 1948 American Presidential Election Unlike in prewar years, Chinese Americans were no longer the only sizable group concerned about China politics, because America’s role in China and the Chinese civil war now influenced US domestic politics to a considerable degree. By 1946, the Cold War had unquestionably begun, with the Soviet Union and the United States jockeying for position in Europe and the Middle East. The next year, Harry S. Truman laid out his “Truman Doctrine,” asserting that it “must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” especially communist insurgencies. Soon after, the president created the European Recovery Program, later called the “Marshall Plan,” which helped rebuild those areas of Europe not within the Soviet orbit. The question of China was trickier, for while the administration disliked the idea of a communist China, officials did not consider it a country of vital importance. As historian Warren I. Cohen has noted, “Although no American government ever took a stronger and more successful stand against Soviet imperialism, a Communist China was considered tolerable” and not a threat to US security. Still, the administration found the policy difficult to explain to much of the public, which sympathized with China and wartime ally Chiang Kai-shek and assumed the Truman Doctrine should apply to him.60 As anti-communist sentiment grew in the United States, Republican politicians used Truman’s tepid support for the Nationalist Chinese as a way to criticize the administration as “soft” on communism. Disgusted with KMT incompetence and corruption, the Truman administration in early 1948 cut aid to Chiang, who was already losing his grip on Manchuria. In response, Republican presidential hopeful Thomas Dewey derided Truman’s China policy and linked it to the deteriorating position of the Nationalists on the mainland. Generalissimo Chiang openly blamed Truman’s policies for battlefield defeats and hoped for a Dewey victory in No-

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vember. Nationalist officials and Chiang relatives within the United States also lobbied sympathetic legislators, demanding more money and support for the Nationalists.61 The Chiang regime’s attitude toward Truman helped foster a slow but definite political realignment in Chinese New York. After the war, the community’s Democrats reorganized themselves yet again, founding a new Chinese American Democratic organization based in Sing Kee’s Mott Street office. On the surface, the new group appeared to reflect the shifting dynamics of the community, especially the growing activism of its war veterans. Although longtime Democrats like Sing Kee, George Chintong, the Lee family, and James Typond all joined the group, the organization named as its leader Peter Fok-leung Woo, a young man active in the recently founded American Legion post. But Woo, like many other leading Democrats, was also a member of the On Leong Merchants Association. This tong affiliation, now suspect in KMT eyes because of Seeto Meetong’s activism, was a major reason the Chinese American Democrats’ effectiveness diminished in the new political environment. In addition, right-wing KMT members in New York distrusted President Truman for his lukewarm support of the Chiang regime, and consequently they viewed the Chinese Americans who supported him with contempt. This became apparent in the press: by 1948, George Chintong’s customary editorials in favor of Democratic candidates disappeared from the pages of the KMT-run Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, the paper for which he had formerly written. Still under the sway of moderates, however, the Daily avoided endorsing Dewey—yet another sign of the intraparty strife roiling the ideologically fragmented American KMT.62 The election and the China politics behind it fractured the CCBA-NY as well. After Koon Lai Loo became chairman of the group, it not only renounced its old ties to the Democratic Party but even repudiated the Roosevelt administration. Loo also openly proclaimed his hope for a Republican victory in the November 1948 presidential election and worked closely with longtime Chinese American Republican Wilbur Pyn to stump for Dewey. The move, and Loo’s denunciation not just of Truman but of Roosevelt, infuriated community Democrats. The political turmoil in Chinese New York grew so heated that less than a week before the presidential election, George Chintong distributed an open letter publicly accusing Loo of violating CCBA-NY rules by allowing local Republicans to run their campaign from a building the group owned.63 While Chiang Kai-shek and the CCBA-NY chairman backed Thomas Dewey, many of San Francisco’s KMT leaders supported President Truman.

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Despite the rumblings from Nanjing, Albert Chow, San Francisco Chinatown’s leading Democrat and an anti-Chiang KMT member, publicly affirmed his confidence in Truman’s leadership and his belief that Truman would win the election. In 1948, Chow and Doon Wong met with Truman in San Francisco, where the president briefly paused during his “whistlestop” campaign across America. While the men stayed in Truman’s hotel room to talk, Florence Chow, delegate to the Chinese National Assembly, took First Lady Bess Truman on a car ride through the city. Later that summer, Albert Chow, while serving on the executive committee of the US KMT’s general branch, also traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia as an alternate delegate and Truman loyalist. Sensing they could not thwart Chow, recent Chinese immigrants tied to the KMT tried instead to establish a Chinese American Republican Party organization in San Francisco with the primary purpose of supporting the faltering Chiang regime by electing Dewey president. Longtime Chinese American Republicans, most of them native-born moderates, successfully resisted the move, but tension between the two groups continued to simmer for a number of years.64 The Kuomintang was not the only political party unsuccessfully attempting to hold together its various factions in 1948. Truman’s own Democratic Party had also split, with civil rights, the Cold War, and a host of other issues dividing its members and leaders. Right-wing Southern Democrats left the party to form their own pro-segregation States’ Rights Party (the “Dixiecrats”), which nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president to protest President Truman’s civil rights initiatives. On the left, the upstart Progressive Party coalesced around former vice president Henry A. Wallace, whose campaign for the presidency initially attracted a large number of New Dealers and other liberals disgusted with Truman’s conduct of foreign policy.65 Much of the Chinese-language press paid close attention to Wallace’s bid, for it raised numerous issues of considerable interest to Chinese Americans. Wallace advocated American neutrality in China’s civil war, a controversial but not necessarily unpopular stand in a community where anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist sentiments ran deep. Furthermore, Wallace’s bid likely resonated in part because by 1948, many Chinese Americans themselves yearned for another option besides the communists or Chiang Kai-shek. Wallace opposed racial discrimination and supported fairer immigration laws at a time when both the national Democratic and Republican parties equivocated on these issues. And he claimed to be the legitimate heir to Franklin Roosevelt, whose support for exclusion repeal,

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war against Japan, and, through his wife, a housing project for San Francisco’s Chinatown, had made the late president incredibly popular among Chinese Americans around the country.66 Less obviously, Wallace’s desire for a social democratic future for America likely resonated with many older Chinese Americans who had a similar hope for China. All China’s leading political parties, including the KMT, envisioned at least partial state ownership and control of significant portions of the economy. Sun Yat-sen, the Guangdong revolutionary so revered that his portrait hung in almost every Chinese school and community center in America, asserted before his 1925 death that “China must not only regulate private capital, but she must also develop state capital” in order to avoid “the expansion of private capital and the emergence of a great wealthy class with the consequent inequality in society.” The various groups that made up the “Third Force” small parties in China held an array of similarly social democratic views, while the CCP of course argued for a complete dictatorship of the proletariat and the eventual destruction of capitalism and its vestiges. Such ideas were hardly abstractions, at least for many older Chinese Americans. Thousands of them remembered the excitement and revolutionary fervor of 1920s Guangdong, with its KMT-CCP united front, peasant associations, and strong labor unions.67 By mid-1948, the Progressive Party thus attracted a small, passionate group of Chinese American supporters, around fifty of whom attended the party’s convention in Philadelphia in July. By that time, Democrats, Republicans, and much of the press had begun to accuse the Progressive Party of being a Communist front, a charge that eventually cost Wallace most of his liberal supporters. An inquisitive Japanese American reporter found that Chinese Americans who attended the Progressive Party convention refused to reveal their names; some were neither citizens nor even legal residents. Several of these people were actual communists, since the Progressive Party attracted a significant number.68 The most public and passionate Wallace supporters in Chinese American communities tended to be leftists rather than liberals. In New York, the leftist China Daily News endorsed Wallace wholeheartedly; its editors were among the few in New York’s Chinatown who did so openly. In fact, Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance members and China Daily News staffers made up the entire Chinatown Wallace for President Committee. In a community with so few voters, even the China Daily News could not say for sure just how many of the city’s Chinese Americans cast ballots for Wallace.69 In San Francisco, the Chinese American Wallace club executive board similarly consisted of men known in the community as left-wing supporters of the

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Chinese Communist Party, such as Francis Leong, Lawrence Lee, and Leong Thick Hing. Lacking an outlet such as the China Daily News, they instead convinced Gilbert Woo to publish Leong Thick Hing’s passionate defense of Wallace in Woo’s new liberal, noncommunist newspaper Chinese-Pacific Weekly.70 In San Francisco, where better statistics are available for Chinese Americans, the election appears to have turned on local as much as international issues, suggesting the political maturation of a community increasingly pulling away from China politics. Despite Albert Chow’s fame and influence, the Chinese American Democrats lost Chinatown for the first time since the mid-1930s. The final vote tally—Truman, 42 percent; Dewey, 48 percent; Wallace, 10 percent—did not reflect a distinctly rightward trend in the community, however. Of course, Chinatown conservatives who supported the Chiang regime backed Dewey under the assumption that he would offer the Nationalists more assistance than Truman. But many liberals and moderates in the city just wanted the civil war to end, and at least some blamed Truman’s reluctant aid to Chiang for prolonging the conflict. Nor could the president win adherents with his social welfare policies; San Francisco Chinatown still awaited its long-deferred housing project, while the end of wartime production forced many Chinese Americans back into low-wage service jobs. The most significant issue was probably immigration. Despite the promises of Attorney General Clark, the INS continued to treat incoming Chinese wives and relatives with suspicion and contempt. Few Chinese Americans easily forgot the immigration scandal of mid1948, when Leong Bick Ha hanged herself and Wong Loy tried to jump from the Sansome Street detention facility. Congressman Franck Havenner, who fought for Chinese American immigration rights, outpolled Truman by a wide margin, winning three times as many Chinese American votes as his Republican opponent, William Maillard. Under these circumstances, Thomas Dewey’s surprisingly strong showing in the community did not demonstrate a resurgent conservatism there; rather, it reflected anger at the Truman administration and probably support for Earl Warren. The popular liberal Republican and California governor was Dewey’s running mate that year, and his centrist image appealed to the largely centrist Chinese American community of San Francisco.71

End of an Era Students of American politics remember the 1948 election for its surprise ending. Despite the confidence of most pollsters, who predicted a Thomas

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Dewey victory, Harry Truman defeated his opponent and returned to the White House. Over at the Chinese Journal, Chiang Kai-shek’s mouthpiece in New York, editors who had hyped the election’s importance quietly buried its results in the back pages. In San Francisco, Chinese American Republicans found solace in the fact that their candidate had at least won a plurality of their community’s votes. While relieved at the election’s outcome, Democrat Albert Chow expressed regret that he had failed to deliver Chinatown to his friend Truman and complained to reporters that Chinese Americans needed to learn how to unite in order to advance an agenda that included civil rights and the delayed housing project. It was an ironic comment for a man deeply involved in the factionalized world of KMT politics.72 The 1948 election did not resolve the biggest political disputes within Chinese American communities, but it gave opponents of the pro-Chiang KMT greater influence and leverage. Few in the American KMT wanted a Communist victory, but as the People’s Liberation Army neared Beijing, the centrist KMT’s disenchantment with Chiang crested. Within days of Truman’s victory, Albert Chow and Doon Wong sent a telegram to the White House urging “immediate aid and support from our country [to] stem the red tide engulfing China.” However, they did not explicitly endorse more money and assistance for Chiang Kai-shek himself. By November, rumors were swirling around Nanjing that Chiang planned to resign his post as president, a move that would make Li Zongren the ROC’s leader. Chow and Wong almost certainly knew of these developments and saw American aid as a way to sustain the Nationalist government until the transfer of power to Li had taken place. Supporters of Chiang fought back, but they faced an increasingly hostile administration and a Chinese American public weary of the war.73 As a result, the year and a half after the 1948 election was a time of considerable political openness and ferment in the Chinese American communities of New York and San Francisco. The Second Red Scare, while already a major force in American society and politics, remained relatively mild in Chinese America through 1948. The People’s Republic of China had not yet become a reality, while the Truman administration openly expressed its exasperation with the Chiang regime. Certainly, as historian Him Mark Lai has shown, some Chinese Americans were beginning to feel pressure from US authorities by this point; still, most who faced persecution in the early part of the Second Red Scare generally did so because of their association with the US Communist Party or with leftist groups in America—not because of their activities on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.74 The

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Second Red Scare, in other words, focused mainly at this time on the Soviet Union and its alleged influence in the United States. Indeed, for many Chinese Americans, the two years between the 1948 election and China’s late 1950 entrance into the Korean War were ones of cautious promise and hope. People of Chinese ancestry were making slow but steady progress as they sought better jobs and homes in postwar America. They also managed to preserve many of the immigration privileges they gained right after the conflict. And the Chiang regime’s stumbling and incompetence eroded the power of the most right-wing of the traditional elites in Chinese American communities, creating more and more space for liberal and moderate voices and different views. Already apparent in San Francisco by 1948, this shift in political climate slowly affected New York City as well. Even as the red scare intensified, the influence of Chiang’s Chinese supporters in America seemed very much in decline. Between 1949 and early 1950, the Truman Administration showed little interest in propping up the Generalissimo any longer, especially after he fled to Taiwan. Truman’s decision to release the China White Paper in mid-1949 further exposed the strained relationship between the United States and the Nationalists.75 In this atmosphere, the American KMT splintered even further, while a growing number of second-generation Chinese Americans simply refused to become involved in China politics at all. Unfortunately, they could not wholly avoid the domestic implications of the deepening Cold War, especially after the Chinese Communist Party took over the Chinese mainland in late 1949 and entered the Korean War against the United States in 1950. China politics and Chinese American politics, increasingly separate by 1948, were poised to merge again.

THREE

The Resurgence of China Politics

By early 1949, the Chinese and American political landscapes had both changed dramatically. In the United States, Harry Truman won reelection to the presidency against considerable odds and despite deep rifts in his own party; in 1949 he also began a gradual disengagement from the Kuomintang (KMT) regime. In China, Chiang Kai-shek “retired” from the Chinese presidency in January 1949 after the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) captured Beijing. Chiang’s rival, Vice President Li Zongren, became acting president of the Republic of China (ROC), but Chiang never really ceded power. Instead, he retreated with most of his army and China’s treasury to Taiwan. After the Communists won the civil war, Chiang’s agents and Li Zongren’s allies in the US KMT competed for American support and financial and military assistance. The activities of Chiang’s supporters and his foes in the US KMT dragged the Chinese American population, whether willing or not, into the multilateral struggle to shape China’s future and American policy toward it. Li Zongren’s brief ascent to the ROC presidency and the Communists’ eventual victory in the civil war upended the status quo in Chinese New York and enhanced the influence of centrists and liberals in the San Francisco Chinese American community. The eighteen months between Chiang’s retirement and the outbreak of the Korean War was thus a period of political ferment. Conservatives’ attempts to suppress dissent, never fully successful before, now gave way to the kinds of open discussion and freewheeling debate increasingly absent in mainstream America during the Second Red Scare. At the same time, though, outsiders began to play a more important role in shaping Chinese American politics. At the national level, the “China Lobby,” a group of American legislators, private citizens, and Chinese Nationalists, red-baited the State Department, rejected any

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US relationship with the PRC, and urged the use of KMT troops in Korea and even the escalation of the Korean War into China.1 In Chinese American communities, their ground troops were the scores of Nationalists who streamed into the United States as the KMT lost its hold on the mainland. Upper-class Chinese living in America had long kept their distance from their working-class countrymen, and the newest arrivals rarely settled in Chinatowns, either. Still, these exiles quickly attempted to meddle in Chinese American politics, a tendency most pronounced in New York City, where many Nationalists found refuge.2 Once the Korean War began and the new People’s Republic of China (PRC) entered the conflict, the Truman Administration moved to support the Chiang regime, indirectly empowering its representatives in America at the same time. The KMT government on Taiwan immediately sought to reassert Nationalist power in Chinese American communities and to exploit growing public anger at the PRC and its policies. In particular, many Chinese Americans expressed dismay over the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) land reform campaign and the tone of letters they received from relatives on the mainland. As the Korean War raged, numerous people of Chinese ancestry also publicly voiced support for the Chiang regime, fearful of the consequences of questioning a US ally. Yet in Chinese American communities, opposition to the Communists did not equal deep and sustained support for the Nationalist government, whose recent past few could forget. By 1951, many Chinese Americans had grown disgusted with all of China’s political factions and frustrated at the meddling of outsiders in their communities. At the same time, the PRC’s entry into the Korean War forced those who had not already done so to accept the idea that their futures now lay in America. This realization, together with widespread unease over the policies of both the ROC and the PRC, resulted in a political situation as much in flux in 1951 as it had been in 1949.3

The Nationalist Defeat on the Mainland By April 1949, Chinese Communist forces were massing on the north bank of the Yangzi River, readying for their push into south China, while Li Zongren struggled to mount a coherent resistance to them. After Chiang Kai-shek’s January 1949 “retirement” from the ROC presidency, he had fled to Taiwan, taking the nation’s treasury and 200,000 KMT troops with him and leaving Li Zongren to continue the fight against the advancing PLA. Behind the scenes, however, Chiang never really surrendered power. Journalist Doak Barnett, who covered the Nationalists’ retreat, noted that Chiang

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purposely withheld money and troops from Li, who thus found it impossible to fight the advancing Communists effectively. Chiang undercut Li in order to insure that the acting president could not emerge as a strong anticommunist rival and challenge Chiang’s own position as an indispensable leader. Chiang “has openly proclaimed his belief that a third world war not only will come, but has, in effect, already started,” Barnett observed from Taipei, Taiwan, in late 1949. “He seems confident that he will ride the crest of Western military advances in an eventual Soviet-American struggle and will be reinstated as ruler of a non-Communist China.”4 As the ROC collapsed on the Chinese mainland, ordinary Chinese Americans expressed some concern about the Communists’ ideology but far more about the civil war’s impact on their relatives. After the PLA crossed the Yangzi River, the Nationalists moved their capital to Guangzhou in Guangdong Province, the ancestral home of the vast majority of Chinese Americans. The Nationalists’ move not only worsened the problems of inflation and unrealistic exchange rates in the Pearl River Delta but also threatened to bring the war south. Most Chinese Americans and their families in China had little or no experience living under Communist rule but plenty of resentment about Nationalist corruption, which many no longer saw as the lesser of two evils. So while a New York Times reporter claimed that Chinese Americans in New York overwhelmingly favored the Nationalists, the San Francisco Chronicle contended that “opinion appear[s] to be about equally divided between the Nationalists and the Communists” in that city’s Chinatown. In addition to community leftists, a good number of small importers and businesspeople in San Francisco hoped for a CCP victory, which they believed would stabilize China’s currency and improve trading conditions.5 While CCBA chairmen and KMT members in San Francisco and New York remained loyal to the ROC, the tug-of-war between Chiang Kai-shek and Li Zongren created tensions in community leadership circles. In April 1949, as Li Zongren attempted to begin peace negotiations with the Communists, the major CCBAs across the United States sent frantic telegrams urging Li to refuse to talk to the Chinese Communist Party unless the PLA stopped massing troops north of the Yangzi; in July, the same groups cabled both Chiang Kai-shek and Li Zongren, pledging to support the KMT government. The dual telegrams revealed the American party membership’s fidelity but also its uncertainty about who was actually leading the ROC at any given moment.6 Chiang’s resignation from the presidency emboldened moderate KMT elements as well as noncommunist, non-KMT Chinese Americans across

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the country. A January 1949 forum about China’s political situation vividly illustrated the effect of Chiang’s resignation on the New York community. Hosted by the leftist Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, the meeting featured a number of local Chinese American communist sympathizers, including China Daily News staffers and a member of the Chinese Youth Club. However, centrist noncommunist speakers, including the liberal journalists Y.K. Chu of the China Post and Yun Shan Yu of the China Tribune, took part as well. Unexpectedly, so did Koon Lai Loo, the chairman of the CCBA-NY and a member of the Chinese Hongmen Party. Loo’s participation probably surprised the many Chinese New Yorkers who remembered the CCBANY’s feud with the Laundry Alliance in the 1930s. In addition, Loo had taken part just two months earlier in a Thomas Dewey rally at which China Lobby members ridiculed the China policy of both Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt. For such reasons, historian Renqiu Yu has characterized Loo’s new friendliness towards New York’s CCP sympathizers as an “opportunistic act in which he sought to arrange for his protection after power changed hands in China.” However, Loo’s speech suggests more complex motives. Praising the Laundry Alliance forum, he claimed that those who had dared to speak their minds in the past had faced “red-baiting from the reactionary party, but now that Chiang Kai-shek has overthrown himself, the people can speak freely and the overseas compatriots can speak freely.” In these few words, Loo hinted at the pressures he had experienced and the kinds of tensions bubbling even within CCBA-NY, the conservative establishment in the community.7 By mid-January 1949, Chiang Kai-shek’s impending resignation also emboldened San Francisco’s KMT moderates, especially US KMT executive committee member and ardent Democrat Albert Chow. With Chiang’s departure imminent, Chow devised a plan to seek “official status” from the Truman administration in order to travel to China as the president’s “personal goodwill envoy to assure the Chinese people that America will not forget them in their hour of need.” Chow’s motives were multifaceted. On the one hand, he certainly welcomed the personal prestige that such a mission would earn him; furthermore, as an immigration broker, Chow also stood to benefit financially from an undertaking that would remind potential clients of his connections and influence. Chow’s plan also had political implications, for the Chiang government and many in the rightist KMT factions in America had openly backed Thomas Dewey’s presidential candidacy. Chow sought to exploit their losing bet and enhance the power of the anti-Chiang KMT moderates by linking them to the president.8 Chow greatly misjudged the administration’s priorities. According to

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historian John W. Garver, “By early 1949, the Truman administration had concluded that the United States should disengage from the Chinese civil war and the Nationalist Chinese regime, ‘let the dust settle,’ and then attempt to work out some sort of accommodation with the new Communist China.” Under the circumstances, Truman’s staff had no use for Chow’s plan, which involved convincing the Chinese people that the United States would not allow the mainland to fall to the CCP. In reality, such a collapse was exactly what the Truman administration expected and a development to which officials had already resigned themselves.9

Domestic Challenges: Revision of Immigration Laws Despite the administration’s lack of interest in Chow’s plan, he and others who wanted to tie the KMT’s moderates to the Democratic Party received another opportunity to do so when Congress considered new immigration legislation in the spring of 1949. Beginning in 1947, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) had pushed for a bill that would place Japanese and Chinese aliens on an equal footing. Not only could Chinese aliens naturalize after 1943, but under the 1946 Chinese Alien Wives of American Citizens Act, Chinese American citizen men could bring in China-born wives as non-quota immigrants, a huge advantage given the tiny Chinese quota. Chinese American activists sought and won this status in large part by working with liberal California Democrats, as discussed in chapter 2. JACL lobbyist Mike Masaoka took a different approach by collaborating with conservative Republican legislators, including some who agreed that American immigration law hurt the nation’s image in Asia but simultaneously feared any increase in Asian immigrants. In early 1949, Masaoka ally Walter Judd, a Minnesota Republican, brought a new immigration bill to the floor of the House for a vote. The legislation, had it succeeded, would have given all Asians the right to naturalize and would have set up quotas for each Asian nation. However, Republican conservatives demanded that the bill place the alien wives of Chinese American citizens back on a quota basis.10 The new bill threatened to revive latent tensions between the two largest Asian American ethnic groups, who now began to complain about each other’s supposedly undue influence on legislators. While JACL lobbyist Mike Masaoka preferred not to undermine the rights Chinese Americans had won in 1946, he was willing to sacrifice the non-quota status of Chinese spouses if doing so gained naturalization and immigration rights for Japanese aliens. In a private message to the JACL leadership, Masaoka

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blamed Chinese Americans themselves for the threat to their status: “Our understanding is that the Chinese so abused this privilege of bringing in their wives (their practices have been categorized as a racket in some circles) that an official of the Immigration and Naturalization Service recommended these changes.” Rather ironically for a lobbyist, Masaoka also complained that “Chinese particularly have created quite a problem . . . [by] retaining lobbyists in Washington” to fight the legislation. While the JACL did not want to take anyone’s rights away, he suggested, its goals were more important than the status of the Chinese. In response, a Chinese Nationalist Daily reporter deemed the Judd bill a product of “the hundred thousand Japanese American citizens living in the United States [who] are raging just like a wildfire.”11 Chinese American attempts to oppose the Judd bill also revealed the distinct political cultures of Chinese New York and San Francisco and the impact of the rightist KMT factions’ declining fortunes in both cities. In 1945, when KMT official Ting-wing Chu was chairman of the CCBA-NY, the organization did little to fight for the Chinese Alien Wives of American Citizens Act, leaving it to San Francisco’s “national” branch. In 1946, new chairman Mo-arm Kong made a public statement in favor of the law, but he died just weeks later. Under his successor, the pro-Chiang Woodrow Chan, the CCBA-NY focused mainly on the situation in China; in early 1948, Chan resigned from his post and left the United States for a number of months to serve as an overseas Chinese delegate to China’s National Assembly. Even when Chan was still the organization’s chairman, Chinese American veterans, not the CCBA-NY, became the primary proponents of immigration rights in Chinese New York. With the influence of rightist KMT factions declining in the city, however, new CCBA-NY chairman Koon Lai Loo sought to rebuild the reputation of his organization as a defender of the community. When the Judd bill reached the floor, the CCBA-NY started a mass campaign to raise money to contest it. The organization also dispatched to testify in front of Congress the lawyer Edward Hong, a World War Two veteran and naturalized citizen who served as the CCBANY’s counsel.12 Chinese Americans on the West Coast, especially in San Francisco, led the campaign against the bill, demonstrating a degree of political sophistication and influence that far outshone the acumen of their New York peers. After members of the House, including many supporters of the 1946 Chinese Alien Wives of American Citizens Act, voted to pass the Judd bill, West Coast Chinese Americans mobilized their resources to stop the legislation in the Senate. Participants in the campaign in the House and Senate in-

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cluded a range of groups, from the Chinese War Veterans Association to the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. The Chinese American Citizens Alliance sent its national leader, the Los Angeles lawyer You-chung Hong, to testify against the bill in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Chinese Times journalist and CACA San Francisco leader Henry Lem wrote to members of the committee as well. At the same time, San Francisco’s CCBA retained its primary leadership role in the fight. Board members Albert Chow and his business partner Doon Wong again represented the group as they had in 1946, traveling from San Francisco to New York and on to Washington, D.C., to meet with members of Congress and raise funds to challenge the Judd bill.13 The fight over the Judd bill not only exposed the different immigration agendas of Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans but also showed how China politics had begun to distort the objectives of community leaders tied to the rightist KMT factions. The overriding goal of Chiang

3.1 Leading members of San Francisco’s Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association sit for a photo in 1943. Among those shown are Doon Wong (seated fifth from the left) and his business partner Albert Chow (seated at the top right side under the Republic of China flag), who in the late 1940s lobbied for Chinese American immigration rights and led the anti-Chiang Kai-shek faction in the local Kuomintang. (Courtesy San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)

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Kai-shek’s backers in Chinese American communities was preserving American support for the Chinese Nationalists. Ordinary Chinese Americans, on the other hand, saw favorable immigration laws as their most important objective. In the late 1940s, these aims publicly conflicted as Chiang and his supporters in the KMT forged ties to many American politicians who opposed increases in Chinese immigration, including Walter Judd. Indeed, Judd believed that Albert Chow, the well-known immigration broker, was “engaged in a rather lucrative racket promoting illegal immigration,” and the congressman secured the cooperation of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., to try to stop Chinese Americans from lobbying to thwart his bill. Chow and other opponents of the legislation refused to back down, however.14 The embassy’s inability to silence Chinese American critics of the Judd bill showed the continuing decline of the power of rightist KMT factions across the United States. Demonstrating the increased freedom of speech in Chinese New York after Chiang Kai-shek’s resignation, the moderate KMT Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York seemed to regain its voice and its old politics. Despite Judd’s support for the Nationalist government, the paper praised the involvement of West Coast Chinese Americans with ties to the Democratic Party in the fight against the Minnesota Republican’s legislation. Albert Chow and Doon Wong’s visit to New York City during their fundraising tour further highlighted the political ferment and tension that the immigration battle and Chiang’s resignation created. Koon Lai Loo used the opportunity to publicly align himself with the two men; despite Loo’s onetime advocacy of Thomas Dewey, he now welcomed Truman’s most famous Chinese American friend and applauded Chow and Wong’s work on behalf of Chinese American rights. The Chinese Nationalist Daily covered the men’s visit in detail, while the rightist, pro-Chiang Chinese Journal appears to have largely ignored it. Most of the welcoming party for Chow and Wong also consisted of people aligned more or less with the anti-Chiang factions of the KMT.15 By the end of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the Judd bill, California’s Chinese American activists had succeeded in convincing senators to restore the non-quota status of Chinese alien wives. A May 1949 Readers Digest article dubbed Mike Masaoka “Washington’s Most Successful Lobbyist” for his legislative triumphs; in reality, Chinese American opponents of the Judd bill thwarted the JACL representative and forced him to change tactics. In March 1949, Masaoka informed JACL leaders that the organization’s strategy on the Judd bill would be to “take no strong position on any of the amendments,” especially the one to restore the status of the

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Chinese. But after energetic Chinese American lobbying, several senators, including liberal California Democrat Sheridan Downey, indicated their strong support for just such an amendment. An embarrassed Masaoka quickly reversed course, publicly backing the amendment in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings and arguing that “our Chinese friends” should not lose their rights. Sheridan Downey seems to have brokered a deal between Masaoka and William Jack Chow, who testified immediately after the JACL representative spoke. Chow echoed the spirit of Masaoka’s testimony, voicing his own belief that the Japanese “justly deserve to be granted the privilege to become citizens if they are not already so.”16 While sympathetic senators helped bridge the divide between Japanese American and Chinese American activists, the Judd bill never reached the floor of the Senate. Two years earlier, the Senate Judiciary Committee had begun a comprehensive study of the nation’s immigration system, and in early 1950, the committee halted consideration of the Judd bill to begin work on a much larger overhaul of the nation’s immigration system. In the meantime, however, the special status of Chinese women under the law remained safe, enhancing the stature of the anti-Chiang KMT members who helped protect it, especially Albert Chow and Doon Wong.17

Chinese America and the Nationalist Defeat In spite of the success of political activists like Albert Chow, the Communists’ victory in the civil war threatened to undermine the influence of KMT moderates in the United States. Much of the American party, especially on the West Coast, may have disliked Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership, but members also opposed communism and supported preserving the KMT’s singleparty rule of China. By the fall of 1949, the CCP controlled most of China from Manchuria south to Fujian, while the KMT government, now headquartered in Guangdong, clung to just a few parts of southern and southwestern China. Although the civil war continued, on October 1, 1949, CCP leader Mao Zedong declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Less than two weeks later, the KMT government abandoned Guangdong and fled to Sichuan Province in the far southwest. The United States did not move to recognize the new PRC government, yet leaders also did not publicly reject such a possibility. For almost a year, Secretary of State Dean Acheson had, according to historian Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, tried to “minimize U.S. responsibility for Kuomintang fortunes.” In addition, as the civil war dragged on, he chose not to shutter US diplomatic outposts in newly Communist areas, leaving open the pos-

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sibility of future American recognition of a CCP regime. Just two months before the founding of the PRC, President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson issued the China White Paper, a compilation of secret memos, cables, dispatches, and similar documents meant to show that if Chiang Kaishek lost the civil war, it was his own fault, not Truman’s. Almost simultaneously, Acheson convinced the Joint Chiefs of Staff to accept his plan to allow Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek had retreated with most of the KMT armed forces, to fall to the PLA when the time came.18 The gradual US retreat from the KMT regime further emboldened Chinese American leftists, who were already benefiting from the more open atmosphere in their communities after Chiang’s January 1949 resignation. In San Francisco, a group of leftists, both Chinese American and white, rented the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Hall on October 9, 1949, and met there to celebrate the founding of “New China” with speeches and a performance of the “Yellow River Cantata.” The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance held a similar celebration in New York City the same day. On October 10, which was the thirty-eighth anniversary of the 1911 anti-Qing revolution, the Laundry Alliance, the Chinese Youth Club, and the China Daily News raised the PRC flag in solidarity with the new regime.19 KMT members across the political spectrum responded to these displays with vitriol and sometimes violence. Officials of New York’s Chinese Consulate threatened to take legal action against those flying the PRC flag in the city. In San Francisco, the CCP-KMT rivalry turned bloody, showing that many KMT members who opposed Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership were as unwilling to tolerate dissent as the Generalissimo himself. According to KMT activist Pei Chi Liu, on October 9, 1949, “some of our people went inside [the CACA hall] and beat [the celebrants], you know, knocked them down.” The group of men who burst into the hall, spraying blue dye on the crowd, ripping down the PRC flag, and attacking attendees, were members of two of the community’s reliably pro-KMT tongs, the Bing Kung Tong and the Hip Sing Tong. Pei Chi Liu’s close collaborator and KMT colleague Doon Wong was head of the Bing Kung Tong and almost certainly ordered the attack. The next day, posters appeared in San Francisco Chinatown listing fifteen Chinese American PRC supporters marked for death and offering a $5,000 reward to those willing to carry out the sentences.20 Despite such violence, even the angriest KMT members could not stifle community dissent in San Francisco or New York. In the West Coast city, three years of civil war had eroded support for the KMT inside many community institutions, from the various tongs to the CCBA. One of the more

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powerful members of the San Francisco CCBA’s board of directors, Joe Yuey of the Suey Sing Association, worked with Wen Fu, chairman of the CCBA’s Ying On Association, to protect several people on the KMT death list until the furor died down. KMT members allegedly placed the liberal journalist Gilbert Woo on the original list of those marked for death, even though Woo neither attended the October 9 celebration nor wholeheartedly embraced the leftists who did. Fortunately, Woo had spent part of the evening of the 9th with a good friend who was also a KMT member, listening to the man’s anger over the loss of the mainland. Woo’s friend quickly convinced the local KMT plotters to remove the journalist’s name from the death list. Still, some in the KMT, including Pei Chi Liu, argued that Woo was a communist sympathizer because he printed accurate war news in his paper. Sensing the need for further protection, Woo joined the Ying On Association, while his brother, the printer Norbert Woo, chose the Suey Sing Association. The willingness of the two groups to accept as members those whom the KMT targeted merely reaffirmed the declining influence of the party.21 KMT members’ inability to fully suppress expressions of support for the new regime in either New York or San Francisco also showed how the PRC’s existence and US government’s ambivalence about it were undercutting the American Kuomintang’s power. In late 1950, the FBI and the INS began working with KMT leaders to target community leftists; a year earlier, though, the Truman administration’s attitude toward the Chiang regime meant that KMT activists could rely only on their own power and slipping influence to suppress dissent. In New York, the Chinese Consulate asked New York’s mayor and police commissioner to remove the PRC flags flying over the Chinese Youth Club, the China Daily News, and the Laundry Alliance, but local officials refused to comply. Among those requesting police action was pro-Chiang KMT official Woodrow Chan, the former chairman of the CCBA-NY, but current chairman Koon Lai Loo remained neutral. Neither the On Leong Merchants Association, already estranged from the pro-Chiang KMT, nor the Hip Sing Tong, acted to suppress pro-PRC community members in New York. While the San Francisco KMT did use tong men to rough up the community’s pro-PRC celebration, it could not stop two separate anti-KMT newspapers from beginning publication in 1949. The staff of the first, China Weekly, included CCP members such as Henry Tsoi and was outspokenly leftist; the second, Chung Sai Yat Po, had existed since 1900, but its publisher sold it in 1949 to a new group of investors who included Joe Yuey. Soon after, its editorial policy became pro-PRC, al-

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though not to the same extent as the China Weekly. The FBI did keep watch on PRC sympathizers and leftists in San Francisco and New York but took no further action, much to the frustration of ROC supporters.22

Mission to Chongqing: KMT Moderates in America and Li Zongren Despite the dissent roiling Chinese America, San Francisco’s CCBA dispatched Albert Chow to meet with both Chiang Kai-shek and Li Zongren just days after the October 9 beatings at the CACA hall. Although Chow may have known beforehand about KMT members’ plans to break up the leftists’ celebration, he seems to have played no role in the affair. Since he owed his prestige as much to his involvement in Democratic Party politics as his position in traditional organizations and the KMT, he would have jeopardized his standing by participating in political violence. Still, the incident and his new instructions from the CCBA put him in a strange position. Unlike earlier in the year, Chow now understood that the Truman administration had no plans to intervene to save the ROC—indeed, that the United States might soon recognize the PRC as the legitimate government of China, just as the celebrants at the CACA hall had. As a leader of the US KMT, Chow still held out hope that the ROC would survive and receive American assistance. And his orders from the CCBA involved traveling not only to Chongqing to meet with Li Zongren, but also to Taiwan to meet with Chiang Kai-shek, whose leadership Chow did not support. It was an awkward mission.23 Chow flew first to Taiwan, where the “retired” Chiang had fled earlier in the year. During Chow’s short stay in Taipei, he and his wife, Florence, presented Chiang with a decorative sword the CCBA had raised funds to commission. The organization engraved the sword handle with the words “Suppress the rebellion and build the nation” and included a scroll for the retired president that read, confusingly, “President Chiang of the Chinese Republic.” Despite the flowery language and ceremonial aspects of Chow’s visit, behind closed doors he spoke to Chiang with uncommon frankness about the failures of the Generalissimo’s administration and the need to hand over his power to Li Zongren. Cognizant of Chow’s supposed influence with President Truman, Chiang offered little response to the American’s scolding, merely coughing and murmuring “so, ahem.”24 After leaving Taipei, Albert Chow joined Li Zongren in Chongqing, the Nationalists’ capital during World War Two and now one of their last redoubts. Chow likely took much greater pleasure in presenting Li Zongren

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with his ceremonial sword, but the feeling was fleeting. By mid-November, Communist forces were closing in on the southwest, Li’s stronghold; as the situation deteriorated, Chow, Li, and Li’s entourage flew from Chongqing to Chengdu and soon afterwards to Kunming in Yunnan Province. Two weeks later, they fled to Hong Kong as the PLA closed in.25 Li’s escape, and his rejection of surrender to the communists or collaboration with Chiang, provided the moderates in the American KMT a platform both for continuing their anti-Chiang advocacy and for keeping alive hope for the future of the imperiled ROC. Plagued by stomach ulcers, Li decided to travel to New York for treatment and then return to Hainan Island, still in KMT hands, to launch a campaign to retake the mainland. Broadcasting the position of KMT moderates in the United States, Albert Chow accompanied Li from Hong Kong to San Francisco and then on to New York. He also gave an interview in which he described Li in glowing terms and Chiang in less flattering ones: I think Chiang is personally honest. But he has been surrounded by corruption. I think the people of China have made it pretty clear to Chiang they don’t want him back. But Chiang has not retired. He still heads the Kuomintang party which runs the Nationalist government.

Expressing a sentiment widespread among ordinary Chinese Americans, he also criticized Madame Chiang’s relatives for holing up in New York with the sole intention of “making money.”26 Even leaders affiliated with rightist KMT factions in New York publicly welcomed Li. The old general at least represented resistance to the Communists, even if his differences with Chiang were well known. In this way, he became a beacon for the many Chinese New Yorkers, both conservatives and moderates, unwilling to embrace the new regime. After Li emerged from surgery at a New York hospital, an array of politically diverse leaders, from Chinese American veterans’ group head Jack Non Li to On Leong Merchants Association members to pro-Chiang US KMT board member Kock Gee Lee, visited his bedside.27 Behind the scenes, however, Chiang’s agents in the United States were already working to undermine Li Zongren’s prestige and standing. After arriving in New York, Li released a statement through ROC Ambassador V.K. Wellington Koo clarifying that his visit to the United States was personal and would not involve meeting with President Truman or discussing aid to China. In reality, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had already informed the president that Li was coming to the United States

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in part to convince Truman to give him rather than Chiang the unspent $75 million Congress appropriated for China aid in September 1949. Aware that Ambassador Koo was a Chiang loyalist determined to channel all funds to the Taiwan regime, Li knew that he could not expect the diplomat’s assistance in his bid for the $75 million. Indeed, Koo and his allies rushed to undercut Li in whatever way possible. While Li recuperated from surgery at a rented house in the Bronx, he and his aide Kan Chiehhou began publicly criticizing Chiang’s leadership and duplicity. Chiang Kai-shek’s brother-in-law H.H. Kung and Hu Shih, a famous scholar and a former Chinese ambassador to the United States, quickly called on Li to pressure him to stay silent. Other Chiang loyalists flooded the general with telegrams condemning him for refusing to step down in favor of the “retired” president; one even delivered to him a handwritten letter from Li’s close comrade General Pai Chung-hsi, urging him to resign or to travel at once to Taiwan.28 Meanwhile, the general’s moderate KMT allies in the United States struggled to thwart the maneuvering of the Chiang loyalists and to help Li achieve American recognition and aid. In January 1950, President Truman publicly announced that the United States would not intervene to prevent the Communist government from invading Taiwan. Still, Chinese American anti-communist opponents of Chiang held out hope that after Li recovered, he could secure American backing, travel to Hainan Island, and fight on. Once Li Zongren’s recuperation was well underway, Albert and William Jack Chow secured an appointment with President Truman to lay the groundwork for a possible future meeting between the two leaders. Shortly after, the PRC and the Soviet Union formally forged an alliance, stalling any possibility of immediate US government recognition of the new Chinese regime.29 The delay heartened backers of Li, for it kept alive their hope that American officials might eventually channel aid to the acting president. After the Chow meeting, Chiang loyalists scrambled desperately to find some way to keep Li Zongren from meeting with President Truman. In late February, Secretary of State Acheson invited Li to join Truman in an informal March 2 lunch. “According to traditional diplomatic practice, President Truman’s invitation to me was supposed to go through the Chinese embassy, but Ambassador Koo tried to stop this,” Li charged years later. “He chose this moment to fly to Miami for a ‘vacation.’” Sensing a problem, Acheson had another invitation delivered to Li’s aide, Kan Chieh-hou, and when Li accepted, Ambassador Koo returned to Washington immedi-

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ately to participate in the lunch—or in Li’s opinion, to spy on him. Unable to stop Li and Truman from meeting, Chiang Kai-shek himself now moved to undermine Li’s legitimacy and authority: on March 1, 1950, Chiang formally resumed the presidency of the Republic of China, an act that Li declared unconstitutional but was powerless to stop.30 The Truman-Li luncheon, which proceeded in spite of Chiang’s move, fueled speculation that the US government would try to assist anticommunist Chinese other than Chiang in order to undermine the new PRC. In a press conference the morning of the event, Truman mentioned that Li was coming because he was the “acting President of China.” When a reporter asked, “What happened to Chiang Kai-shek?” Truman replied, “I am not in communication with Chiang. I can’t tell you,” and refused further comment. Still, at the lunch, Li did not succeed in wresting any money from the administration. Instead, as he later recalled, Truman “advised me to tolerate the injustice and to keep in touch. . . . I realized that there was nothing more he could do for the Chinese government at the present moment; he had to recognize the fait accompli in Taiwan.”31 The highly publicized informal luncheon was both the apex of the antiChiang KMT faction’s influence and its last hurrah. Chow and his allies knew that the only hope for Li Zongren was the US government’s continued desire for a noncommunist alternative to Chiang. Two days after the lunch, the State Department publicly accepted the ROC government’s claim that Chiang was now the nation’s president again. An even greater setback to Li’s cause occurred when the PLA began its campaign to take Hainan Island just days after the Truman lunch. By mid-April, PLA soldiers were marching on the capital of Hoihow (Haikou), while Nationalist leaders fled and left half their army behind them. For Li Zongren’s backers, the defeat was a particularly bitter one; the general had promised to use Hainan as a launching pad for an eventual campaign to recapture the mainland.32 Chiang Kai-shek now swallowed his anger and reached out to the Chows and their counterparts, for he desperately needed their help. Chiang counted many supporters in American politics, but almost all were conservative Republicans like Senators H. Alexander Smith and William F. Knowland, who in early 1950 hammered away at Dean Acheson and demanded assistance and naval support for Taiwan. But the rhetoric of the senators and their allies on the Joint Chiefs of Staff did little to change Acheson’s mind, or Truman’s. The president and his secretary of state refused to reconsider America’s stated policy on the island, which the president had declared in January he would not defend. Chiang Kai-shek thus

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realized that he needed Democratic allies with ties to the administration, a tall order given Chiang’s overt support for Dewey in 1948 and the backing that Truman’s Taiwan policy received from most Democrats in the Senate. Chiang could, however, attempt to woo Albert Chow, Doon Wong, and other moderate KMT members back into the fold with arguments about the need to preserve the KMT and Free China. Within weeks of the Truman lunch, Chiang loyalists in the United States did just that, going to work on Albert Chow.33 The moment was opportune, for the State Department’s recognition of Chiang and the invasion of Hainan had deeply shaken Chow, whose outspokenness on Li’s behalf was turning into reticence. Traveling in New York as Hainan fell, Chow apparently received a visit from Liu Chieh, the ROC ambassador to Canada, and James Tsuen-chi Yu, the regime’s ambassador to Italy. Close confidants of Chiang, the ambassadors worked to convince Chow of the need to unite all factions in the KMT in order to preserve the party and what was left of the ROC. The two men likely pointed out to Chow that Chiang, not Li, controlled the last piece of “Free China,” and the United States had chosen to recognize the Generalissimo’s regime.34 After Chow left New York, he began to use his influence to encourage a united anti-communist front under Chiang and the KMT, despite Li’s rejection of this strategy. Chow apparently believed he could push Li and Chiang to work together, and he used his own fame to this end. When Chow traveled to Hong Kong on business a few weeks later, Li claimed that his onetime ally was passing himself off as a State Department representative and promising that American aid would be forthcoming if Li and Chiang united against the CCP. From Hong Kong, Albert and William Jack Chow flew to Taiwan at Chiang Kai-shek’s invitation and met with him. Chiang’s officials also gave the Chow brothers a tour of the island, where what they saw impressed them. Li Zongren quickly repudiated the Chows. “While in Formosa [Albert Chow] acted as if he were an emissary of myself, to offer co-operation to Chiang in order to hearten the disillusioned officers on the island,” Li complained in a letter to Truman. Chiang wrote to Truman as well, thanking the president for “what the Chow brothers have told me of Your Excellency’s kindly sentiments toward China,” and entrusting the two men to deliver the note to the president. The Chows returned quietly home to the United States, visiting Washington, D.C., to meet with President Truman and then going back to San Francisco. Albert Chow never again said anything publicly about Li Zongren.35

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The Korean War and the End of Political Openness Unlike the Chows, other anti-communist Chinese Americans continued to question the Generalissimo’s legitimacy, fueling the urgency felt by many Chiang loyalists in the United States. In mid-June, anonymous writers distributed circulars—some Chinese-language papers even claimed an airplane dropped them—calling on overseas Chinese to help “overthrow . . . Chiang and resist . . . the Communists” and announcing a meeting of sympathizers that never took place. Days later, Chiang recorded a speech exhorting Chinese Americans to oppose communism and support his government on Taiwan. Local radio stations that offered at least some Chinese-language programs—most notably “Golden Star Radio” in the Bay Area—translated Chiang’s speech from Mandarin into Cantonese and broadcast it that evening. It seemed that the propaganda battle would drag on until Taiwan capitulated to the PLA.36 Just four days after the broadcast, though, the Chiang regime gained a new partner in its campaign to survive—and to assert dominance in Chinese American communities. On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. The United States, under the auspices of the United Nations, entered the conflict and helped turn back the North Koreans. Abandoning his previous policy on the defense of Taiwan, Harry Truman dispatched the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet to patrol the Taiwan Strait and insure that the area’s tensions did not distract the United States from the Korean crisis. Truman’s move, which marked a new level of American commitment to the Taiwan regime, infuriated the PRC; so too did American forces’ disregard of China’s warning not to cross the 38th Parallel as they pushed the North Korean soldiers back. In late October, the People’s Republic of China entered the conflict on the side of North Korea.37 Suddenly, Chinese Americans found themselves associated because of their ancestry not only with a nation at war against the United States but also with communism, a doctrine considered by most Americans to be the height of treason. Outside the safety of Chinatowns, vandals attacked Chinese American-owned businesses, throwing trash at them and breaking their windows. A nagging fear haunted Chinese Americans on the West Coast, for many had watched, often without pity, when the federal government interned Japanese Americans less than a decade earlier. State and federal officials reassured the public that Chinese Americans were loyal to the United States and pledged that the government had no plans to intern anyone. However, the FBI quickly intensified its scrutiny of Chinese Americans and their transnational ties. This heightened official suspicion focused on

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all Chinese Americans but became a particular burden to the many community members who had entered the United States unlawfully.38 Chinese American leaders, both traditional elites and younger men and women, now rushed to proclaim their patriotism to the United States in very public ways. The San Francisco Cathay Post of the American Legion adopted a resolution deploring the Chinese Communist move and asserting members’ loyalty to “America only, first, last, and always.” Representatives of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance made similar statements, as did San Francisco’s Albert Chow and New York’s Shavey Lee, the two men most often identified as the “mayors” of their respective Chinatowns. The CCBA-NY denounced the PRC and proclaimed support for the UN, while the San Francisco branch of the CCBA cabled President Truman to express the same sentiments.39 The PRC’s entry into the Korean War ended the period of political uncertainty in Chinese American communities and enhanced the power of those close to the ROC regime, including the newly unified American KMT. Once again, the distinctive political cultures of San Francisco and New York determined the degree of ROC interference in local affairs. In San Francisco, newly minted Chiang loyalist Doon Wong created the Chinese Six Companies Anti-Communist League of San Francisco in December 1950. Members included not just former Li Zongren partisans Doon Wong and Albert Chow but also pro-Chiang KMT members such as S.K. Wong and men and women who belonged to no Chinese political party, like Republican activist Earl Sun Louie. Although many in the committee, such as Doon Wong, Albert Chow, and S.K. Wong, had ties to the Taiwan regime, the organization recognized the existence of noncommunist anti-Chiang elements by avoiding direct identification with the ROC. In contrast, New York’s CCBA, KMT, Chinese Hongmen Party, and traditional organizations created an explicitly pro-Taiwan “Anti-Communist Committee for Free China.” The group introduced itself to the public by picketing at the United Nations when PRC representative Wu Xiuquan appeared there to condemn American policy toward Taiwan.40 In both cities, Chiang supporters tried to use the Korean War and America’s new commitment to the ROC to reassert KMT influence in Chinese American communities. In 1949, as the Nationalist regime lost its grip on the mainland, Chiang loyalists in America struggled in vain to suppress open discussion of the civil war. The independent community press thrived in both San Francisco and New York, with a handful of new publications even supporting the Chinese Communist Party. In early 1949, CCBA-NY head Koon Lai Loo finally dared to publicly critique the pro-Chiang KMT

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faction’s attempts to suppress free speech. While the FBI kept close watch on some Chinese American leftists, the Truman administration was itself estranged from the Chiang regime at that time. By November 1950, however, ROC supporters in the east and on the West Coast renewed their campaign to harass those they deemed too sympathetic to the Chinese Communists, and now they found ready allies at the INS and the FBI. In San Francisco, ROC loyalists targeted the Chinese American Democratic Youth League, or Min Qing, and the Chinese Workers Mutual Aid Association. In New York, they focused on the China Youth Club, the China Daily News, and the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance. Like others in the community, many members of these groups had entered the United States as “paper sons” using fake identities. This made them particularly vulnerable to investigation if someone knowledgeable about their status decided to go to the authorities—as ROC backers increasingly did by 1951. As the situation worsened, many leftists simply slipped out of the country and voluntarily traveled to the PRC. Either way, political involvement suddenly posed significant danger for Chinese Americans simply because so many had entered the United States unlawfully.41

The Complexity of Chinese American Community Politics While Chinese American conservatives and their allies in the US government tried to suppress community dissent, the excesses of the PRC’s land reform campaign deeply alienated many Chinese Americans who already loathed Chiang and his repressive regime. The early defenders of the “people’s government” inadvertently hastened this anti-communist skepticism and anger. In March 1950, the newly left-leaning San Francisco Chung Sai Yat Po assured readers that rumors of property confiscation and redistribution in the PRC were “as absurd as the so-called ‘reallocation of wives’ rumors” that KMT agents liked to spread. Many Chinese Americans in both San Francisco and New York soon discovered otherwise. Land reform, during which the CCP confiscated millions of acres of property and redistributed it to landless and poor peasants, began even before the end of the civil war. The process was both necessary and wildly popular among most peasants, yet the land reform campaign was a bloody one that resulted in more than a million deaths. Initially moderate in many places, land reform intensified once the PRC entered the Korean War and the central government encouraged cadres to allow and even foment violence at anti-landlord struggle sessions. In Toisan, Zhongshan, and other Pearl River Delta counties, land reform’s escalation deeply affected the families of hundreds of

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thousands of overseas Chinese. Chinese migrants to the United States had long sent money back home to their relatives to enable them to buy land, build homes, and send children to school. Now, Communist cadres targeted many of these same families as “stinking landlords” and “bad elements,” confiscating their holdings and subjecting them to beatings and sometimes execution.42 The rumors about land reform and the stories related by refugees in Hong Kong frightened many Chinese Americans, and the letters they started to receive in late 1950 created real panic. In many of the missives, families on the mainland begged for money to protect them from official punishment. As Bruce Hall wrote in his memoir Tea That Burns: [The letters] say that venerable patriarchs are being arrested for nonpayment of back taxes. Wives are being thrown into prison for not paying “rent” to the State for the farms which have just been seized by “Farmers’ Cooperatives.” And then there are those who are jailed for reasons that are not entirely clear. . . . The writers all ask, beg, plead for money to pay off the fines which will release these family members from jail or save some loved one from torture and murder.

Such letters pushed many Chinese Americans to desperation. The United States government forbade citizens and residents from sending money to people in nations at war with the United States, making remittances to the Pearl River Delta illegal. A good number of Chinese Americans still complied with the requests for money, sending funds through Hong Kong agents, but others simply had no idea what to do.43 By mid-1951, American authorities and journalists had uncovered what mainstream US newspapers dubbed the “red blackmail” scheme. Although pro-KMT leaders may have tipped off officials, FBI agents monitoring the Chinese-language press would have read about it far earlier. Papers including the Chinese World were commenting on the issue and the techniques the CCP used in different communities as early as February 1951. As reporters pointed out, people of Chinese ancestry in the United States were not the only affected group; Chinese ancestry communities in Southeast Asia, Canada, and elsewhere received a similar stream of letters. The CCBA-NY estimated that about one thousand Chinese Americans in the city remitted $3 million in response to the campaign, and the larger community in San Francisco probably sent more. Once the letters caught the notice of American officials and the English-language press, China Lobby member William

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Knowland demanded an investigation, while the Treasury Department began its own inquiry and declared the remittances absolutely illegal.44 The “red blackmail” situation complicated Chinese American attempts to alleviate public concerns about their loyalty to the United States. The issue enveloped people from across the political spectrum: KMT leaders did not rush to label those who sent money as pro-communist, because at least some of their friends remitted funds as well. In San Francisco, the CCBA warned community residents not to respond to the pleas. However, it neither advocated punishing those who did nor accused them of being pro-PRC. Instead, CCBA official Kenneth F. Lee tried to assure the public that illegal remittances were not funding China’s war in Korea. “Most of us have families in China and send money regularly through Hong Kong for their support,” he contended.45 Even the most avowedly anti-communist groups in the community could not avoid the pull that family relationships exerted. By early 1952, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the Chinese World, and other moderate anti-communist voices began an unsuccessful campaign to persuade the Treasury Department to allow Chinese Americans to remit funds again. In 1953, after the Korean War armistice, the campaign drew even more support: men such as John Young, a World War Two and Korean War veteran and Chinese American Republican Committee member, distributed petitions in San Francisco’s Chinatown urging an end to the ban on remittances to the PRC. A supporter of the ROC, Young exemplified how little politics mattered in comparison to the desire to support relatives in China: his own brother-in-law spent time in jail for violating the law by sending money back to his village in China.46

The Persistence of a Free Press in Chinese American Communities The United States government resisted Chinese American entreaties to lift the embargo for a number of reasons, one of which was certainly its usefulness for prosecuting Chinese American leftists. The Department of Justice, which started monitoring Chinese leftist groups in late 1949, used the law with particular effectiveness against New York’s China Daily News. The paper was already struggling to survive because of a KMT campaign to force businesses to withdraw their advertising and readers to cancel their subscriptions. Few if any newsstands dared carry the China Daily News after the PRC’s entry into the Korean War. By December 1950, the newly formed

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Anti-Communist Committee for Free China in New York ramped up the pressure, condemning the paper as communist and referring to it as the E Qiao Ribao (Overseas Russian Daily News) rather than the Hua Qiao Ribao (Overseas Chinese Daily News). Less than a year later, the Treasury Department exploited the uproar over the “red blackmail” campaign to press a variety of charges against the staff of the paper, which had run ads for PRCbacked banks in Hong Kong. Such banks often accepted remittances from Chinese Americans wishing to circumvent the embargo in order to send money to families in China.47 The case was a complex one, and it revealed both the ways rabid anticommunism was distorting the legal system and the likelihood that the defendants were not guiltless, despite their contentions. Public anger over the Korean War, the “red blackmail,” and the alleged communist “brainwashing” of American POWs meant that the paper’s staff could not receive a fair trial. Certainly, the court gave them overly harsh sentences for having accepted a few hundred dollars’ worth of advertisements. The case dragged on for years, until the journalists’ final appeal to the Supreme Court failed. However, in rejecting the appeal, Justice Tom Clark did point out one reasonable argument against the defense. The China Daily News staff members asserted that they did not realize accepting advertising from PRC-backed banks was illegal until federal agents told them so. As Clark observed, “All of the individual defendants were affiliated with the China Daily News, itself a defendant, which published news reports and notices about the fact of federal blocking of financial dealings with Communist China and also suggestions for circumventing the regulations.”48 In other words, the men almost certainly understood from reporting on the financial law that they were breaking it; they did so anyway because they and most of their readers disagreed with the embargo—as did many other Chinese Americans. While the federal government targeted the China Daily News, intracommunity pressure compromised Chinese America’s formerly free press. The China Weekly and the Chung Sai Yat Po of San Francisco folded under anti-communist pressure, including boycotts and the withdrawal of advertising. For their part, the editors and publishers of the handful of Englishlanguage journals that targeted Chinese Americans avoided political controversy. Perhaps conscious that their fellow Americans could easily read their prose, few if any dared criticize “Free China” or question its righteousness. Charles Leong, who published the Chinese Press between 1940 and 1952, and then the Chinese News beginning in 1953, was emblematic of such journalists. Careful to broadcast his anti-communism in all his pub-

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lications, he also spent some months working for the CIA-backed Committee for Free Asia. Later in the 1950s, William Yukon Chang, a Hawaiian transplant once in the employ of a Nationalist government paper, started the English-language Chinese-American Times in New York City; reliably anti-communist, the Chinese-American Times confined most of its commentary to local issues.49 At the same time, the popularity of a number of independent US Chinese-language publications revealed that a deep vein of anti-Chiang resentment and skepticism continued to exist in both San Francisco and New York. Challenges to Chiang’s legitimacy certainly became less frequent in the 1950s, because KMT infighting over leadership, once represented in the pages of the Young China (San Francisco, right-KMT), the Chinese Nationalist Daily (New York, left-KMT), the Chinese Nationalist Daily of America (San Francisco, left-KMT), and the Chinese Journal (New York, right-KMT), now gave way to a full-throated veneration of Chiang. Nevertheless, a number of independent organs remained, including the Chinese World and the Chinese-Pacific Weekly of San Francisco and the United Journal (founded in 1952), Chinese-American Weekly, and China Post of New York. Scholar Him Mark Lai argues that “dissenting voices in Chinese communities [were] effectively cowed or silenced by the mid-fifties, [and] the Chinese community press essentially conformed to a rigid pro-KMT, stridently anticommunist orthodoxy,” yet the content of the independent press actively belied such charges. Moderates like New York’s Chin-Fu Woo, editor of the United Journal and the Chinese-American Weekly, openly described “the filth and corruption of the previous national government,” and the likelihood that “Old Chiang . . . [will] bungle things all the way to the end.” Dai-ming Lee of the Chinese World routinely excoriated Chiang Kai-shek and his most extreme Chinese American backers, whom the editor referred to as a “gang of cheaters.” None of the independent editors embraced the KMT, but most loathed the Communists just as much. The tragic course of the Chinese revolution, particularly beginning in 1958, suggests that this was at the very least an intellectually and morally viable position.50

The Persistence of the Third Force in America After China’s entry into the Korean War, the nominally unified KMT no longer feared American recognition of the communist regime, while the continuing domestic anti-communist hysteria guaranteed that Chinese American leftists lived in fear. The “red blackmail” campaign and the stories of land reform abuses also undermined the PRC’s appeal to many Chi-

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nese Americans who initially hoped the new government could provide strength, unity, and stability for China. Yet much of the Chinese American public remembered clearly the last years of the civil war and the incompetence and corruption of the Chiang regime. Despite radio broadcasts, pamphlets, and consular pleas, many Chinese Americans continued to view the Taiwan government with deep distrust and dislike. These conditions helped a weak but persistent “Third Force” movement of noncommunist, non-KMT political parties to survive after 1949. Many in the US KMT saw the survival of the Third Force as a possible threat to the Chiang regime’s influence in Chinese American communities. The movement consisted of a loose-knit group of small Chinese political parties such as the Young China Party, the Chinese Democratic Constitutionalist Party (CDCP), and the Democratic Socialist Party, as well as the remaining supporters of Li Zongren and other non-KMT, non-CCP figures. It included a few sympathetic liberals on Taiwan, but little freedom of speech existed there—a situation even more pronounced on the mainland. As a result, Third Force leaders like Carsun Chang (Zhang Junmai) and Li Huang after 1949 shuttled between overseas Chinese communities in Asia or hunkered down in Hong Kong or the United States. Some maintained contact with the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department, trying for months and years to convince American officials to provide them with funding.51 The official American attitude varied from agency to agency and month to month. The CIA tried to find and to arm Third Force adherents during the Korean conflict, but the plan was a complete failure. The agency also bankrolled a group known as the “Chinese Fighting League for Freedom and Democracy,” but it ceased to function by 1954. A few State Department officials maintained interest in promoting Third Force groups, but more highly-placed authorities rejected these organizations as useless to American interests. Troy Perkins, who served as acting director of the State Department, privately ridiculed the collection of liberal intellectuals who made up the small parties. In one memo, he even dubbed them “‘Park Avenue Guerrillas’” who showed only an “intrepid willingness to mount the ramparts of Riverside Drive” in New York City, where Chiang’s brother-inlaw H.H. Kung and other Chinese Nationalist loyalists lived.52 The KMT regime used the US government’s new, albeit grudging, support to try to thwart the Third Force in the United States. Chiang loyalists found the courts to be one effective arena in their battle. In 1951, a scandal erupted over Nationalist Chinese Air Force procurement in the United States. The Nationalist government went to court to compel two Chinese

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air force officers to release funds that they had allegedly refused to spend on airplane fuel and parts because of graft in Taiwan. Although Li Zongren was not a party to the case, one argument the two officers used in their defense was that Li, not Chiang Kai-shek, was the president of China. The court refused to rule on Li’s actual status but accepted the earlier State Department recognition of Chiang’s regime as evidence that the KMT government was legitimate. The Supreme Court later refused to rehear the case, dealing yet another blow to the fortunes of Li’s supporters and further undermining the general’s claim to be the real president of the ROC.53 With Li Zongren’s star already fading in mid-1950, the CDCP emerged as the primary standard bearer for the Third Force in America, becoming the most effective anti-Chiang voice in the nation’s Chinese American communities and prompting considerable KMT unease. Chiang loyalists viewed Dai-ming Lee, editor of San Francisco’s Chinese World and a CDCP leader, as particularly dangerous. An American-born citizen and longtime anti-communist, he safely heaped contempt on Chiang without fear of deportation, rendering the KMT’s ties to the INS and FBI useless to silence him. Although the majority of Chinese Americans, especially American citizens, never participated in the activities of third parties like Lee’s, the popularity of his newspaper hinted at the appeal of his perspective to a large segment of the public. Indeed, the paper counted far more subscribers than the KMT’s Young China, which scrambled in the early 1950s to gain a subsidy from the CIA-backed Committee for Free Asia—and then ran stories that maligned the Third Force as money-grubbing. Dai-ming Lee’s friend Gilbert Woo, whom he tried to hire for the World in 1945, remembered that “even those who didn’t agree with him wanted to read him . . . [and] ‘take a look at what Dai-ming Lee is saying about things.’”54 An opinion leader, Lee routinely sparked open discussion and debate, and KMT leaders saw him as one of the greatest threats to their influence in the community. The danger that the KMT perceived from even moderate voices became perfectly clear in February 1951, when Lee ran Chinese and English editorials accusing San Francisco’s new Chinese Six Companies Anti-Communist League of diverting some contributions meant for Korean War soldiers to the Chiang government. In both versions, Lee contended that the organization was on the verge of becoming yet another arm of the KMT propaganda machine. In the Chinese version, he added a warning to readers, especially pro-Chiang Chinese, that the League contained American citizens whose duty and loyalty was to the government of the United States, not to the ROC or Chiang. The backlash was almost instant, with the Anti-Communist League ordering Lee to appear at its next meeting and apologize. Less pub-

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licly, KMT-affiliated thugs threatened Lee’s newspaper, reviving the memory of the violent suppression of the October 9, 1949, pro-PRC celebration.55 Lee’s provocative article exposed the limits of KMT power in San Francisco, for the editor made the party look foolish, reactionary, and contradictory. Mindful that Anti-Communist League chairman Doon Wong’s Bing Kung Tong could be dangerous, Lee first moved to protect his paper and staff, hiring Pinkerton guards and informing the San Francisco Police Department about the situation. Then he simply refused the demands of the Anti-Communist League to appear at the group’s meeting or apologize for his accusations. As tensions worsened, the city’s two KMT papers, the Young China and the Chinese Nationalist Daily of America, charged Lee with having been a “vocal and enthusiastic supporter of Mao” until the outbreak of the Korean War. They picked the wrong person to red-bait, however. In response to the accusations, Lee reminded readers that the KMT, not the CDCP, had collaborated with the Chinese Communists and the Soviets in the 1920s, and he insinuated that Chiang Kai-shek’s Russiantrained son Chiang Ching-kuo was a communist. Someone, probably Lee or his colleague K.Y. Hsu, also tipped off the San Francisco Chronicle, which both translated the KMT papers’ baseless charges and quoted Doon Wong inadvertently vindicating Lee (Wong disparaged the editor for opposing both the CCP and the KMT). The unwanted press forced Wong’s friend and Anti-Communist League publicity director Albert Chow to assure the Chronicle that the donations in question would not go to Chiang. It also demonstrated the limits of KMT power over informed and confident Chinese American citizens.56

New York, Nationalist Redoubt While San Francisco contained a growing number of such citizens, Chinese New York was rapidly becoming an outpost of Nationalist China, an ironic outcome for a city where leftist politics remained respectable far longer than anywhere else in America. Those Chinese with KMT connections who settled in the New York metro area during and after the civil war included H.H. Kung, brother-in-law of Madame Chiang; T.V. Soong, her brother; Chen Lifu, a powerful Chiang aide once central to the KMT’s right-wing “C.C. Clique”; Shen Shih-hua, a former Chinese diplomat and friend of Chen; Bishop Paul Yu-pin, the former Catholic prelate of Nanjing; and his longtime associate Stephen Pan. Most members of the KMTconnected influx avoided living in the crumbling tenements of Chinatown, but their attempts to exercise influence over Chinese New York prompted

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other Chinese Americans to complain about the “right-wing infiltration” into the community. In contrast, far fewer San Francisco KMT activists by the 1950s were recent arrivals from China or trained cadres. Instead, party leaders in the Western city were more likely to be well-connected locals, a reflection of the Bay Area’s fairly low ranking in the Chiang regime’s list of priorities.57 In addition to the many KMT-affiliated newcomers arriving in New York, several of Chiang’s most fervent American sympathizers lived in the city in these years. The most influential were publisher Henry Luce and his wife, Claire Boothe Luce, who used Time and Life magazines to boost the Chiang regime on Taiwan throughout the 1950s. Less known, Christopher T. Emmet, a political writer active in the ardently pro-Chiang Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals (ARCI), lived on the Upper East Side. Alfred Kohlberg, a textile importer from Westchester County, also kept an office in the city and helped bankroll a number of pro-KMT groups; at the same time, he fed tips to the FBI and the ROC government in hopes of silencing political opponents, both American and Chinese. Kohlberg’s money and politics attracted an array of impecunious Chinese and Chinese American hangers-on, like Ernest K. Moy, a KMT member and supporter who helped found ARCI.58 Because of this concentration of former KMT officials and their allies, Chinese American political culture in New York moved to the right in the early 1950s, especially in terms of public discourse. Certainly, the people who organized the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance in the 1930s and who read the China Daily News in the 1940s did not abandon their ideals, but the prosecution of the newspaper and the harassment of leading leftists scared others into silence. While independent voices, such as the moderate Chinese-American Weekly and China Post, survived, Nationalist journalists and exiles attempted to shout them down. As discussed in chapter 2, proChiang KMT activists in 1944 bought the once independent Shangbao and soon turned it into the pro-Chiang Chinese Journal. Similarly, Chen Li-fu and a number of his friends purchased the China Tribune, a once independent, centrist paper that had opened during World War Two and, by 1950, was the last Chee Kung Tong (Chinese Freemasons) newspaper in the continental United States. Chen contended that communists had wanted to buy the paper, prompting his partners to purchase it first. “We began expressing our views in the New York Chinatown area, counterattacking the Communists to recover the mainland,” he recalled.59 Given the ongoing prosecution of Chinese leftists—and the sheer improbability of recovering the mainland by publishing the China Tribune—the purchase actually rep-

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resented a different rightist KMT faction’s attempt to interfere in community affairs. Most ordinary Chinese New Yorkers lacked the money, legal status, and confidence to challenge the Nationalist exiles. Although many of the city’s Chinese immigrants served in World War Two, few took advantage of laws that enabled veterans to naturalize regardless of legal status, since they feared exposing their “paper families.” Only a handful had the free time to devote to politics anyway, since they were struggling to make ends meet. In the 1950s, the New York community remained much poorer and less educated than San Francisco’s and enjoyed far fewer economic opportunities. On the West Coast, a growing economy powered by Cold War spending began to benefit many Chinese Americans, especially college graduates. In contrast, deindustrializing New York was a city just beginning to lose its middle class, the customer base for the hand laundries still so important to the Chinese community. Furthermore, technological innovations such as the increasing availability of washing machines and coin laundries further threatened this economic niche.60 At this moment, the CCBA-NY, an organization Koon Lai Loo hoped to redirect towards community concerns in 1948, turned back decisively towards China politics. In late February 1950, Chiang backers reclaimed leadership of the CCBA-NY, and the new chairman they chose was, in fact, a very familiar face: the KMT educator and former CCBA-NY chairman Woodrow Chan. With Chiang Kai-shek set to reclaim the presidency from Li Zongren, the CCBA-NY rejected another moderate candidate like the outgoing Loo and selected instead a leader with close ties to the Taiwan regime. In fact, Loo was the last non-KMT chairman to lead the organization until 1968. During the 1950s, the position rotated among just three men, all of them KMT officials connected to rightist party factions: Chan, Kock Gee Lee, and Shing Tai Liang. All three put China politics above more mundane community concerns, as chapter 4 will discuss.61

Political Cultures in Flux: 1949–1951 Between 1949 and 1951, Chinese political interference in Chinese American communities became more direct than ever before. In January 1949, Chinese Americans of many different political stripes hoped that Li Zongren could broker a peace settlement in China or lead a successful anticommunist campaign there. By late 1951, few mentioned his name anymore, and the political ferment of early 1949 had given way to resignation, fear, and disillusionment. Two years after Li’s ascent to the presidency, the

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Communists controlled the mainland, and the Korean War cast a pall over Chinese Americans around the United States. The political ferment and flux of early 1949 had turned into anxiety and suspicion, enhanced by the growing power of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his use of the China issue to gain influence. The United States was on the verge of recognizing and giving significant aid to the ROC, while the US KMT was actually more unified than it had been in many years. By 1951, it was using this new strength, and the backing of US agencies such as the Justice Department and the INS, to root out leftists in Chinese American communities. In this environment, many Chinese Americans felt compelled to publicly display their trustworthiness and anti-communist credentials. CCBAaffiliated anti-communist leagues led the way, holding parades and rallies and using the events to raise funds for their activities. Other organizations embraced similar tactics. Chinese American veterans’ groups marched in holiday parades, carrying American flags and anti-communist banners, and the Chinese American English-language press extolled the nation’s virtues and warned against the blight of communism. Chinese American school children participated in anti-communist essay contests, while their parents agonized about whether or not to send money to impoverished relatives on the mainland. Citing such developments, historians of the early Cold War era generally contend that China’s intervention in the Korean War not only heightened an already repressive political atmosphere but also helped snuff out political activism and dissent in Chinese American communities.62 In this era, KMT members and their backers in Chinese American communities did manage to silence most communists and leftists, but the left never represented the majority of the community, nor did its suppression equal the end of public dissent. In reality, many—indeed, probably most— Chinese Americans distrusted both the far left and the far right by this point. Anti-Chiang sentiment was initially greater than anti-communist sentiment in early 1950; in those months, many Chinese Americans and their families had recent experience with the ROC government’s corruption. The PRC’s honeymoon did not last long, though. As a reader wrote to the Chinese-American Weekly in April 1950, “I (and not just me, but also many other countrymen) have learned through experience . . . [to] feel that neither the ‘Republican government’ nor the ‘people’s government’ is any good.”63 As the Chinese-language press and its readership demonstrated, not only was much Chinese American anti-communism fairly genuine, but it was also complex and not at all reflexively pro-Chiang or pro-KMT. By 1951, many Chinese Americans were becoming painfully aware that over-

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seas Chinese families occupied an uncertain position in the new society on the mainland. Certainly, as Xinyang Wang has shown, KMT newspapers exploited the communists’ land reform campaign, exaggerating the extent of violence it involved. Nonetheless, letters from relatives begging for money and describing the excesses of land reform undercut Chinese American skepticism that these abuses were simply KMT lies. Even the pro-PRC China Daily News reported that land reform violence had affected many overseas families, although the newspaper praised the dismantling of the “immigrant landlords’ feudal and exploitative landowning system.”64 Such words could only have dismayed most Chinese American New Yorkers, for laundrymen, cooks, and waiters did not easily conceive of themselves as feudal and exploitative. On the other hand, numerous Chinese Americans sympathetic to the Nationalist Party quietly rejected the KMT as it existed by 1950. Many in San Francisco and New York continued to venerate Sun Yat-sen, founder of the KMT, father of the republican revolution, native of Guangdong, and a onetime overseas Chinese dissident whose portrait hung next to the Nationalist flag in almost every Chinese-language school in New York and San Francisco. Sun’s admirers hoped against hope that the KMT on Taiwan would genuinely reform itself and return to the vigorous revolutionary organization that it was in the 1920s. They supported the ROC on Taiwan for this reason, but privately they admitted no real affection for Chiang Kaishek. They did not entirely blame him for losing the mainland—many felt his rapacious family was to blame, or that the Soviet Union had given far more aid to the CCP than the United States did to the ROC—but they did not like him very much, either.65 In one way, then, Chinese American politics in both cities were as much in flux in late 1951 as they had been three years earlier. The difference was the scope of acceptable politics—true leftists now rarely dared proclaim their ideas, while right-wing backers of Chiang benefited from the support of American agencies and the climate of McCarthyism. Still, the PRC alienated much of the undecided population, which moved from relief over the civil war’s end and hope for a stronger, more unified China to dismay about the treatment of relatives and friends on the mainland. The popularity and longevity of publications such as the Chinese World and the Chinese American Weekly, which were affiliated with neither the KMT nor the CCP, attest to this. These journals provided distinct forums for those in the community who disliked both the far left and far right. Covering American news and politics in greater depth than in the past, such organs also reflected significant shifts in their readers’ interests. Chinese Americans who

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had once envisioned returning to China were changing their plans, and at least some took a second look at US politics as well. Other people of Chinese ancestry, formerly apolitical, grew increasingly incensed at the harassment and suspicion their communities now endured because so much of the public associated them with China. The end results of the simmering discontent and political flux in these communities depended both on local conditions and KMT priorities and influence. In San Francisco, a growing number of Chinese Americans, mostly second-generation citizens, began participating in Democratic and Republican politics. While claiming to support Taiwan if asked, such people increasingly avoided China politics, which seemed like a hopeless, fractious quagmire. Many also began to sense that voting not only proved their Americanness to outsiders but also might help protect their community from the scapegoating and discrimination common during the Korean War. New York’s value to the KMT regime was far too great for the ROC regime to allow such developments to occur there. By the mid-1950s, San Francisco gained a Chinese American politics distinct from China politics. In New York, the two remained the same, much to the detriment of the majority of community members.

FOUR

Divergence: New York and San Francisco in the 1950s

In 1952, Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Act, a piece of immigration legislation that most Chinese American leaders and organizations ultimately opposed. The tardy and unsuccessful Chinese American campaign against the bill reflected the problems of a community divided and under siege. The participation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Korean War had put Chinese American organizations and activists on the defensive. Facing public scrutiny, and sometimes hostility, the groups that once worked to enhance the community’s political influence now shifted their focus to proving their loyalty to the United States or the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan. Even after the Korean War ended in 1953, Chinese Americans still faced public and official skepticism about their fidelity: both the ROC and the PRC in the mid-1950s sought to woo the more than twelve million “overseas Chinese” who lived throughout the world. In such an environment, a growing number of Chinese Americans, especially in the Bay Area, decided that they needed to forge relationships of mutual reliance with politicians, exchanging votes for real representation. Chinese Americans could muster enough votes to exercise influence only at the local level, but between 1952 and 1955, second-generation activists in the Bay Area sought to do just that. While China politics fractured the New York community, Chinese Americans in San Francisco built American political networks that enabled them to defend their community during a wide-ranging 1956 federal investigation into immigration fraud. Although the Korean War essentially ended where it had begun, it dramatically changed international relations in East Asia. As a result of the conflict, the Truman Administration committed the United States to preserving the Republic of China on Taiwan, despite the president’s deep suspicion of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. The Eisenhower administration con-

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tinued this support and eventually signed an official defense treaty with Chiang in late 1954, after the PRC shelled the ROC-held island group of Quemoy (Jinmen). For his part, Mao Zedong used the Korean War to help consolidate Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule on the mainland as well as his own power in the CCP. Moreover, he learned from the conflict just how useful war could be for domestic mobilization, a major reason he authorized attacks such as the one on Quemoy.1 In this tumultuous international environment, American conservatives promoted a brand of domestic anti-communism that verged into extremism. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had used America’s supposed “loss of China” to communism to gain prominence and power in early 1950, continued his reckless attacks on those whose politics he disliked. In 1954, he publicly challenged the Eisenhower administration on its treatment of American allies who traded with the PRC. Other pro-Chiang politicians such as William F. Knowland of California and Styles Bridges of Vermont demanded that the administration defend not just Taiwan but also its offshore islands like Quemoy. Their allies in the private sector, including men such as William Bullitt and Alfred Kohlberg, maintained a steady public relations campaign on behalf of the ROC and against recognition of the PRC or its admission to the United Nations. The Senate’s censure of McCarthy in 1954 neither dampened his allies’ enthusiasm for Chiang nor curbed their willingness to accuse opponents of communist sympathies.2 This same kind of anti-communism drove America’s growing involvement in Southeast Asia, where the presence of large populations of ethnic Chinese prompted widespread discussion about the loyalties of such people. Fearful of communist-led Viet Minh insurgents in French Indochina, the Truman administration had underwritten the French military’s attempts to recapture Vietnam in the late 1940s. President Eisenhower not only continued this aid, but, after the Viet Minh defeated the French in 1954, plowed American resources into the Republic of Vietnam regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, an anti-communist alternative to the popular Ho Chi Minh. As American involvement in the region grew, journalists devoted increasing attention to the existence of large overseas Chinese populations in places such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Burma, Malaya, and the Republic of Vietnam. The US public soon read about the way both the ROC and the PRC governments maintained nationality policies that deemed all people of Chinese ancestry to be Chinese citizens.3 In this environment, the survival of the ROC on Taiwan helped Chinese Americans to dodge the kind of racist hysteria that Japanese Americans faced a decade earlier. Unlike in 1941, when the single nation of Japan attacked

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the United States, two entities in the 1950s claimed the label “China,” and one was an American ally. The prevailing Cold War liberalism of the 1950s also offered Chinese Americans further—albeit not total—protection, since many American leaders and commentators emphasized the need not only to contain communism abroad but also to assimilate racial minorities (including Chinese Americans) at home. Significantly, many Democratic and Republican officials believed that the PRC was simply part of a worldwide communist conspiracy that Moscow controlled—an idea with the potential to undercut the belief that China, like Japan during World War Two, was somehow a “racial” enemy of the United States.4 Chinese American politics in New York and San Francisco diverged decisively at this moment. On both coasts, the vast majority of Chinese Americans publicly claimed to support “Free China” and hate communism. Still, at a time of growing ROC efforts to interfere in Chinese American communities, most second-generation Chinese American activists in San Francisco quietly rejected KMT meddling. They also protected American political activism as a sphere distinct from China politics and created a remarkably tolerant, collegial atmosphere in which political opponents could still be friends and collaborate for shared goals. In contrast, exported KMT factionalism undermined unity in Chinese New York, where ROC officials and Nationalist party leaders increasingly controlled vital community organizations.

Immigration Legislation and the Decline of Political Influence The Immigration Act of 1952 (also known as the McCarran-Walter Act) emerged from the Senate subcommittee that set aside Walter Judd’s 1949 legislation (discussed in chapter 3) in the interests of drafting a more general immigration bill. Throughout the process, Asian immigration remained a major sticking point. Between 1943 and 1946, Congress had granted token quotas and naturalization rights to immigrants from China (1943), the Philippines (1946), and the Indian subcontinent (1946), but other Asians, particularly Japanese and Koreans, still could not immigrate or naturalize. Yet while many members of Congress wanted to refute Soviet and PRC propaganda about the racism of American immigration policy, they hoped to do so without admitting more people not wholly of northern or western European ancestry.5 The result by 1952 was a bill that in some ways removed racial discrimination from US immigration policy and in other ways enhanced such discrimination. The 1952 legislation eliminated the old bar against the im-

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migration and naturalization of Asians and affirmed that both spouses and minor children of Asian American citizens could enter the United States on a nonquota basis. It also replaced the former “Asiatic Barred Zone” from which no Asians could immigrate with an “Asia-Pacific Triangle” whose nations and territories received token quotas of between 100 and 200 immigrants per country per year. The artificially low quotas prevented any significant Asian immigration; so did a clause stipulating that the cumulative quota immigration from the entire Asia-Pacific Triangle could not exceed 2,000 people per year. The law also considered Asians in racial rather than national terms, mandating that an immigrant with one racially Asian parent be charged to the Asia-Pacific Triangle quota, even if that person was a citizen or national of a country with a far larger quota. In other words, a British citizen with a Chinese parent could not immigrate under the large quota for Britain but had to use the tiny Chinese quota instead.6 In addition to the overt racial discrimination the law embodied, smaller sections within it proved potentially harmful to Chinese immigrants. Previous law had mandated that when a consul refused to issue an American passport to a derivative citizen claimant, that person had the right until age 23 to receive a certificate of identity from the consul. The certificate enabled the claimant to travel to the United States for a final determination of status. The 1952 bill lowered the maximum age to 16, creating possible hardships for the many China-born derivative citizens separated from their families because of war and revolution. The new law also removed the claimant’s ability to have his or her case heard in an American court and allowed only appeals to the State Department, an agency historically hostile to Chinese immigrants. The problem was particularly acute because Everett Drumright, the US Consul General in Hong Kong, now handled the great majority of Chinese visas, and he viewed with deep suspicion the citizenship claims of most applicants. He required such extensive investigations—including X-rays to determine age and blood typing to establish relationships—that the waiting period for a passport extended for years. Finally, the new law prohibited the naturalization of someone with an outstanding order of deportation against him or her, even if the order was not based on a crime. A number of Chinese American war veterans who possessed fraudulent birth certificates had orders of deportation outstanding against them, despite their service to the nation.7 Distracted by the Korean War and its domestic impact, Chinese Americans initially seemed oblivious to the McCarran-Walter Act’s problems. In 1945, 1946, and 1949, Chinese American Citizens Alliance (CACA) leaders and Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) representa-

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tives strenuously lobbied Congress for favorable immigration policies for people of Chinese ancestry. In contrast, not a single Chinese American spokesperson appeared at the 1951 House and Senate joint immigration subcommittee hearings to shape the new legislation, even as representatives of many other ethnic groups, including Mike Masaoka of the Japanese American Citizens League, testified at length about their communities’ needs and the provisions the final bill should include. As journalist Gilbert Woo later lamented, energetic Chinese American lobbying over provisions in the bill might have prevented “one thousand cases involving investigations of lineage and ancestry, and losses of more than a million dollars in legal fees” in the years that followed.8 When McCarran-Walter came to the floor of the House and Senate in early 1952, Chinese Americans demonstrated little familiarity with its detailed provisions. In late February, the Chinese American Citizens Alliance contacted California senators William Knowland and Richard Nixon and urged them to support the bill. After all, it appeared at first glance to be antiracist and placed alien wives and children of American citizens on a nonquota basis. Within a few weeks, however, the CACA and other Chinese American leaders and activists across the country changed their position.9 Having now read the detailed language of the bill, Chinese Americans realized just how deeply it could affect their community and scrambled to organize some kind of opposition to its worst aspects. The CCBAs of San Francisco and New York created committees that included traditional leaders as well as Chinese American Democrats, Republicans, and war veterans, all of whom urged their senators to change the bill while fixing it was still possible. Lim P. Lee, representing San Francisco’s American Legion Cathay Post, sped to Washington, D.C., to urge senators to reconsider provisions that would affect veterans with orders of deportation. George Chintong, Tammany Hall’s Chinatown leader, sponsored with sixty-six other Americans an advertisement in the New York Times protesting the bill and calling on Congress to adopt Herbert Lehman and Hubert Humphrey’s much more liberal alternative. None of this last-minute lobbying worked, and the legislation passed both houses. After President Truman vetoed the bill, Chinese Americans finally mustered enough money and manpower to send representatives to the immigration hearings that Congress held throughout the United States in the fall of 1952.10 The Chinese American organizations that belatedly jumped into the fight did so largely without their allies from the late 1940s. Sheridan Downey, the liberal California senator who convened hearings in 1948 to investigate INS mistreatment of Chinese immigrants, retired in 1950 because of

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poor health. Another Chinese American ally, the progressive Los Angeles congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, ran against Richard Nixon to replace Downey in one of the most bruising electoral battles of 1950. Nixon famously accused Douglas of being “pink down to her underwear,” but the usually conservative CACA backed her anyway, a tribute to her unflagging support for Chinese American rights. When Nixon defeated Douglas, the CACA lost a key ally and gained an awkward relationship with the new senator. At the same moment, San Francisco Chinatown’s congressman, the progressive Franck Havenner, faced similar accusations of communist sympathies; in 1952, after the Republican-dominated California Legislature redrew the lines of his district, Havenner lost his bid for reelection. Even Albert Chow’s high-profile friendship with the lame duck president, Harry Truman, made little difference by late 1952. Despite the pleas of Chinese American organizations, California senators Richard Nixon and William Knowland both voted for McCarran-Walter and to override the president’s veto of it.11 While the loss of allies undermined Chinese American influence at a crucial moment, the Korean War and China politics also diverted community attention from the looming immigration fight. In 1950 and 1951, immigration reform seemed permanently stalled in a Senate subcommittee, so members of the CCBA, veterans’ groups, and the CACA put their energy into raising funds for the various anti-communist leagues, whipping up enthusiasm for Korean War bond drives, and holding loyalty parades. In contrast to the JACL, whose lobbyist Mike Masaoka spent much of the year in Washington, D.C., Chinese Americans maintained no representative in the capital, a tactic Gilbert Woo described as “an example of pennywise and pound foolish.”12 When McCarran-Walter finally came to the floor, it simply took Chinese American leaders by surprise.

Factionalism Exported Community inattention to the early debates about the McCarran-Walter Act reflected not just the impact of the Korean War and domestic anticommunism but also the increased involvement of the Nationalist government in Chinese American affairs. By 1952, the long-term survival of the Republic of China on Taiwan seemed far more certain than it had just a year and a half earlier. Once American aid and support ensured that the Nationalists would endure, KMT leaders did a certain amount of soul searching about their defeat on the mainland. In addition to initiating widespread land reform on Taiwan, the Chiang regime in 1950 began a significant pro-

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gram of KMT party reform. The process did not eliminate factions in the party. Instead, it placed into a dominant position factions of younger and more flexible members, who helped mute some the worst of the infighting and incompetence that afflicted the KMT before 1950.13 Party reform had real consequences not just on Taiwan but also in New York and San Francisco. On the West Coast, party reform helped the reconciliation process already underway within San Francisco’s KMT. In 1949 and early 1950, several of the city’s most prominent KMT members had called for Chiang Kai-shek’s retirement and thrown their support to Acting President Li Zongren. By mid-1950, Chiang loyalists in the ROC diplomatic corps helped woo back people such as Albert Chow and Doon Wong. Party reform, by eliminating the right-wing C.C. Clique from key leadership posts in Taiwan, smoothed this process, ameliorating the concerns of former Chiang critics. The ROC government also made no move to punish the former dissidents; indeed, officials named Wong, Chow, and other KMT leaders in the United States honorary advisors to the ROC and granted the importers among them monopolies on certain Chinese products (which after 1950 Americans could no longer obtain from mainland China).14 In New York, with its influx of Chinese exiles and its relatively disempowered, heavily immigrant community, party reform resulted in greater factionalism and embroilment in China politics. Chinese exiles and Chiang relatives with their own factions increasingly jockeyed for position with KMT leaders who belonged to other cliques. Woodrow Chan, a KMT official who served twice as chair of the CCBA-NY in the 1940s and 1950s, was likely affiliated with the remnants of the San Min Chu I Youth Corps faction, whose leader was ROC prime minister Chen Cheng.15 The only other two men to hold the CCBA chairmanship in the 1950s—Shing Tai Liang and Kock Gee Lee—belonged to another faction of the party with ties to the now defunct Political Science Clique and party elder Wu Tiecheng.16 Chen Lifu, central member of the once powerful C.C. Clique, chose exile in the United States over party reform on Taiwan. Moving to New York, he bought the China Tribune newspaper, which became his mouthpiece and enabled him to meddle in Chinese American affairs and critique Lee and Liang’s Chinese Journal. Other C.C. Clique members ended up in positions of power on the East Coast as well, including Chen Chih-mai, who served as a counselor in the Chinese Embassy in Washington, and a number of other diplomats attached to East Coast consulates. Chiang Kai-shek’s brothersin-law T.V. Soong and H.H. Kung, and his nephew David L.K. Kung, lived in the New York metro area too. Not only were Soong and H.H. Kung rivals

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of a sort, but they also counted their own followers; so did the New Yorkbased conservative anti-communist Stephen C.Y. Pan and his former boss, the pro-Chiang Catholic archbishop Paul Yu-pin.17 In this atmosphere, party factionalism and infighting thrived in New York. The late historian Him Mark Lai once noted that in the 1950s, “proTaiwan partisans among the newcomers became active in [traditional] community organizations and a number easily entered leadership circles.”18 But such newcomers were not just pro-Taiwan; they often had distinct factional identities as well, a fact that longtime residents bemoaned. By 1960, Chin-fu Woo of the moderate Chinese-American Weekly complained that over the previous decade, members of various Taiwan-based party cliques had “slipped into office in the [Chinatown] mass organizations . . . [in order] to control [them] and enable the groups to be unconsciously exploited and become the tail of the clique.” Journalist Y.K. Chu agreed, publicly excoriating Shing Tai Liang for having shaped the CCBA into an organization where “cliques and connections operate and dominate.”19 Since all of the groups involved supposedly supported the ROC government, the point of this factionalism was simply to gain favor with faction leaders in Taipei. Because of New York’s concentration of KMT cadres, Chinese exiles, and Chinese government officials, the Chinese American community’s political culture grew more China-oriented than it had been in the previous decades. Various cliques tried to take over existing Chinese American groups not by using community service to win the loyalty of members but by secretly infiltrating the organizations. The infighting and struggles for control did nothing to improve life for the Chinese American working-class majority in New York. Focused on their own cliques’ interests and their own prestige within party factions, New York’s KMT-connected leaders largely ignored ongoing struggles for immigration fairness, community betterment, and racial equality in the city. The US government’s desire to woo newly independent and nonaligned Asian nations occasionally pushed American officials to take action when domestic racial incidents became international embarrassments; the white public also grew more supportive of civil rights after World War Two. Still, nonwhite activists organizing at the grassroots created most of the civil rights progress of the postwar years. While the best known civil rights battles of the 1950s took place in the South, thousands of activists in Northern and Western cities fought with equal determination to overcome the residential segregation, employment discrimination, and educational inequalities so common in these places. New York was a major center of such activism, and though the federal government cracked

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down on black leftists in the 1950s, their liberal counterparts continued to demand access to decent jobs, homes, and schools. Before 1949, New York leftists, most of them white, had worked with certain Chinese Americans, including the staffs of the Chinese Vanguard and China Daily News and the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance; in contrast, no mainstream political activists sought to cultivate the community’s unorganized political center, except for Tammany Democrats who wanted to keep the bribes flowing from Chinatown’s brokers. When the Second Red Scare decimated New York’s leftists and their Chinese American allies, the lack of organized Chinese American liberals became even more apparent. Community leadership remained firmly in the hands of the KMT activists in the CCBA-NY whose main concern was the survival of the Chiang regime, not the betterment of Chinese American New York.20 The New York State Housing Division’s proposal for “China Village,” a low-income apartment development, exemplified how KMT goals and party factionalism took priority over the concerns of ordinary Chinese Americans in the city. In the late 1940s, hundreds of newly confident Chinese American veterans of World War Two began to demand a public housing project for New York’s Chinatown, where apartments were of poor quality and in short supply. Although many Chinese American men, especially hand laundry workers, had before the war lived behind their businesses across the city, numerous veterans now wished to settle in or near Chinatown, where their newly arrived wives from China would be able to speak the language. The veterans probably modeled their fight for China Village on an earlier campaign in San Francisco; there, a number of young activists pushed in the 1930s for a Chinatown public housing project. Their peers in New York read about the San Francisco project in the Chinese language press when construction on the apartment complex finally began in the late 1940s.21 In their bid for a housing project, New York’s Chinese American veterans seemed poised to forge the same kinds of crucial links to outside officials and organizations that second-generation Chinese San Franciscans had created in the late 1930s. The New York veterans cooperated closely with the Housing Division and its head, Herbert Stichman. When he needed to investigate local conditions in order to submit a Chinatown proposal, members of the community’s new Kimlau American Legion Post provided the manpower for the work. Over a series of weeks in early 1950, they knocked on the doors of hundreds of Chinese American families in the Chinatown area to study the incomes and needs of residents. When Robert Moses, the powerful planning official, heaped ridicule on the China Village proposal,

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the Chinese American veterans reached out to and received public support from Paul Rutheiser, the New York County American Legion commander. Rutheiser also urged Tammany Hall to press for the project’s construction and pushed city officials to smooth its launch. Chinese American veterans thus appeared to be creating direct links to mainstream institutions, an important assertion of the former soldiers’ stature and position in their community.22 However, the CCBA-NY quickly became involved in China Village, injecting KMT factionalism into the project. Scholars Greg Umbach and Dave Wishnoff contend that CCBA-NY leaders viewed China Village as “an opportunity to reassert their authority” over the community’s Marxists and leftists. In fact, the CCBA-NY did politicize the project, but not to crush leftists. Until late June 1950, the Truman administration seemed open to eventually recognizing the PRC and refused to take any action to protect the Chiang regime on Taiwan. During the same months, anti-Chiang KMT members and other noncommunist opponents of Chiang like Li Zongren competed for US government support. KMT rightists at this time saw winning official American backing for Chiang Kai-shek and Taiwan as their primary goal; launching an attack on communists was secondary. 23 Chiang supporters in New York used China Village as part of this larger campaign. KMT leader and new CCBA-NY chairman Woodrow Chan easily convinced Stichman that the community group should help plan China Village alongside the veterans. Chan then enlisted an old San Min Chu I ally, Chih Meng of the ROC-backed China Institute, to endorse Stichman’s vision and suggest the inclusion of a Chinese cultural center in it. This proposal reaffirmed the ROC’s claims to stand for authentic Chinese culture against the supposedly Soviet-inspired CCP. In addition, since the ROC government based its legitimacy in part on being the representative and protector of the overseas Chinese, Chinese consul general P.H. Chang attended the China Village planning meetings, signaling that ROC officials spoke for New York’s Chinese American residents and cared about their welfare.24 Woodrow Chan also understood that China Village was particularly valuable for asserting his own authority at a time when anti-Chiang sentiment divided the KMT. A number of years earlier, the CCBA-NY acquired a site on Mott Street, the thoroughfare at the center of the China Village project, with the intention of building a new headquarters and community center there. The project remained stalled because the organization lacked the funds to begin work on it. In contrast, the On Leong Merchants Association, which controlled most of the property on Mott Street, was in the

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process of completing its new 85 Mott Street headquarters, an elaborate Chinese-style building with curved eaves and a tiled roof. The On Leongs and their building embodied the threats that Chan saw to his prestige as CCBA-NY chairman and his objectives as a KMT rightist. Not only had the tong succeeded in its construction project, but many On Leongs remained loyal to Seeto Meetong, the charismatic former New York tong leader now living in the PRC. Others supported Li Zongren’s claims against Chiang Kai-shek. These affinities complicated Woodrow Chan’s attempts to push the CCBA-NY board, on which an On Leong representative sat, to side with rightist pro-Chiang forces. Slum clearance would disrupt the tong’s geography and investments and parcel out its property to developers and banks. Unsurprisingly, local On Leong leaders pushed back against the Housing Division and Chan, opposing the scope and location of China Village and its potential impact on their Mott Street holdings. They also used their ties to Tammany Hall to rebut Rutheiser’s claim that all Chinese Americans endorsed Stichman’s plan for China Village.25 The political environment shifted quickly during the summer and fall of 1950, eventually leading to the abandonment of the China Village plan. The outbreak of the Korean War in late June 1950 ended uncertainty about the fate of Taiwan and affirmed American support for the Chiang regime. Most KMT dissidents, including local On Leong men, accepted the political reality and expressed loyalty to Chiang, eliminating one of Woodrow Chan’s most pressing problems. Meanwhile, the PRC’s entry into the Korean War in late 1950 complicated the meaning of China Village for the Chinese American veterans and other community members who initially sought the project. Such people included some veterans who were also On Leong Merchants Association members and felt caught between their desire for better homes and the demands of their group’s leadership. By late 1950, public housing was growing far more controversial across the country, with right-wing opponents accusing its backers and officials of having communist sympathies. Chinese Americans were especially sensitive to such accusations, given PRC involvement in the Korean War. In February 1951, Herbert Stichman announced that the Housing Division was postponing the Chinatown project, a decision reporters attributed to Robert Moses’ opposition. Few if any Chinese Americans complained, for while Woodrow Chan no longer saw the utility of the plan, ordinary residents simply feared association with a project that might mark them as communist.26 By the time Robert Moses signaled his willingness to accept a scaledback China Village in 1954, no Chinese American organizations expressed interest in participating. Shing Tai Liang, an ROC official tied to a different

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party clique than Woodrow Chan, now chaired the CCBA-NY, and he had little incentive to continue support for an initiative linked to Chan. Furthermore, the Housing Division’s new plan not only covered a smaller area than the original China Village but also used a totally different piece of land just outside Chinatown. The CCBA-NY’s proposed Mott Street headquarters, formerly at the center of the planned China Village, would now be several blocks from it. The CCBA-NY had no interest in supporting a community center to rival its own, or in seeing the creation of retail space not only outside its control but in direct competition with its holdings and the property of its board members. The Chinese American veterans had also moved on, afraid of associating with a politically problematic project. China politics drove the CCBA-NY’s involvement in China Village and its later abandonment of the project and scared ordinary Chinese American veterans away from any new demands for public housing in New York.27

The Sinicization of American Politics in New York The same factionalized KMT elite that sought to control the China Village project also moved to dominate Chinese American political organizations. In August 1952, shortly after the Democratic and Republican national conventions, Madame Chiang Kai-shek arrived in San Francisco, much to the surprise of American officials. A month earlier, she had requested and received US government permission to visit Hawaii for treatment of a skin ailment. Although well aware of Madame Chiang’s politicking during past visits to the United States, the State Department anticipated no embarrassing activity this time. “The fact that Madame Chiang expects to travel only as far as Maui makes it unlikely that her trip would have domestic political ramifications,” noted one official. After touching down in Hawaii, however, Madame Chiang flew almost immediately to the West Coast. Her abrupt arrival in San Francisco surprised even the city’s KMT leaders, including Albert Chow, who rushed to her hospital room to welcome her. Madame Chiang’s time in San Francisco seemed to reassure the State Department that her trip was strictly medical, not political: while on the West Coast, she never ventured out of the hospital. But in mid-October, Madame Chiang left San Francisco and flew to New York, ostensibly to convalesce at her brother-inlaw H.H. Kung’s Long Island home. Independent publisher Chin-fu Woo, who in 1943 published a laudatory account of Madame Chiang’s visit to America, now expressed deep skepticism about her motives. Noting that Taiwan possessed excellent medical facilities, he wrote that given the tim-

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ing of her trip—during the American presidential campaign—“the people all believe that this time she is certainly carrying out a political task.”28 Madame Chiang’s visit to New York revealed the shadow that China politics now cast on the Chinese American community there. In San Francisco, Chinese American Democrats and Republicans alike dashed about stumping for their chosen candidates and ballot initiatives in the fall of 1952, and few paid any attention to Madame Chiang’s presence in the city. In contrast, she dominated the scene upon her arrival in New York. Scores of Chinese American leaders flocked to the airport to meet her, many expressing dismay when she ignored them and stepped immediately into her car. Hoping to silence the ensuing criticism, Madame Chiang then held a series of receptions and teas for the leaders of the traditional organizations. At one of the soirees, she called upon the overseas Chinese, including those in America, to act as the KMT government’s “cadres.” Chin-fu Woo angrily portrayed these words as yet another demand for complete submission to Chiang’s authority, but few others in the room that day saw anything wrong with Madame Chiang’s exhortation. Indeed, many viewed it as their natural assignment.29 At a time when Chinese American and China politics were growing apart in San Francisco, they increasingly blurred together in New York. Madame Chiang’s cadres saw one of their duties as shaping local electoral politics to serve the ROC’s ends. KMT activists thus moved in 1952 to dominate and control both local presidential campaign committees—groups that historically functioned to do nothing more than display candidates’ token Chinese supporters. But they were community organizations nonetheless, and the KMT sought to control all such groups. Unsurprisingly, factional identity played a far greater role than ideology in determining whether individual KMT leaders joined the Republicans or the Democrats. The composition of the 1952 Chinese American Republican presidential committee in New York affirmed the ROC regime’s success in silencing the anti-Chiang stirrings that had roiled the KMT during the civil war. In contrast to the diverse membership of the 1948 Dewey committee, Nationalists dominated the local Chinese Americans for Dwight D. Eisenhower group. William T.S. Wu and his wife Elsie Wu both served, even though William Wu was simultaneously a member of the Eastern US KMT executive committee, Taiwan’s National Overseas Chinese Committee, and the ROC’s National Assembly. Since Wu naturalized in 1946, his continued participation in the National Assembly should have jeopardized his citizenship—but US officials never applied the law as stringently to Chinese

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Americans on the right as they did to community leftists. Another member of the Ike committee was Ernest Moy, the turbulent, self-promoting cofounder of the group Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals and a China Lobby hanger-on. Yu Huan, editor of the once moderate Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, chaired the group, and the tone of his paper during the 1952 election verified that Chiang’s leadership no longer faced challenges within the New York party. In 1948, the Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York remained neutral in the election; months later, it criticized the Republican Party for being “regressive” and praised Li Zongren as a champion of the people. By 1952, the rightist KMT was back in charge. Yu heaped praise on Ike and called the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, an “extreme leftist” determined to “abandon Free China.” Not everyone in New York’s Chinese American Republican Party circles answered to the KMT, but even the one moderate non-KMT member of the Ike committee came from the world of China politics: the printer Man Wah Chan, a former employee of the Chinese Democratic Constitutionalist Party’s Chinese World. KMT domination of the local group was so complete that longtime Republican activist Wilbur Pyn did not even participate in it. Instead, he chaired the national Chinese Americans for Eisenhower group because of his ties to Thomas Dewey.30 KMT members largely monopolized the local Adlai Stevenson for President Committee as well, despite the official party line that Stevenson was a dangerous, anti-ROC leftist. The tusheng Tammany loyalist George Chintong chaired the Chinese American Stevenson committee, but he provided the only continuity in a group that KMT loyalists dominated. The Stevenson committee included Harry H. Toy, a New York KMT board member and the chairman of the New York Gee Tuck Sam Tuck Association. Minchi Wu Chin, a school principal and proponent of Madame Chiang’s New Life Movement, also sat on the committee. The last member was Woodrow Chan, the KMT official and former CCBA-NY chairman who became an American citizen in 1950. Like William T.S. Wu, Chan actively participated in Chinese politics—he was an overseas Chinese representative to the ROC National Assembly—and this should have resulted in his loss of US citizenship. But the US government did not pursue the issue. As in so many other KMT matters, factional loyalties rather than ideology determined who among the Nationalists joined the Democratic Party: Toy, Wu Chin, and Woodrow Chan were all connected to Albert Chow, either through old San Min Chu I associates (for Chan) or the national Gee Tuck Sam Tuck network (for Toy and Wu Chin).31 The composition of the Stevenson committee likely provoked in ordi-

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nary Chinese American New Yorkers even greater cynicism about American politics than they had felt in previous years. The Nationalist government’s interest in electing Eisenhower was obvious, so the flood of KMT members into the Ike committee attracted little attention. After all, many KMT members equated support for the Republican Party with support for the Chiang regime. But the KMT officials in the Stevenson committee served the same regime, and their presence in the campaign simply reflected the Nationalists’ practice of infiltrating every local organization. The regular community Democrats, long a pragmatic rather than an ideological group, allowed the KMT to monopolize a committee that few saw as valuable anyway. Indeed, beneath its KMT window dressing, the local Democratic organization barely changed in the early and mid-1950s. Most members of the group seemed profoundly uninterested in trying to increase its size, activities, or agenda, and community conditions were unfavorable anyway. The Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act of 1943 enabled Chinese to naturalize but offered no amnesty for the thousands of “paper sons” in the United States who used false documents to claim citizenship and entry rights. Even many war veterans entitled to naturalize regardless of their legal status did not do so, fearful of exposing their paper relatives. This meant that although comparatively wealthy, pro-Nationalist arrivals often naturalized and registered as Republican, longtime working-class residents of New York who might be expected to tilt more to the left did not flow into the Democratic Party or alternatives like the American Labor Party or the Liberal Party. Instead, most avoided all contact with the government, including the Board of Elections. For the few who dared to vote, the presence of prominent KMT leaders in the local Stevenson committee seemed cynical at best, given the ROC’s stand on the election. The Chinese American Democrats thus remained a fairly undemocratic group that collected a few scraps of patronage and helped community brokers interact with city agencies. Such brokers were content to let KMT activists monopolize high-profile committee positions, while they continued to maintain all-important relationships to local politicians and agencies. During the early 1950s, Tammany Hall, in steep decline a few years earlier, was in the midst of a brief resurgence under boss Carmine DeSapio. The revival benefited the Chinese American community’s brokers and its longtime Tammany loyalists, who received a few patronage positions from the machine: George Chintong accepted appointments to city school and police committees, while Thomas H. Lee, Shavey Lee’s brother, became an assistant US attorney at the recommendation of Tammany Hall. Thomas Lee, unlike some others in the group, seemed genuinely interested in im-

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proving Chinatown’s welfare. Under his leadership, a collection of local businesspeople called the Chinese Community Club collaborated with the city’s Community Service Society to bring nursing services to Chinatown and set up a meeting space for elderly men without families. But as an organization, the Democrats remained a fairly insular group of mainly On Leong Merchants Association members and local brokers who saw politics as good for business.32

Permutations of Political Activism: San Francisco While China politics continued to dominate Chinese American politics in New York, a growing number of Chinese Americans in the Bay Area became convinced that their community needed for its own protection to forge stronger alliances to local elected officials. In the early 1950s, evidence for this conclusion abounded, particularly in the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act and the increasing scrutiny Chinese Americans faced from the INS and the FBI. Civil rights concerns also persuaded many in the community’s growing middle-class, educated, American-citizen population, of the need to mobilize politically, as African Americans and other nonwhites were increasingly and visibly doing. Most of the men and women who became active in Bay Area politics pointedly avoided the reach of the KMT government and created a political culture that rejected its factional nastiness. Some feared entanglements that might expose them to Chinese or American government scrutiny; others were sick of the constant bickering and animosity that had characterized China politics in their parents’ generation. Still more saw in domestic politics a promising arena for community and ethnic betterment, a way to prove their Americanness, and an arena for combating racism. The vast majority of these younger activists also valued sticking together across party lines, in large part because they knew the history of their own community, for decades a scapegoat and target of white supremacist sentiment. The declining influence and involvement of Albert Chow enabled many younger Democrats to avoid China politics and KMT meddling. Although still the best-known Democrat in the community, Chow now spent far more of his time championing the ROC. Between May and September 1951 alone, Chow traveled to Taiwan and Hong Kong, meeting with ROC leaders and working to discourage further Third Force activity; visited New York to support the new anti-communist organization there; and led a Chinese American delegation that called on President Truman to request more assistance and support for Taiwan.33

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In the early months of 1952, Chow’s involvement in American politics continued to diminish, a reflection both of his newly close relationship to the Chiang regime and of his slipping influence within Democratic circles. In February, the House Ways and Means Committee convened hearings in San Francisco and subpoenaed an embarrassed Chow to testify about the activities of notorious California lobbyist Arthur Samish. Weeks later, Chow’s friend President Truman decided against running for a second full term. As party luminaries scrambled to declare their candidacies, Chow backed no one. Instead, he left the country, flying to Hong Kong for business and to Taiwan for another meeting with Chiang Kai-shek. Although he was the CCBA’s leading expert on immigration policy, he paid little attention to the McCarran-Walter Act then making its way through Congress. In fact, when Chinese American activists discovered the objectionable aspects of the bill, the CCBA for the first time played almost no role in the fight against the legislation; instead, veterans’ groups and the CACA took the lead.34

Liberal Revolt Further eroding Chow’s influence, his Chinatown Democrats in 1952 faced a liberal revolt that reflected larger trends in statewide politics and the growing confidence of many second-generation Chinese American citizen professionals. The leader of the rebels was Jackson K. Hu, a Hawaiian who had come to California in the 1930s to study at UC Berkeley. Settling in San Francisco, Hu worked as a real estate appraiser and became friends with the liberal journalist Gilbert Woo and his Chinese-Pacific Weekly colleague Moon Yuen. Woo, a tireless cheerleader for Chinese American involvement in US politics, devoted far more space to that subject than any other newspaper in the community. But he had a tiny staff and struggled to cover the many local events that punctuated the primary election season in California. When a leading candidate, Senator Estes Kefauver, came to San Francisco that spring, Woo asked Hu to attend a Kefauver for President banquet in Woo’s place. A Southern civil rights moderate, Kefauver had become a popular national figure during a series of televised 1951 hearings on organized crime, so the apolitical Hu knew of him and eagerly agreed to Woo’s request. Kefauver’s speech electrified Hu, who then organized a number of younger men and women in the community into a Chinese American Kefauver for President committee.35 The Chinatown Kefauver committee constituted a direct challenge to the community’s regular Democrats. Albert Chow and his supporters felt

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little enthusiasm for the Tennessee senator, a view that Truman himself and most members of the establishment Democratic Party in California shared. Yet Kefauver likely appealed to Hu and other young Chinese Americans in part for that very reason. More alarming to the state’s party regulars, the establishment Democrats ultimately failed to find anyone who could match Kefauver’s popularity. They placed Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, the state’s attorney general and leading Democrat, on the California ballot in the primary as a stand-in for a yet-to-be-determined establishment candidate, but Kefauver trounced him.36 For the upstart Kefauver backers in Chinatown, the primary was a sometimes exciting, sometimes disillusioning lesson in power politics and local influence. Statewide, Kefauver handily defeated Brown, winning almost three times as many votes as the attorney general. But despite the best efforts of Jackson Hu and, eventually, Gilbert Woo, whose paper endorsed Kefauver, the senator lost terribly in Chinatown, picking up only one hundred votes to Pat Brown’s more than seven hundred. Although Kefauver probably won more votes from the middle-class Chinese Americans who lived outside Chinatown, his defeat in the district demonstrated the continuing influence of Albert Chow and his establishment Democratic Party counterparts. Chow and his brother William Jack had longstanding ties not just to Kefauver nemesis Harry Truman but also to Pat Brown, who during his first term as San Francisco district attorney hired Jack Chow to work in his office. The decision of Democratic Party leaders to nominate Adlai Stevenson instead of Estes Kefauver for president also disheartened many of the idealistic young Chinese Americans who backed the Tennessean. Some even gave up on politics. Jackson Hu did not, instead continuing to participate in local and state-level Democratic activism. During the primary season, the San Francisco United Democrats (UDs) organization rallied behind Kefauver and invited Hu and his group to work with them for the Tennessee candidate. After the convention, Hu stayed friends with a number of the leading liberals he had met through the UDs, including rising California politicians Stanley Mosk and Alan Cranston. These connections gave him a degree of influence within the Chinese American community, and in November, Hu worked side by side with onetime Pat Brown backers in support of Adlai Stevenson.37 Although relieved by the results of the primary in Chinatown, Albert Chow’s protégés struggled to rebuild the kinds of political alliances Chow had forged in the quite different political atmosphere of the 1930s and early 1940s. Chow rose to prominence during the New Deal era, when Californians uncharacteristically embraced President Roosevelt’s Democratic

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Party. However, the Republican Party reasserted its almost complete dominance of California politics once World War Two began. By 1952, California’s governor was a Republican, albeit the moderate Earl Warren, both senators were Republicans because of Sheridan Downey’s retirement, and most of the Congressional delegation was Republican. Indeed, Pat Brown’s popularity among California Democrats rested in part on the fact that he was the only Democrat still holding a statewide office by 1952.38 In addition to navigating a political landscape inhospitable to Democrats, Albert Chow’s younger brother and protégé Jack Chow found that China politics complicated his political choices. By 1952, Albert Chow had begun to suffer from health problems and focused his diminished energy on business and ROC affairs, leaving most domestic political work to his brother. Like Albert Chow, Jack Chow remained a loyal Democrat at a time when conservative Republicans such as California senator William F. Knowland were the staunchest American defenders of the ROC. In fact, Knowland’s nickname was the “Senator from Formosa,” and he counted Chiang Kai-shek as a personal friend. On the one hand, then, Jack Chow probably felt significant pressure from KMT members both in the United States and Taiwan to back the Republican Party; on the other hand, his ties to Chiang, both through his brother and his own trips to Taipei, provoked the suspicion of many in the community who disliked both the PRC and the ROC or wanted nothing to do with China politics at all. The fact that a handful of Albert Chow’s other KMT allies, such as Frank Nipp and Doon Wong, also remained Democrats, did little to ameliorate such sentiments.39 Aware of his uneasy position, Jack Chow in 1952 moved to rebuild the kinds of political alliances his brother created during the New Deal era but played a less public role than Albert had in previous campaigns. Although Chinatown chairman of the Adlai Stevenson-John Sparkman Committee, Jack Chow largely stayed out of the spotlight, eschewing the high-profile appearances his brother had relished. Chow also copied what his Republican peers were already doing: seeking influence within party organizations. In 1950, a local dentist and CACA Republican named Thomas H. Wu won a seat on the San Francisco Republican County Committee. Wu understood that while the position was low-level and nongovernmental, it gave him the ability to bring his community’s concerns to candidates and officials. Acknowledging as much, Jack Chow ran in 1952 for a seat on San Francisco’s Democratic County Committee, as did Jackie Wong Sing, his law partner and brother-in-law (the two men married sisters Anne and Fanny Kwok). Their goal was not completely selfless: as immigration lawyers, Chow and Sing benefited from access to local politicians, especially

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the members of Congress who represented San Francisco. Still, for the same reason, they understood how much Chinese Americans had just lost in the battle to shape immigration policy in a way that would benefit their community. And they had no intention of allowing Thomas Wu and his GOP colleagues to make Chinatown Republican again.40 As Jack Chow and Jackie Wong Sing tried to rebuild Democratic Party influence, Chinese American Republicans exploited their party’s growing advantages in the 1952 race. Going into the fall, national Republican leaders radiated confidence, certain that the popularity of General Dwight D. Eisenhower would spell victory in November. Chinese American Republicans shared this optimism and hoped Ike’s strong campaign would make the GOP Chinatown’s majority party once again, a goal they had almost achieved in 1948. Furthermore, the ticket itself, which featured the moderate Ike and his red-baiting vice presidential choice Richard Nixon, appealed to all segments of the Chinese American GOP. The most prominent community Republicans were native-born people, including Earl Sun Louie, Thomas Wu, and John Young, who tended to be moderates and CACA members as well. However, as in New York, a number of Nationalist exiles joined the Republican Party in San Francisco in the late 1940s and 1950s. They pushed for more active support of the ROC and other right-wing policies, causing tensions within the Republican group. The Ike and Dick ticket made everyone happy, at least for the time being.41

Political Collegiality in San Francisco The 1952 campaign at times became quite acrimonious—Nixon labeled Stevenson a “garrulous Galahad” and a “double standard bearer,” while Truman attacked Eisenhower for “spreading a wave of filth”—but San Francisco Chinese Americans largely avoided such nastiness. In early October, Gilbert Woo observed that many of my good friends in Chinatown are Republicans. Our political views aren’t the same, but it hasn’t harmed individuals’ feelings. Moreover, we have often helped each other. At times I think that in Chinatown this can’t be considered anything but a miracle, because in particular, the generation that is a little older still embraces the ‘my politics are perfectly correct’ idea of not letting others deviate even a little.

Beginning in the late 1930s, Chinese American political activists began to carve out American politics as a safe space for diverse opinions,

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debate, and dissent in a community that China politics still divided. In 1952, as Chinese Americans on both sides of the aisle started venturing back into political activity after the harrowing first years of the Korean War, they again avoided nasty personal attacks and red-baiting. The tone of the campaign that year also helped pull in voters who might otherwise have avoided participation. Woo once lamented that Americans and Chinese talked about politics in very different ways. The latter fought tooth and nail every day of the year, while the former understood that “just because you’re a Democrat doesn’t mean you’re evil, and just because you’re a Republican doesn’t mean you’re a dunce.” In 1952, more San Francisco Chinese Americans than ever before talked and thought about politics in Woo’s “American” way.42 The general tenor of the campaign also reflected the fact that many activists had grown up together or at least knew each other well. Republican T. Kong Lee was friends with Democrat Jackie Wong Sing and served on the board of the increasingly conservative Chinese Times with new Democrat Ngai Ho Hong. Republican leaders Earl Sun Louie and Thomas Wu delighted in teasing liberal Democrat Gilbert Woo when the journalist covered GOP functions for the Chinese-Pacific Weekly; their different party affiliations and philosophies did not preclude friendship. Democrats Lim P. Lee and Jackson Hu grumbled about the CACA’s Republican tilt, but they were friends with most of the members anyway. And partisanship in these years was neither pure nor total. In 1951, Thomas Wu testified in favor of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission in hearings before the Board of Supervisors, taking a position that many white Republicans rejected. Chinese American moderates also blurred party lines during elections. Like their non-Chinese peers, numerous Chinese American Democrats voted for Eisenhower, while many Chinese American Republicans supported and donated to Chinatown’s Democratic representative, Jack Shelley, a proponent of more open immigration. The generally conservative CACA also gave its endorsement in 1952 to the doomed Democrat Franck Havenner, mindful of his longtime advocacy for fairer immigration policies.43 A 1952 ballot initiative, Proposition 14, encouraged this kind of collegiality in San Francisco Chinese American politics, binding the community together in a shared campaign to destroy an artifact of its painful past. Prop. 14 promised to remove anti-Chinese language from the state’s constitution. Dating to 1879, the discriminatory passages, while largely moot because of subsequent legislation and court decisions, aggravated many Chinese Americans mindful of their community’s history. By the early 1950s,

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civil rights organizing and court cases had begun to undermine most of the worst aspects of anti-Chinese American discrimination on the West Coast. A growing number of white residents even began to question anti–Asian American bigotry, given America’s extensive commitment to the noncommunist governments of places like South Korea and Taiwan. Still, Chinese Americans continued to face widespread discrimination in employment, immigration, and housing, and grappled with lingering suspicion about their loyalties as the Korean War dragged on. The state constitution’s wording thus irritated Chinese American activists and contradicted American propaganda as well.44 Despite their anger over the issue, Chinese American activists in the Bay Area chose the least visible way possible to attack the constitution’s archaic language, using a strategy that reflected their unease and defensiveness during the Korean War years. The most well-known California ballot propositions have generally resulted from citizens or organizations gathering signatures to put initiatives to a popular vote. However, the State Legislature can also move to amend the California constitution by passing a legislative initiative and placing it on the ballot the next year; Prop. 14 was this type of initiative. Given the San Francisco CACA’s major role in the Prop. 14 campaign, the organization was probably responsible for lobbying Assemblyman Tommy Maloney to introduce the amendment to the State Legislature in early 1951. By using the legislative method, the CACA avoided having to collect thousands of signatures from the public at the height of the Korean War. And in sponsoring the bill, Maloney, whose district included Chinatown, took public responsibility for the initiative and thus obscured the Chinese American role in it.45 The CACA spearheaded the campaign to pass Prop. 14 in 1952 but always sought to downplay rather than publicize the bill to the larger community. Instead of creating a speakers’ bureau to advertise Prop. 14 outside Chinatown, the CACA asked Chinese Americans with ties to non-Chinese to explain the proposition and defend it to their friends and colleagues. The organization also paid to print up hundreds of placards, which Chinese American shopkeepers and residents put in their windows, as well as bumper stickers that Chinese American drivers attached to their cars. Finally, the CACA committee secured the cooperation of the entire community press, which on the eve of the election jointly printed a half-page CACA statement urging Chinese Americans to work together to pass the initiative. Prop. 14 won by a large margin in every county in the state, suggesting that California voters supported the principle of equality, at least when doing so did not threaten actual white racial privilege. Chinese Americans

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continued to face considerable discrimination in California, but they still celebrated the Prop. 14 victory. At a tense time for the community, the win provided a measure of comfort and a reminder that they could bypass the nastiness of China politics after all.46 Chinese American political activists in San Francisco took even greater comfort in the fact that both presidential campaigns publicly acknowledged their supporters of Chinese ancestry in 1952, albeit for reasons that might have dismayed many community members. With the “loss of China” still a hot national issue, prominent Senate Republicans, including William F. Knowland, Francis Case, Bourke Hickenlooper, and Homer Ferguson, visited Chinatown to give speeches claiming that the Truman administration had failed the Nationalist regime. While Chinese American Republicans saw these campaign stops as affirmations of Chinatown’s Americanness, campaign staff actually chose the neighborhood to remind the public at large of Asia policy. For the Democratic Party, racial minorities, particularly African Americans, had become an important voting bloc since the 1930s, and especially after World War Two. At the same time, national Democratic candidates feared alienating the once solid but increasingly disaffected white South. Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson was a racial moderate who avoided discussing the explosive issue when possible, but his campaign staff picked San Francisco as one of the few places where he would talk directly to and about racial minorities. Initially enthused, local black Democrats became furious when the Stevenson campaign chose Chinatown for the speech site. Stevenson staff contended that Chinatown would provide a distinctive, recognizable backdrop; conveniently, it also enabled the candidate to address minority issues without appearing in front of the group white voters most feared. Disgusted black reporters covering the San Francisco trip refused to get off the bus for the Chinatown speech.47 The response of ordinary Chinese Americans to Stevenson’s speech suggested an ongoing shift in their attitudes towards American politics, with normally apathetic people recognizing the need to pay greater attention to the election. In July 1952, Moon Yuen expressed his frustration at the indifference and ignorance that characterized the way many ordinary Chinese Americans looked at American politics. Republican Party, Democratic Party. There are many friends who ask me why I’ve recently been making such a big noise about parties. Such critics inevitably make these points: first, they believe that American political issues are “somebody else’s” issues. Why should we (meaning Chinese ethnics) pay

144 / Chapter Four attention? . . . . [Because] American political issues directly and indirectly influence our everyday lives. With an enlightened political party in power, the lives of the people are safeguarded. With a reactionary political party in power, the majority of the people face unlimited suffering.

Over the next two months, the attitudes that frustrated Yuen began to change. First, a PRC resurgence in the Korean War, and the breakdown of armistice negotiations, worried many community members, who feared renewed hostility against Chinese Americans. At almost the same moment, Congress overrode President Truman’s veto of the McCarran-Walter Act, reminding Chinese Americans yet again of the flagging political influence of their community. And knowledge about Prop. 14 was growing in the community, uniting people of all political backgrounds. Stevenson’s speech thus drew an unprecedented audience of about ten thousand people, many of them Chinese American, and forced the Eisenhower campaign to respond. Although Eisenhower did not make a Chinatown stop, he invited Chinese American Republican leader Earl Sun Louie to ride his campaign train. The night before the vote, his campaign also sent Governor Earl Warren and Senator William Knowland to Chinatown to make nationally televised speeches in favor of Ike.48 Despite the controversies that swirled around them, Stevenson and Warren’s visits greatly heartened Chinese Americans, regardless of their politics. A local businessman noted the significance of the fact that Stevenson’s Chinatown speech had occurred in the midst of the PRC resurgence in the Korean War. “Chinatown passed through this once, causing great fear, worry, and anxiety, but this has changed into self-confidence,” noted the man. “[The campaign stop] proves that Chinatown is still part of America.” Gilbert Woo, who favored Stevenson in the election, still found the results of the campaign and the effort of activists on both sides heartening. “Because of their hard work, the polling places everywhere in Chinatown were especially crowded,” he exclaimed after the vote. “Chinatown has six polling places. Approximately 2000 people voted, and this was truly record-breaking.” The political apathy that Chinese Americans expressed just months earlier had evaporated.49

Competing for the Loyalty of the Overseas Chinese San Francisco’s Chinese Americans ignored the cynical motives of the presidential candidates who used their community as a backdrop, but they grew

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increasingly frustrated at the seeming unwillingness of both the ROC and the PRC to recognize that “Chinatown is . . . part of America.” By 1952, Taipei’s new Commissioner of Overseas Chinese Affairs, Cheng Yen-fen, was trying to appeal to overseas Chinese angry about the course of land reform on the mainland. Late that year, Cheng held a conference of overseas Chinese leaders to organize the Chinese Overseas United National Salvation Association. Mindful of the KMT’s own fractured past, the Salvation Association included in its oath not just a promise to support the ROC but, significantly, a personal pledge of loyalty to Chiang Kai-shek. Western diplomats soon noticed an uptick in other KMT attempts to secure the loyalty of the overseas Chinese. The PRC government fought back, turning to the prominent overseas leader and onetime New Yorker Seeto Meetong to explain away widely circulated horror stories about the beatings and executions of landlords in South China. Seeto contended that the publicized problems of the land reform campaign were the lies of KMT agents in Hong Kong and noted that in reality, overseas Chinese families appreciated being relieved of the “yoke of feudal landownership.” Such rhetoric hardly reassured millions of overseas Chinese, many of whom had worked for years to purchase land in China and wear that “yoke.” Sensing this, Beijing soon organized its own overseas Chinese conference and increased its efforts to recruit overseas Chinese youths to study in the PRC. By 1954, Communist officials also scrambled to revive flagging remittances, for many overseas Chinese stopped sending money because of land reform’s excesses and the Korean War–era currency policies of America and its allies. CCP cadres at the local level now changed the official class status of many overseas dependents from the despised and penalized “landlord” category to permutations of the much more favorable “peasant” label, and they started to offer a guaranteed rate of return on all overseas Chinese investments in certain areas.50 Both the United States and its ally Britain, whose colonies contained millions of people of Chinese ancestry, watched the battle for the hearts and minds of the overseas Chinese with increasing concern. In the two years after the CCP takeover of the mainland, American and British officials contended that the initial pride of many overseas Chinese in the accomplishments of the PRC would eventually wane. Both nations’ diplomats independently noted, however, that the growth of overseas Chinese disillusionment with the PRC government did not equal increased regard for the KMT on Taiwan. The British believed this a positive development, for many United Kingdom diplomats considered the China orientation of

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the large overseas Chinese population of British colonies in Singapore, Malaya, and elsewhere to be detrimental to the coherence and stability of such societies.51 American officials did not express the same sentiment, probably because by the early 1950s they had begun collaborating actively with certain Chinese American leaders who shared their desire to snuff out leftist activity. Even today, the FBI jealously guards the identities of long-dead community informants, but the Bureau’s highly redacted files contain some clues about tactics and subjects. Agents approvingly noted, for example, that the “CCBA are [sic] anticommunist and have cooperated in subversive investigations in areas having large concentration of Chinese.” The almost completely redacted file of Pei Chi Liu, a KMT official who came to the United States on a diplomatic passport in 1940, suggests that he tried to feed the FBI tips in the early 1950s. Unsurprisingly, he was a political advisor to Doon Wong, an honorary advisor to the Chiang regime and one of the principal organizers of the CCBA’s Anti-Communist League. Both men believed that certain members of the community threatened their cause. In New York, prominent anti-communists collaborated with the FBI and INS as well. For example, evidence suggests that Stephen C.Y. Pan, who like Liu came to the United States on an official ROC passport, helped American officials find and deport alleged leftists.52 For these reasons, as well as for their resistance to any recognition of the PRC, US officials tended to view the ROC campaign to woo overseas Chinese, including Chinese Americans, as benign or even positive. The renewed PRC-ROC battle for the loyalty of the overseas Chinese worried many ordinary Chinese Americans, especially those on the West Coast. As a cautious Gilbert Woo warned, “We are exactly the same as other American citizens and as individuals can discuss our opinions of the situation in China, but we shouldn’t take part in actual Chinese politics. No matter which side we join, it will affect our citizenship rights, because other people will proclaim that we’re not real citizens.” Now, PRC and ROC officials alike seemed complicit in this attitude, and their twin campaigns to win the support of overseas Chinese around the world caught the attention not only of American officials but of the broader public as well. 53 Chinese governments had long claimed the overseas Chinese for themselves, but the existence of two separate “Chinas,” one of them in a mutually hostile relationship with the United States, pushed the issue to the fore. With the 1953 conclusion of the Korean War, US officials began focusing greater attention on French Indochina, where the communist Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh forces were defeating their former colonial ruler, France.

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President Eisenhower described the situation in the region as resembling a row of dominos: if Vietnam fell to communism, the rest of Asia and Oceania would eventually follow. Policy makers knew that millions of people of Chinese ancestry lived throughout Southeast Asia, including most of the places Eisenhower listed as potential dominos, and as the PRC attempted to wield more influence outside its own borders, Asians and Westerners alike wondered about the loyalty of these overseas Chinese. India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru publicly claimed that the “vast” communities of overseas Chinese in the region were “rather frightening.” The Indonesian government, frustrated when 1954 talks with the PRC on the issue stalled, sent its parliament a bill to ban dual nationality (the two nations concluded a treaty dealing with the issue in 1955, but tensions over ethnic issues continued to simmer). British colonial officials in Malaya fretted over the way Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai’s statements about nationality would play in the colony’s Chinese and Malaysian language papers. The American press warned of the potential for overseas Chinese to act as a “fifth column” from Singapore to the Philippines to Thailand, Burma, and Vietnam.54 Many Chinese Americans, alarmed at such heated rhetoric, grew even more worried in 1955, when the United States and the PRC held direct talks for the first time. The negotiations, which the press dubbed the “Little Geneva” talks, concerned the fate of American citizens in China and Chinese students in the United States. The former were mainly people marooned in China in 1949 after the Nationalist defeat, while the latter were almost all students stranded in the United States at the same moment. Many of the students wanted to return to the mainland, despite American concerns that their advanced technical and scientific training could benefit the PRC. Others hoped to stay in the United States permanently. As the talks dragged on through late 1955, journalist Dai-ming Lee reprinted an Associated Press item, which asserted that “Red China has informed the United States it considers all Chinese nationals in America—not just students—are liable for repatriation. . . . China is reported to consider all persons of Chinese ancestry her own citizens, even if they hold American or some other citizenship.” In fact, the truth was murkier—neither the ROC nor the PRC had renounced their claims to such people nor specified the extent of loyalty they expected.55 Regardless, the report clearly touched a nerve in Chinese American communities. The reported PRC position on nationality at the “Little Geneva” talks raised the specter of a US-based overseas Chinese community existing apart from American society in every way, with its own political

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orientation, culture, and language. As scholar G. William Skinner argued at the time, nationalism and deliberate European colonial policies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had helped foster in Southeast Asia “the persistence of national identity” among Chinese newcomers. In contrast, Chinese Americans did not live among colonized Asian peoples and had not developed “feelings of superiority” towards a subordinated majority population. They did not constitute a distinct, successful class of merchants and traders, either. The entire dynamic was quite different than in Southeast Asia, and it diverged even more with exclusion repeal and the slow postwar erosion of anti-Chinese discrimination. The CCP’s victory, land reform policies, and entry into the Korean War also cut the large majority of Chinese Americans off from China and pushed them to see the United States as their permanent home.56 Fearful that other Americans might not understand this, Chinese Americans responded to the Little Geneva story with deep concern. Many wondered just how serious PRC officials really were, and, perhaps, how willing American officials were to stand up to them. The US participants in the talks had asked PRC negotiators to list the names of Chinese students allegedly denied the right to leave the United States. A Chinese student wrote to Dai-ming Lee to tell him that “rumors are flying around the East Coast . . . that the Communist Party is offering a high price for a list of the names of students” to use in the negotiations. As the Sino-American talks dragged on into the fall, Gilbert Woo at the Chinese-Pacific Weekly confronted a mailbag full of letters containing detailed questions about the talks’ impact on ordinary people. The tone of the correspondence suggested as well that the American KMT’s anti-leftist collaboration with federal officials had deeply eroded trust within Chinese American communities. An anxious correspondent said that he relied on Gilbert Woo to give honest answers of the type “appropriate to the style of the overseas masses, not the style of flattering and toadying to ‘overseas leaders’ that is a constant of despicable journalists”—almost certainly a slap at the party-controlled newspapers in the community. Dai-ming Lee’s anonymous correspondent advised fellow students to be very cautious and hide their status from other Chinese Americans, who might not be trustworthy.57

San Francisco: Third Force in Decline While Dai-ming Lee’s readers ate up his coverage of the Little Geneva talks, his strident denunciations of the Chinese Communist Party, and his sarcastic attacks on Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT leader’s cronies, few cared

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about the political party the editor championed. The men and women who a generation earlier might have joined the CDCP now looked to the Democrats and Republicans instead. Some also participated in the Tea Forum, a series of lunches that epitomized the new political collegiality of San Francisco Chinatown by bringing Chinese Americans of all political persuasions together to hear speakers address pertinent topics. But almost no one sought entry to the CDCP anymore.58 The Third Force political movement that Lee now led continued to decline after the end of the Korean War, despite the journalist’s energetic support for a noncommunist, non-KMT future for China. Lee and J.K. Choy, the founder of the Chinese World’s English section, kept up their barrage of letters to American officials and continued their attempts to meet with anyone in the federal government who would give them five or ten minutes. However, the war and the atmosphere it created in the end thwarted even their best efforts. In 1951, Choy arranged a meeting with State Department officials who not only rebuffed his requests for assistance for the Third Force but privately labeled him an agent of Chiang sent to test them. Officials also rejected his pleas to issue visas to Third Force elements who wanted to travel to the United States. If such people spoke against new American ally Chiang during the Korean War, a State Department staff member argued, “it would be at the least inconsistent for the U.S. to provide a platform for any great length of time to the airing of such views.”59 Over the next few years, the seeming permanence of the US commitment to Taiwan pushed Lee, Choy, and other Third Force adherents to shift tactics, amid thinning ranks and growing community skepticism. Stranded in New York City, the ROC’s onetime acting president, Li Zongren, settled in for the long haul and announced that he would recruit Chinese students in America to publish a Third Force newspaper in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. The venture never materialized, prompting much whispering about the old general’s stability and the supposedly evil influence of Kan Chieh-hou, his closest aide. For his part, Dai-ming Lee largely gave up his attempts to convince the US government to back the Third Force after President Eisenhower took office. Instead, he increasingly focused on publishing diatribes against both the communists and the Nationalists. In a New Year’s message in January 1954, Lee urged the people of the PRC to revolt against their government but also called the year a “make or break” time for Chiang, who was publicly promising once again to retake the mainland. “Chiang has uttered his empty phrases so often, he actually has come to believe them himself,” Lee noted dryly. “He has so deluded himself that he thinks in terms of returning to the mainland on a sedan chair

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carried by American soldiers and sailors with the US Air Force holding an umbrella over his bald pate to keep him from getting sunstruck.”60 Yet Lee and his colleagues increasingly saw preserving a noncommunist Taiwan as the only hope for creating an actual “Free China.” Gambling that Chiang’s boasts would eventually destroy the Generalissimo’s prestige and power, Lee helped create a new Third Force coalition, the Free China Political Organizations (FCPO), in the summer of 1954. In addition to the CDCP, the group included the Chinese Hongmen Party, the Freedom Front, the Chinese Democratic Alliance, and Li Zongren’s Committee for Revival of the Kuomintang. The principle aim of the group was not, as with previous Third Force groups, to gain US recognition. Now, adherents simply hoped to whip up public opinion in Taiwan to such a degree that Chiang Kai-shek would have to give up his hold on the government there. Li Zongren became the glue that held the group together, giving the collection of exiled intellectuals and Chinese American citizens a focus for their activism. In March 1954, just months before the FCPO founding, Taiwan’s National Assembly formally stripped Li of the vice presidency. Regardless, the groups that constituted the FCPO appointed Li to be their leader, for the old general still commanded respect for his independence from Chiang and his role in the war against Japan. In December, the FCPO with Li at its head even issued a strident manifesto criticizing both Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek and calling on all Chinese patriots to rebel against communism.61 The same problems that had bedeviled the Third Force for a decade quickly emerged in the FCPO, particularly the difficulty of pulling together people with disparate aims and sometimes volatile personalities. In mid1955, Li Zongren held a surprise press conference in which he called for an internationally supervised demilitarization of Taiwan and the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu, as well as negotiations with the PRC over their future. If the negotiations failed, Li said, the people of those islands should be able to hold a plebiscite to determine whether they wished to remain Nationalist territory or join the PRC. Coming from their leader, the proposal shocked Li’s FCPO partners, who contended that his idea amounted to “abandonment of resistance to communism,” in the words of a stunned Dai-ming Lee. The CDCP and the Hongmen Party hastily withdrew from the FCPO and disavowed its activities.62 The collapse of the FCPO proved to be the death gasp of the Third Force. Dai-ming Lee never gave up his crusade against both Mao and Chiang nor stopped trying to knit together the Chinese who opposed both regimes. After the dissolution of the FCPO, he invited Carsun Chang, a longtime Third

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Force leader, to write a series of articles for the Chinese World. Lee’s close associate, J.K. Choy, had derided the man to American officials in the early 1950s, but no matter—Chang was one of the few remaining Third Force leaders with whom Lee could still collaborate and demonstrate a united front. But words could not save the Third Force, which ceased to exist except in the columns of the Chinese World and Honolulu’s New China Daily Press, the CDCP paper that Dai-ming Lee edited before his move to San Francisco.63 Even while keeping the Third Force alive in print, Dai-ming Lee and J.K. Choy increasingly turned their attention to Chinese American civil rights issues. Chinese Americans in San Francisco in the 1950s cared less about China politics than their parents had, and the issues that piqued their interest were not Chiang Kai-shek’s latest pronouncements or the world tour of some official from the ROC’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission. Instead, they wanted the right to remit money to families on the mainland, more liberal immigration policies, and better treatment of visa applicants in Hong Kong. By the mid-1950s, then, Dai-ming Lee was devoting less of his paper to the questions of Free China and more of it to the concerns of the Chinese American community of San Francisco. Lee weighed in on everything from the San Francisco Police Department’s “Chinatown squad” to the local library but paid particular attention to the abuses of the American consul-general in Hong Kong, who continued to harass and block visa applicants. In 1956, when the federal government launched a widespread investigation of Chinese immigration, Dai-ming Lee became one of the loudest critics of the probe.64 Lee’s colleague, J.K. Choy, also sought to reconcile his China activities with his increasing interest in American politics. In 1954, he created his own organization, called the Crusade for Free Democratic China (CFDC), to help “promote the spread of democratic ideals, constitutional government and legal principles in China.” Although a handful of former missionaries and civic leaders joined the Crusade’s board, Choy seems to have been the group’s only really active member, traveling to Washington in early 1955 to lobby members of Congress. Upon his return, he resigned from his position at the Wo Kee Company to free up more time for the Chinese World and the Crusade; however, he stepped down from both within a few months. Choy offered little explanation for these decisions, but his own politics had been shifting away from Dai-ming Lee’s for quite some time. In contrast to Lee, a strong supporter of Eisenhower and other moderate Republicans, Choy increasingly rejected the GOP. By late 1955, he began to turn his back on China politics and become more and more active in

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San Francisco’s growing Chinese American liberal Democratic movement. Much more than Lee, he embraced Chinese American politics rather than China politics as the community’s future.65

Chinese American Democrats in a Changing California Despite the Kefauver revolt of 1952, Albert Chow and his family seemed in early 1955 to have reasserted their control over the Chinatown Democrats. Although Albert Chow’s personal involvement in party politics had diminished by the mid-1950s, his younger relatives continued to follow his centrist and often transnational path. For Jack Chow, involvement in ROC issues was part of the family immigration brokerage business, which employed not only the former deputy district attorney but also his brotherin-law Jackie Wong Sing and, of course, his ailing brother, Albert. Indeed, Jack Chow participated in ROC politics into the 1970s, seeing it as a legitimate and effective way to champion Chinese American civil rights. He frequently traveled not only to Hong Kong to work on immigration cases but also to Taipei, where he met with members of the government and the National Assembly.66 Charles Leong seemed similarly intent on copying his uncle Albert Chow’s practice of mixing business and politics. A longtime journalist, the centrist Leong worked briefly for the Committee for a Free Asia (CFA) before launching the English-language Chinese News in 1953. To burnish his anti-communist credentials during the waning months of the Korean War, Leong picked up endorsements from Albert Chow, then president of the CCBA, and Doon Wong of the Anti-Communist League. He even hired Ernest Moy, the ARCI cofounder, to work for the News in New York. With ambitions larger than his budget, Leong then tried to convince his old employers at the Committee for a Free Asia to allow him to use “existing Committee facilities, news, and research information, and particularly, specially prepared articles by Committee personnel” to augment the News’ shoestring operation. Leong hinted as well that the Chinese News could best take the place of the Asian Student, the short-lived CFA publication that the Committee created in 1952 to circulate to Asian students in the United States.67 Unfazed by the CFA’s decision to reject his proposal, Leong was soon working another angle. In mid-1954, as the midterm elections neared, Leong tried to convince the California Democratic Party to pay $4,500 to the News in return for his agreement to print and distribute thousands of extra copies containing “editorials, and editorial support . . . [and] properly

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slanted stories . . . written on behalf of the Democratic slate.” Donning Chow’s power broker mantle, Leong even contended that “the scope and originality of such a plan to win the Chinese-American vote in California, where the leadership of the Chinese in the national Chinese scene is accepted, will also have the added impetus . . . of winning over Chinese in other parts of the United States to the Democratic vote.” Like the CFA, the Democrats declined Leong’s proposal. Perhaps they had seen the similar claims that the Chinese American Citizens Alliance’s officers made to the candidates who received that group’s endorsement.68 Whatever the case, party leaders saw no need to invest in the Chinese American vote because they mistakenly assumed that the Chow family had the local Democrats under control at a time of widespread liberal challenges to the California Democratic establishment and the state’s political culture. California election officials allowed candidates to cross-file, a legacy of the state’s Progressive era politics but one that helped thwart Democratic Party growth. Although Democrats proved unable to defeat cross-filing, in 1952 voters approved an initiative to force candidates to list their party affiliation on the ballot. Even more importantly, the 1952 presidential election sparked the beginning of a club movement whose members formed local Democratic organizations meant to breathe new life into a party still struggling to win elections. Between the summer of 1952 and early 1953, one hundred new Democratic clubs, most of them liberal in orientation, sprang up in California, challenging older, hidebound organizations and even taking over some county party committees. By late 1953, leaders of the party’s liberal wing and club activists joined to create the California Democratic Council, which played an important role in California Democratic Party politics for many years afterwards. As the club movement gained power and influence, a small but growing number of Chinese Americans liberals began to look to it for inspiration.69 The community liberals shared some important characteristics with typical club movement members, but their status as Chinese Americans complicated their political options. Like the white club movement members, the Chinese American liberals tended to be middle-class, educated professionals. However, they experienced the direct impact of racism, which white club members did not. Furthermore, as these Chinese American liberals sought to address discrimination, they encountered obstacles from conservatives within their own communities. First and foremost was the way that Taiwan supporters who placed the future of “Free China” above every other issue ignored the mediocre civil rights record of politicians such as William Knowland or California governor Goodwin Knight. In addition, racial dis-

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crimination in the mainstream job market made many Chinese American liberals somewhat dependent on Chinatown’s niche economy and thus discouraged them from disclosing their political leanings. Still, in ways public and private, Chinese American liberal Democrats began to make their presence felt in the mid-1950s. When six Chinese American friends donated $300 to the 1954 assembly campaign of liberal San Francisco attorney Phil Burton, one of the leaders of the club movement, they asked the candidate to keep their identities secret. Although the men’s individual donations were almost double that of the average Burton contributor, they apparently feared the economic and social repercussions they could face in their own community for supporting the candidate. Yet this quiet activism of 1954 hinted at a larger dissatisfaction with the centrism of Chinese American establishment Democratic politics and the conservatism of Taiwan supporters. So did the race for Democratic county central committee, in which former Kefauver supporter Jackson K. Hu challenged Jack Chow in the 21st Assembly District. Although Hu lost, he received an unprecedented endorsement from an outside group—the United Democrats, which had backed Kefauver in 1952. And the more than eight hundred votes Hu won in his district suggested the depth of enthusiasm for his liberal views.70 A few months later, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) charged Albert Chow, Jack Chow, Jack Wong Sing, and their firm with tax evasion, dealing a stunning blow to the man still known as the “Mayor of Chinatown.” A government spokesman contended that the “increase in [Albert] Chow’s net worth was higher than the income reported in his tax returns” during the period 1947 to 1952. Those were the last years of the pre-McCarranWalter Act era, a period during which immigration brokers such as Chow scrambled to get Chinese relatives of US citizens admitted to America as nonquota immigrants or derivative citizens. The IRS’s move was part of an intensifying federal probe into Chinese immigration fraud, an investigation whose scope widened the next year.71 In late 1955, China politics still dominated the New York City community as they had since the late 1940s, while San Francisco’s Chinese Americans moved slowly but steadily away from these same politics. In early 1956, a nationwide Department of Justice investigation into fraudulent Chinese immigration underscored the significance of these two distinct political cultures. In New York, the probe dealt a huge blow to the city’s few American-born community leaders, many of them immigration brokers who found themselves under scrutiny or arrest. In San Francisco, how-

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ever, the investigation prompted the full emergence of the growing number of community liberals, who helped lead a successful battle to thwart the worst government excesses. In the process, they created a political movement with long-term implications for their community and its influence in the city.

FIVE

The “Immigration Racket” Investigation and the Rise of a New Politics

In late 1955, Everett Drumright, the US consul-general at Hong Kong, submitted to the State Department his now infamous report alleging widespread Chinese American immigration fraud. In the lengthy document, Drumright claimed that immigration brokers located in Hong Kong worked with stateside Chinese American fixers to sell fake papers and identities to Chinese who wished to enter the United States. In response to the Drumright Report, the Department of Justice, with the cooperation of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, impaneled grand juries in San Francisco and New York to investigate the supposed “immigration racket” and launched a probe into Chinese immigrants and derivative citizens throughout the country.1 The San Francisco federal prosecutor also issued a blanket subpoena to more than twenty Chinatown surname, family, and benevolent associations, demanding all their records and membership rolls since their founding. The investigation sent waves of panic through Chinese American communities throughout the country, for unlawful immigration was widespread, the result of sixty years of outright exclusion and another decade of tiny quotas. Yet the subpoenas, and the aftermath of the immigration investigation, proved to be a turning point for Chinese American politics. At this critical moment, American-born activists, especially those with ties to liberal politicians, helped thwart the federal government’s most aggressive tactics. In the end, the 1956 investigation increased political activism and organizing in San Francisco and eroded the prestige of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York. Everett Drumright made his allegations at a particularly sensitive time in US-Asian relations. A year earlier, Chiang Kai-shek had moved tens of thousands of troops to Quemoy and Matsu, two Republic of China (ROC) island groups very close to the Chinese mainland. In response, the People’s

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Republic of China (PRC) bombarded the islands and sent troops to capture another ROC-occupied island off the coast. ROC ally Dwight D. Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, discussed the possibility of using nuclear weapons against China to protect the offshore islands. Although both sides finally stepped back, the brinksmanship created an incredibly tense atmosphere between the United States and the PRC.2 By 1955, US officials were also scrambling to install Ngo Dinh Diem as premier of the Republic of Vietnam, laying the very early groundwork for America’s eventual military commitment there. Like much of Southeast Asia, Vietnam contained a large and economically important population of Chinese ancestry, a fact that worried American leaders. Everett Drumright’s report echoed President Eisenhower’s own belief that “overseas Chinese” loyalty, whether in Southeast Asia or the United States, was unreliable at best. In addition, Drumright insinuated that the PRC could easily sneak communist agents into the United States, indoctrinate apolitical Chinese youths, and blackmail Chinese Americans through family members in Guangdong.3 But the Drumright Report also revealed that while many white officials continued to regard Asian Americans as potentially disloyal simply because of their ancestry, authorities could no longer publicly make such claims. Although racial discrimination remained deeply ingrained in the United States, the nation had changed markedly since the 1942 Japanese American internment. International criticism of American inequality embarrassed the Eisenhower Administration in the midst of the Cold War. Ongoing civil rights activism was also reshaping American society North and South. Indeed, Drumright made his claims at the very moment that African Americans in Alabama launched the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott. The antiChinese procedures of the INS dated to an era when US authorities openly practiced racial discrimination, but in 1956 federal investigators quickly discovered that they could no longer operate as they once had. People of Chinese ancestry, especially on the West Coast, were becoming civil rights activists and increasingly counting liberal politicians among their allies.4 The 1956 investigations and subpoenas showed the importance of these strong and growing Chinese American political networks in the Bay Area, as well as how a lack of similar networks in New York left the community there particularly vulnerable to official harassment. Historians generally credit the nation’s CCBAs with leading the resistance to the immigration probe, yet in reality the debacle eroded the groups’ prestige and revealed the weaknesses of their transnational approach to politics. Most community members realized that CCBA leaders’ earlier anti-leftist collusion with

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federal officials had not prevented the groups themselves from becoming a target of the Justice Department. Nor did the intervention of the Chiang regime, an ally of the CCBAs, stop or even slow the US government’s 1956 probe.5 Instead, in San Francisco the CCBA ended up relying on politically active Chinese American Democrats to guide opposition to the Justice Department’s subpoenas. These activists’ connections to leading California liberals forced the Justice Department and the INS to offer some concessions to the community. In New York, where Chinese Americans lacked comparable political organizations or networks, the Kuomintang (KMT)controlled CCBA-NY floundered, unable to stop or slow the Justice Department probe. The organization never fully recovered its prestige or influence in the community.

San Francisco: Beating the Unbeatable In early 1956, a young lawyer named Arnold Phillip Burton began an ambitious campaign for a California State Assembly seat. A liberal Democrat, Phil Burton had lost his first bid for the Assembly two years earlier, but in 1955 he moved to the 20th Assembly District (AD) and planned a new run for office. The 20th was one of the city’s most racially diverse and heavily Democratic districts, a mixture of working-class whites, wealthy denizens of Nob Hill, the population of Chinatown, and a large number of Japanese Americans and African Americans. In spite of the district’s party registration numbers, however, the 20th AD incumbent was a Republican. Observers called him “the unbeatable” Tommy Maloney because of his twenty-fouryear tenure in the Assembly.6 At first glance, Burton seemed to have no chance of winning, not just because of Maloney’s incumbent advantage but also because so few of the 20th AD’s Democrats even knew their assemblyman was a Republican. California still allowed cross-filing in primary elections, and for years candidates did not have to list their party affiliations on the ballot. That changed after 1952, when labor unions and Democratic activist groups like the liberal California Democratic Council (CDC) mobilized to alter the election law in an effort to end half a century of Republican control in California. The liberal Democrats backed a successful initiative that required candidates to state their party affiliations on the ballot—quite an innovation in California. Between this change and Phil Burton’s tireless appeals to individual voters, the underdog candidate managed the seemingly impossible: winning the Democratic primary despite Maloney’s decision to cross-file (Burton did not cross-file). In November, Burton shocked the

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experts again, defeating Maloney by a tiny 500-vote margin. Political analysts at the time credited a successful Democratic voter registration drive, Burton’s grassroots organization, his record on civil rights, and his door-todoor campaigning, for the stunning upset.7 Observers before the vote assumed that Burton would do poorly in Chinatown. Tommy Maloney spent little time in the neighborhood or working on the community’s issues; still, he had sponsored Proposition 14, the largely symbolic 1952 ballot initiative that stripped anti-Chinese language from the California constitution. Phil Burton, on the other hand, was a member of the liberal Young Democrats organization, which at its 1956 convention passed a resolution endorsing the admission of the PRC to the United Nations. Burton publicly opposed the resolution, but his opponents used it almost every year after to cast him as a dangerous leftist. On the face of it, such accusations should have scared away Chinese Americans. The Korean War and stepped-up immigration enforcement in the early 1950s had already taken a tremendous toll on Chinatown—journalist Gilbert Woo described the impact as “causing the average frightened Chinatown resident to fear speaking out and to turn white at the mere whisper of danger.” The Second Red Scare still affected American politics, while KMT conservatives in Chinatown continued to red-bait opponents. Phil Burton was an excellent target for such people because of his opposition to loyalty oaths and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Why, then, would any Chinese American take the risk of supporting such a candidate?8 Burton’s liberalism attracted rather than repelled the growing Chinese American middle class, however, for despite their education and American citizenship, such people faced significant racial discrimination in many areas of their lives. Certainly, Chinese American rights had increased markedly since World War Two, yet people of Chinese ancestry continued to encounter racism when they sought homes outside particular areas of San Francisco or jobs in certain professions, including those represented by some of the city’s unions. Burton supported fair housing and equal employment legislation and spoke frequently against racial discrimination and McCarthyism, essentially addressing many of the frustrations of the Chinese American middle class. His stand on China was neutral enough to satisfy these same people, most of whom tried to avoid China politics or quietly wished the Treasury Department would lift its ban on remittances to the mainland.9 Still, Burton’s early Chinese American supporters proceeded cautiously, suggesting the kind of insecurity and fear that gripped the community in the aftermath of Korean War harassment. In 1954, during Burton’s first,

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unsuccessful run for a different Assembly seat, a garment contractor named Paul Hui approached the politician and donated $300 to his campaign. The $300 came not just from Hui but from a group of his friends, including Mon Chow, Philip Wong, Kam Wah Lew, and Park Huie, all of whom asked the candidate to keep their identities secret. After all, the Democratic county central committee, whose members included Albert Chow’s brother Jack Chow, had been trying to thwart Burton’s candidacy at every turn. Hui and his friends were local businessmen and likely feared angering Chow and other powerful Democrats, but they also admired Phil Burton’s liberalism enough to help pay his bills.10 Building on this kind of quiet support, Burton made a sincere but shrewd move in the first month of his 1956 campaign for the 20th AD. When federal prosecutors issued the blanket Chinatown subpoenas, the candidate became the first white politician to publicly oppose them and to label them racially discriminatory. The position won the attention and respect of many Chinese Americans, as well as a primary election endorsement from Gilbert Woo’s Chinese-Pacific Weekly. “After the subpoena case, [Burton] erupted, becoming the first to come out and attack the prosecutor’s office,” the paper reminded readers. “If we don’t vote for him, we will let down a friend.” Within a few months, the newspaper began featuring the candidate almost weekly, while Woo and Burton forged a friendship that lasted until Woo’s death in 1979.11 Burton had not criticized the subpoena unbidden but instead with the encouragement of an old friend and classmate, Democratic Party activist and juvenile court social worker Lim P. Lee. The two attended Lincoln University’s night law school together in the late 1940s, with Burton managing Lee’s successful bid for student body secretary. In an interview with Burton biographer John Jacobs, Lee recalled that in early 1956, Burton asked him for an introduction to Albert and William Jack Chow, still the Democratic Party’s leaders in Chinatown. At the meeting, the ailing Albert Chow turned to Lee and told him in Chinese to “help [Burton] out, but not in any way that will benefit him.” As in 1954, the Democratic establishment and the county central committee opposed Burton’s candidacy. Chow himself had little interest in assisting the upstart liberal or changing the political status quo in his own neighborhood.12 Shortly after the meeting, Lim P. Lee stopped working for Albert and Jack Chow, ending a relationship that had begun before World War Two. Determined to help Phil Burton win the Chinese American vote and the 20th AD seat, Lee became an invaluable asset to the candidate. Biographer Jacobs contends that Lee saw Burton as “his ticket to the top in China-

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town,” but in 1956 it was really the other way around, as Lee clearly understood. After all, Tommy Maloney enjoyed immense advantages over Phil Burton. The Democratic Party’s regular organization in San Francisco even violated its own rules by refusing to endorse Burton because party stalwarts disliked the brash, outspokenly liberal young lawyer.13 Under the circumstances, Lim P. Lee, who had spent years working for the Chows, risked a great deal in breaking with them and throwing his support to Burton. Still, by early 1956 Lee had grown increasingly frustrated with the Chow brothers. To begin with, Lee commanded considerable respect and recognition independent of his work for Albert Chow. He had held important offices in the American Legion’s Cathay Post, the AMVETS, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, was a local leader in the YMCA and the Methodist church, and in early 1956 received a mayoral appointment to the Chinatown Planning Committee. Despite this, Lee knew he would never lead the Chinatown Democrats; Albert Chow would always favor his own family and business partners, including his brother Jack and Jack’s brother-in-law Jackie Wong Sing.14 Lee’s own ambitions aside, he particularly opposed Chow’s immersion in China politics. A less ardent New Dealer than Lee, Chow forged a close relationship with the pro-Republican ROC leadership after 1950, at which point his main concerns became his business and the KMT. Chow’s relative lack of interest in the civil rights battles already brewing locally also frustrated Lee, who publicly ignored China politics in favor of domestic concerns. The Justice Department investigation essentially confirmed Lee’s political instincts by demonstrating the inability of transnational activism to protect the civil rights of the Chinese American community. After the grand jury issued the subpoenas, the CCBA and other traditional association leaders turned first to Chinese consuls in San Francisco and New York, asking them to intervene to stop the process. The tactic backfired, actually intensifying American government hostility. “Aliens holding Chinese national passports are not concerned nor involved [with the investigation] in any respect,” contended a State Department official before a meeting with Chinese Ambassador V.K. Wellington Koo. “Consequently, a logical question arises as to just what is the interest of the Nationalist Government of China in a matter which, at this juncture, is wholly domestic.” When ROC officials in Taipei protested directly to their American counterparts, their complaints also fell on deaf ears.15 Desperate, the CCBA now turned to the growing network of Chinese American community liberals to help fight the subpoenas, a move that subtly eroded the standing of the association and the ROC and indirectly chal-

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lenged the Chow brothers as well. The CCBA continued to coordinate the fight against the subpoenas and retained attorneys Marvin Lewis and Harold Faulkner to defend the targeted groups. However, CCBA leaders, whose ranks included a far larger number of American-born men than in years past, asked several key Chinese American liberal Democrats to collaborate on the defense. These activists, including Joseph Quan, Ngai Ho Hong, and Lim P. Lee, not only played conspicuous roles in the subpoena challenge but also brought in their friend Phil Burton to privately plot strategy with Faulkner and Lewis. In contrast, Albert and Jack Chow, the ostensible leaders of the Chinatown Democrats and visible links to the ROC regime, remained largely absent from the CCBA initiative; the brothers were still under investigation for tax fraud.16

Political Networks: San Francisco Lim P. Lee had risked his future with San Francisco’s Democratic Party to back Phil Burton not just because he believed in the candidate but also because he understood the value of Burton’s connections to local and national liberal activists. The federal government cast the 1956 Justice Department investigation as a necessary probe to prevent Chinese communist infiltration in the United States. At first, this justification satisfied many moderate Democrats who either accepted the government’s explanation without question or simply avoided any group whom the public might associate with communism. Those who initially withheld comment on the Justice Department probe included not just conservative Republicans but also moderate Democrats such as Congressman Jack Shelley, whose district included San Francisco’s Chinatown. Given this silence, community activists like Lim P. Lee especially valued noncommunist allies unafraid of associating with those whom federal authorities red-baited. Phil Burton and his CDC and Young Democrats colleagues fit the bill.17 As Lee hoped, Burton quickly tapped into this liberal network to help defend the Chinese American community. When the Justice Department investigation spread and intensified, Burton contacted US Senate candidate and fellow liberal Richard Richards, who made a public statement opposing the blanket subpoenas. The announcement by Richards, whom establishment Democrats respected more than Burton, helped persuade the party’s moderates to come forward as well. Within days, Rep. Sam Yorty of Los Angeles and Rep. Jack Shelley both publicly questioned the Justice Department probe. Shelley, who cross-filed in the 1956 primary, even promised that if he won enough votes in June to avoid contesting the November

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election, he would travel to Hong Kong over the summer and investigate Consul General Drumright’s methods and agenda.18 While tapping Burton’s liberal connections, Lim P. Lee also benefited from a personal network rooted in twenty years of Democratic Party activism. One of the least known but most crucial figures in this network was Oliver J. Carter, a federal district court judge in San Francisco. Like Lee, Carter was a product of the New Deal tide that swept California in the late 1930s, breaking Republican dominance for the first time in decades. After serving in the state legislature, the liberal Carter joined the administration of Culbert Olson and went on to lead the state Democratic Party in the late 1940s. During his years in Democratic politics, he became friendly with Lim P. Lee and other Chinese American liberals and knew that they struggled with racial discrimination. One of the few white politicians of the era who respected Asian American rights, he opposed Japanese American internment in 1942 when almost no one else did. Carter also broke with party leaders in 1948 to endorse the strong minority civil rights plank that went down to defeat at the Democratic Convention that year.19 The haste of the US attorneys seeking to uncover immigration fraud in the Chinese American community ultimately brought them into Judge Carter’s courtroom, where they experienced a significant and surprising setback. Lloyd Burke, the lead federal attorney, had summoned fifty of San Francisco’s Chinese American leaders to appear before a grand jury on March 1, 1956, and to hand over their organizational files. After the men assembled, Lit Sing Chow of the Gee Tuck Sam Tuck Society stepped forward with his records. Following attorney Marvin Lewis’s advice, he refused to give the material to the grand jury, arguing that the subpoenas were unconstitutionally vague and thus violated his rights. Burke and his assistants immediately rushed Lit Sing Chow to Judge Carter and asked the jurist to determine the validity of Chow’s claim. Mainstream journalists on the scene believed the outcome to be a foregone conclusion: “Judge Carter indicated he did not feel the orders to produce documents were ‘oppressive’ or outside the scope of the Jury’s powers,” noted one, although Carter temporarily impounded the records pending arguments from both sides. Watching the proceedings in the days that followed, Gilbert Woo searched for and found some signs of hope. Already aware of Carter’s political leanings and friendship with Chinese Americans, Woo realized that he also knew the judge’s clerk, an African American, from Woo’s own participation in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Days later, Woo noticed the judge’s unusually sharp questioning of federal prosecutors and agents, another reason for optimism. He had

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perceived the judge’s mood correctly: in late March, Judge Carter threw out the subpoenas, contending they violated the rights of the Chinese Americans in question.20

Political Shifts: San Francisco, 1956 Having helped in the struggle to frame the subpoenas as a Chinese American rights issue rather than a national security question, Lee and Burton now worked to broaden the ideas of other liberal Democrats as well. By 1955, racial discrimination against African Americans in the South and elsewhere had begun to galvanize the Young Democrats and many members of the California Democratic Council, the vanguard of state liberalism. Very few of these Democrats considered the Chinese American population when they discussed racial discrimination, a situation that Burton’s public announcements and private network helped change. When Burton attended the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1956, he used the subpoena crisis to convince the party to insert language in its platform specifying that immigration investigations needed to comply with established law.21 In the meantime, Lim P. Lee campaigned tirelessly for Phil Burton. Lee, a consummate joiner, used his own vast network of contacts and friends to help the candidate meet other Chinatown voters and arranged for him to speak in front of countless neighborhood groups. Lee and Burton asked businesspeople who supported Burton to place campaign signs inside their businesses rather than in the windows, hiding the candidate’s steadily growing Chinese American support from Maloney staffers. Catherine Lee, Lim P. Lee’s wife, soon became deeply involved in the campaign as well, working with Phil Burton’s wife, Sala, to bring an unusually large number of Chinese American women to the candidate’s events. Phil Burton in turn promised, among other things, to provide more child care facilities for Chinatown’s many working women.22 Community Republicans fought back, launching an energetic campaign to promote the GOP and recruit new members among the growing population of voting age Chinese Americans. Local Republicans’ actions revealed continuing tensions in their ranks about the role of China politics but also a general independence and confidence. Beginning in 1955, Rollins MacFadyen, a white American Legion member and fervent William F. Knowland supporter, had urged Chinese American conservatives across the state to form ethnic branches of the California Republican Assembly (CRA). MacFadyen assumed that the primary interest of the “Orientals” whom he

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organized was Asia policy, and many of the Chinese Americans who joined the Southern California CRA groups fit this mold quite well. Some, like Los Angeles Chinese American CRA president Emory Chow, were Nationalist exiles or relatives of Taiwan officials. By early 1956, MacFadyen was pushing his idea in San Francisco too. Some of the city’s Chinese American Republicans, especially those with ties to the Taiwan regime, supported an all-Chinese organization, but GOP leader Earl Sun Louie disliked the idea. Louie had grown up in segregated Chinatown and worried about any group that might marginalize Chinese American Republicans and silence their voices. If MacFadyen ever succeeded in renaming the existing San Francisco Chinese American Republican group a CRA, the organization had dropped the moniker by election time. Under Louie’s leadership, community GOP activists resumed working within the larger San Francisco party, stumping tirelessly for Eisenhower, Nixon, and Maloney, and attempting to make Chinatown a Republican district once again.23 Regardless of Louie’s efforts, Lim P. Lee and Phil Burton discovered a large, enthusiastic, and increasingly active group of Chinese American liberals whom the Justice Department probe helped catalyze. Burton’s most public Chinese American supporters were college-educated professional men and women whose financial success and education offered them some, albeit not total, protection from the economic reach of Chinatown conservatives. Others had actually cut their teeth in China politics, but their experience with racial discrimination in America and their horror at Justice Department tactics pushed them into the Democratic candidate’s fold. Burton received backing from a number of unsurprising places: Paul Hui helped out, as did journalist Gilbert Woo and his friend Jackson K. Hu. But the candidate also won the support of people like J.K. Choy, the onetime Chinese Democratic Constitutionalist Party leader; S.K. Wong, an editor of the KMT’s Young China; and restaurateur and travel agent Joseph S. Quan, a China-born onetime KMT member who immigrated to the United States in the 1930s. Finally, former Republicans such as Ngai Ho Hong broke ranks with their more conservative CACA friends by campaigning for candidates like Burton.24 The Chinese American liberals’ election efforts on Burton’s behalf proved crucial to the Democrat. In November, California swung to Eisenhower once again, but Chinatown voters rejected Ike and his hated immigration enforcers in favor of Adlai Stevenson. By even larger margins, Chinese Americans in San Francisco rewarded Phil Burton for defending them during the immigration probe. In the end, Burton, who beat Maloney by fewer than five hundred votes, received slightly more than 500 votes

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from the four majority Chinese American precincts of the 21st Assembly District. Without his Chinese American supporters, he would likely have lost the election.25

Panic in Gotham Within days of the start of the San Francisco Justice Department investigation, news of it reached the Chinese American community in New York. There, federal prosecutors learned from the missteps of their California peers, avoiding accusations of racial bias by narrowly focusing their initial probe with the hope of an eventual larger payoff. Even before Judge Carter threw out the San Francisco subpoenas, Paul W. Williams, the federal prosecutor in New York, assured Chinese Americans that his office had no interest in issuing blanket subpoenas to the city’s traditional associations. Privately, he and his colleagues crafted a far more effective strategy, and one that helped devastate the Chinese American leadership in the city: they initially targeted only the handful of brokers, fixers, and attorneys whose expertise made the paper son system work.26 The New York community’s structure, poverty, and weakness left it particularly vulnerable to this approach. During the 1930s, a numerically significant Chinese American second generation had emerged in San Francisco and become active in politics. Between 1943 and 1950, the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act, the G.I. Bill, and the newfound ability to bring China-born wives to the United States also changed the demographics of that city: sex ratios evened out to a significant extent, education rates improved, incomes grew, the average age declined, and political activity increased. In contrast, New York’s Chinese American community actually became poorer and less educated between 1950 and 1960. Its aging population of paper sons, many of them still single or separated from wives in Hong Kong and on the mainland, grappled with falling incomes—especially in a fragile hand laundry industry that now faced the scourge of washing machines and coin laundries. As before the war, paper sons in New York continued to interact with government agencies and local politicians largely through a handful of American-born men, especially immigration and license brokers such as Sing Kee, James Typond, and, until his 1955 death, Shavey Lee.27 The postwar influx of Nationalists into the city, and the importance the KMT attached to New York, simply reinforced the vulnerability of the paper sons. The primacy of China politics diverted attention and energy away from Chinese American political activism; furthermore, KMT elites, most of them with ROC government passports, felt little concern about the le-

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gal woes of the working-class majority. Certainly class frictions existed in San Francisco, but there a shared history of residential segregation and intense scapegoating created more community feeling, especially among the American citizen population. Traditional elites with KMT ties simply could not exercise as much power as they did in New York. In San Francisco, American-born and educated men and women not only began to reject the old China politics and embrace new options but had the citizenship status and power to do so. Such people were not nearly as vulnerable as the paper sons of New York. In February 1956, neither of the two groups that provided what passed for leadership in Chinese American New York prioritized the needs of the community’s working-class majority. The first group consisted of CCBA-NY board members, essentially KMT officials whose primary interest remained the preservation of American support for the Republic of China on Taiwan. In fact, at the moment the immigration investigation began, CCBA-NY chairman Kock Gee Lee was just finishing his two-year term and preparing to hand power over to incoming chairman Shing Tai Liang; both members of the editorial board of the KMT Chinese Journal, party leaders Lee and Liang monopolized the CCBA-NY chairmanship between 1952 and 1960. The second leadership group consisted of the informal network of gobetweens, brokers, and attorneys who helped ordinary Chinese New Yorkers navigate the immigration system and the city’s various licensing boards. Although not as prestigious or politically powerful as CCBA-NY officials, these people understood the various bureaucracies that confounded most Chinese Americans. Selling their services to other residents, they learned the personal secrets and real identities of paper sons but also took risks by preserving and building on existing immigration fraud. A handful of the men in this second group participated to some extent in American politics, including the immigration lawyer and Republican leader Wilbur Pyn and the Tammany Democrats Sing Kee and James Typond. However, these fixers had no real incentive to organize voters or encourage American political activism among the population of Chinese ancestry; after all, the brokers’ livelihoods essentially depended on the continued disfranchisement of the working-class majority in the city.28 When prosecutors in San Francisco issued their subpoenas, New York’s two leadership groups came together in anticipation of a similar development on the East Coast. On March 5, new CCBA-NY chairman Shing Tai Liang called a meeting of more than forty representatives of various and sometimes competing community organizations. Among those who came were Kock Gee Lee of the KMT’s Chinese Journal and Chin-fu Woo, pub-

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lisher of the Chinese American Weekly and the United Journal and staunch critic of the Chiang regime’s lack of democracy. Stephen Pan and Ernest Moy, shadow members of the China Lobby and uncritical proponents of Chiang’s government, sat nearby. George Chintong, head of the Chinese American Democrats, attended; so did his sometime rivals for local Democratic leadership, lawyer Thomas H. Lee and Chinatown Kimlau American Legion Post leader Peter Fok-Leung Woo of the On Leong Merchants Association. Woo’s fellow post member, Republican lawyer Edward Hong, showed up, as did Hong’s former law partner and now competitor, liberal Democrat Benjamin Gim.29 Although the Chinese Journal portrayed the meeting as harmonious, the conclave actually grew tense and confrontational. As in San Francisco, the CCBA-NY attempted to involve the ROC government in the resistance to the immigration investigation: the New York Chinese Consul-General attended the March 5 gathering, during which Shing Tai Liang announced his intention to wire the ROC’s foreign minister for assistance. Liang’s plan angered a number of the men who attended the meeting, especially Peter Woo, a naturalized immigrant. The KMT’s desire to monopolize power in the community and its increasingly visible alliance with Republican politicians had annoyed On Leong Merchants Association members like Woo since the late 1940s. Woo sensed as well that reliance on the ROC only reinforced the image of all Chinese Americans as alien subjects of a foreign government. He loudly challenged Liang, arguing that the community should neither involve nor call upon the Chinese government. Woo then walked out of the meeting with a group of like-minded people.30 To pacify the dissenters, Liang contacted a number of American elected officials, but he found even Taiwan’s most ardent Republican defenders in Congress unwilling to speak loudly against an initiative linked to the Eisenhower Administration and defended in anti-communist terms. The CCBA-NY chairman wrote first to China Lobby stalwarts, including Senators H. Alexander Smith and William Knowland. He dispatched letters as well to two Democratic senators, despite their unsatisfactory attitude toward the Chiang regime: Herbert Lehman, who represented New York, and Warren Magnuson of Washington, who had introduced the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act in 1943. Each politician made a token inquiry to the Department of Justice and INS, but none followed up after prosecutors refused to release any information.31 Such results confirmed that Chinese American New Yorkers simply lacked the kinds of political networks that helped their San Francisco counterparts resist the immigration probe. In New York, state legislators

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and local political candidates ignored the community’s crisis entirely. Only Rep. Arthur G. Klein, whose district included Chinatown, paid any additional attention to the issue, but even his concern remained quite limited. Already planning to resign and run for the New York State Supreme Court, Klein had little to gain from criticizing the actions of prosecutors and judges, especially given the small number of Chinese American voters in the city. The congressman made a brief visit to the CCBA-NY to determine the “true situation” but stopped short of condemning the investigation. Instead, he promised only that Chinese Americans’ “legitimate rights will be fully protected,” a statement that offered no comfort to paper sons without “legitimate rights.”32

Leading the Overseas Despite the subpoena setback in San Francisco, the Justice Department continued its investigations there, in New York, and across the United States through most of 1956. Within two months of Judge Carter’s decision, Paul Williams arrested the man he considered New York’s illegal immigration racket kingpin, Sing Kee—Tammany Democrat, On Leong Merchants Association leader, war hero, onetime chairman of Draft Board 1, and owner of the Chinese Overseas Travel Service. Prosecutors claimed that Sing Kee made several million dollars by selling “slots” to Chinese aliens to enable them to immigrate to the United States. Two decades later, the journalist Y.K. Chu contended that Sing Kee’s only crime had been to accept as valid the US government–issued documents of existing paper sons. At the time, numerous paper sons testified that Sing Kee knew he was accepting fraudulent affidavits from them or their sponsors. The truth was likely somewhere in between.33 The Sing Kee prosecution further exposed the vulnerability of a community with little political clout and a highly unrepresentative leadership cohort. No leading New York Democrat did or said anything publicly about the prosecution of Sing Kee or the widening federal probe. In February, when the immigration investigation seemed confined to San Francisco, Mayor Robert Wagner had welcomed Chinese American leaders to Gracie Mansion and laughingly talked about the Democrats running a candidate of Chinese ancestry someday. Now, he avoided further mention of this or any discussion of the federal probe, as did Congressman Klein after his brief visit to Chinatown. Ignored by his supposed political allies, Sing Kee hired attorney Menahim Stim, whose law partners included onetime Joseph

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McCarthy aide Roy Cohn. Whatever his choice of lawyer said about Sing Kee’s opposition to communism, it failed to protect him in court. Found guilty at trial in 1957, Sing Kee received a hefty fine and a two-year jail sentence, which he served after appealing unsuccessfully to the US Supreme Court.34 As the Sing Kee case unfolded in the spring and summer of 1956, federal officials also questioned and sometimes arrested other prominent community members who had worked with the defendant. Authorities investigated Dr. Arthur Liu, a World War Two veteran and chairman of the Chinese Community Club, who had helped match the blood types of paper sons to their supposed fathers. They arrested Harry Hom Dow, a Boston-based lawyer who allegedly told nervous paper sons to stick to their false stories and identities. They detained George Lee, onetime commander of the Kimlau American Legion Post, who confessed to being a paper son and thus exposed his entire paper family. They uncovered the dealings of John Wu Doshim, another broker and travel agent whom some paper sons implicated.35 Panic spread through a community uncertain about how to deal with the crisis and stunned to see some of its most prominent men arrested. Several citizenship claimants withdrew their suits, knowing their brokers and lawyers might implicate them as paper sons. Williams had already brought charges against others. Even Chinese American New Yorkers with no connections to the arrested brokers and fixers understood the grave implications of Sing Kee’s arrest. In March, Peter Woo had created a hotline of sorts for veterans under investigation, but after the arrest of Sing Kee and the probe of George Lee, community members understood that no one was safe.36 Over the summer, Paul Williams’ tactics paid off not only for his own investigators but also for their increasingly frustrated peers in San Francisco, where so many Chinese Americans initially beat the charges against them. As New York investigators questioned paper sons in the Sing Kee investigation, they elicited a familiar name: Chow Gum Chew, better known to the press as Albert K. Chow. The testimony fingering Chow contributed to a much longer investigation of the San Francisco immigration broker’s dealings. By mid-1956, the IRS had formally charged Chow and his wife with tax fraud, contending that they owed thousands of dollars in back taxes from his brokerage business. In the fall of that year, the grand jury in the immigration probe acted as well, issuing a subpoena to Chow, by then quite ill with the heart ailment that eventually caused his death.37

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New York: Failure of Leadership In 1950s San Francisco, an array of politically active Chinese Americans had already begun to replace transnational leaders and brokers like Chow, but few such activists, or the political networks that sustained and defended them, existed in New York. There, Paul Williams’ focus on the brokers, attorneys, and fixers meant that by mid-1956, much of the small Americanborn New York leadership cohort was under arrest or investigation. The CCBA-NY thus continued to dominate the community’s defense and steer it in a transnational and counterproductive direction. In fact, CCBA-NY chairman Shing Tai Liang and his right-hand man, Kock Gee Lee, primarily saw the crisis as an opportunity to build greater community loyalty to the Nationalist government. As historian Stephen Fitzgerald has pointed out, the KMT, lacking a base on the mainland, now needed “the Overseas Chinese to legitimize its rule” and thus used their supposed loyalty “to support its claim to represent China.” The KMT’s handling of the investigation crisis could thus shore up its position among Chinese Americans, many of whom viewed the Nationalist government with suspicion. If KMT leaders in the United States proved unable to thwart the investigation, on the other hand, their failure might foster greater disenchantment with the Chiang regime. When Judge Carter threw out the San Francisco subpoena, then, Liang and Lee gave much of the credit for the decision to the “aggressive, positive protests of the Chinese government”—although in fact these protests did nothing to help. Still, the Carter ruling was the one obvious Chinese American victory in the 1956 probe, and US KMT officials desperately needed to claim some hand in it.38 The CCBA-NY’s approach, which combined appeals for unity and funds with continual pleas to ROC officials, largely backfired by alienating many community members already suspicious of the Chiang regime. Shing Tai Liang’s reliance on the ROC had already prompted Peter Woo and a number of his supporters to walk out of the March 5 community meeting in protest. Under pressure, Liang offered a compromise in which Chinese citizens at the meeting wired the ROC for assistance, while American citizens, including Woo, Ernest Moy, Sing Kee, Thomas Lee, and Republican leader Qiming Tan, appealed to American officials. Frustration with the CCBA-NY continued to grow, however. Days after the initial meeting, George Chin, leader of the Chin Wing Chuen Benevolent Association, complained to a federal prosecutor that the CCBA-NY was shaking down Chinatown groups and residents for a defense fund whose legitimacy Chin doubted. Sensing the degree of distrust in the community, the Chinese Journal then published

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5.1. Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York leaders meet with Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. (third from left) during a reception at Gracie Mansion in February 1956. Two of the men—Gilbert Moy (left) and CCBA-NY chairman Shing Tai Liang (second from left)—were simultaneously Kuomintang leaders. (Courtesy of William Yukon Chang, Museum of Chinese in America Collection)

a series of articles praising the work the CCBA-NY had done to protect the community from the investigation and to foster the “unity” of the overseas Chinese. The group also encouraged Chinese Americans under investigation to contact its legal advisor. Within weeks, however, federal authorities started arresting community leaders like Sing Kee and George Lee and even held the CCBA-NY’s own lawyer for questioning.39 The spreading investigation revealed the limited options of the CCBA-NY and the larger community, which lacked the political ties so crucial to Chinese American tactics in San Francisco. Aside from trying to raise funds for lawyers, the CCBA-NY largely relied on ROC officials to protest against the immigration probe, a strategy that provoked frustration and anger in the community. As one Chinese American complained, the Communists were certainly inhumane and barbaric, but the KMT government “is so weak and corrupt it makes one sigh.” This was not exactly the type of response that Shing Tai Liang and Kock Gee Lee hoped to elicit. Still, they kept what they considered the best interests of the ROC and the CCBA-NY in mind as they plotted strategy. When Shing Tai Liang’s letters to prominent China Lobby

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members produced no tangible results, he refrained from public criticism of these ROC allies. After the KMT government proved unable to stop the immigration probe, Liang’s newspaper paid little heed and instead reported the supposedly rapturous welcome new Chinese ambassador Hollington Tong received from New York’s Chinese American population. CCBA-NY stumbling turned into the concerned and careful handling of refugee issues. And Liang, Kock Gee Lee, and other CCBA-NY leaders even publicly endorsed the Republican ticket in the fall because of President Eisenhower’s anti-communism and support for the ROC. Liang also praised the president for “bringing about in society peace and prosperity,” despite an administration-led immigration probe and crackdown that was decimating the Chinese American community.40 Community cynicism crested when Shing Tai Liang himself faced arrest. In early December 1956, immigration agents investigating members of two groups, the Fujian Association and the Chew Lun Association, burst into the Mott Street office of the CCBA-NY and demanded that Shing Tai Liang cooperate with them. The lead agent refused to respond to Liang’s demand for the specifics of the investigation, prompting Liang to exclaim, “Why are you harassing the overseas Chinese [but not other] immigrants? How have we overseas Chinese burdened America? How have we harmed America?” The agent then demanded to know whether Liang himself was an American citizen, a question the CCBA-NY chairman refused to answer. Angry, the agent arrested Liang and took him to the INS office, where a higher-ranking officer quickly released the CCBA-NY leader. The organization then drafted telegrams of protest to the INS and New York’s two US senators.41 The KMT-dominated press in New York described the arrest and release as a moral and legal victory for Liang and contended that the entire overseas Chinese community was up in arms about the chairman’s brief detention. Sympathetic journalists (including those at Liang’s own Chinese Journal) portrayed the confrontation in heroic terms, with a calm, smiling Liang bidding farewell to his colleagues before donning his overcoat and following the INS agents into the snowy night. Ordinary Chinatown residents perhaps questioned the drama of it all, as did the leftist China Daily News in a brief article that avoided the purple prose of the KMT press. After all, few ordinary Chinese Americans had lawyers on retainer, and in any case, Liang was neither an American citizen nor a paper son; he had come to the United States on an official Republic of China passport in 1947 and was thus never personally at risk during the Justice Department probe. To those who noticed that the CCBA-NY leader’s telegrams and speeches had

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not even slowed the immigration investigation in New York, Liang’s outrage rang hollow.42 Certainly, the fawning coverage did not extend beyond New York. In San Francisco, Gilbert Woo dedicated one of his columns to the arrest and hinted at Liang’s huge conflict of interest: while claiming to be the leader of the overseas Chinese, Liang was actually a KMT official with a very specific agenda. Woo had long deplored the role of Chinese political factions in Chinese American life, and he now criticized the very idea that the unelected Liang could represent anyone. But he also found fault in the tenor of the confrontation itself. “Acting as the leader of ‘all the overseas,’ defying the law, and noisily conflicting with the immigration authorities, makes his value as a leader doubtful,” Woo argued. “To be a leader requires that one exercise self-control . . . Otherwise the value of one’s negotiations and compromises will be greatly reduced.”43

Compromise: The Creation of the Confession Program In San Francisco, federal investigators’ tactics and progress strengthened the hand of the younger activists who urged the community to accept “negotiations and compromises.” Although these activists celebrated when Judge Carter threw out the blanket subpoenas in March 1956, they understood the battle had not ended. That became abundantly clear over the next few months, as San Francisco prosecutors began to copy Paul Williams’ methods, focusing their resources on the attorneys, brokers, and fixers central to the paper son system. Bay Area investigators chose their targets and methods with an eye to stoking fear in the community. Tipped off by the Sing Kee witnesses in New York, prosecutors summoned Albert Chow in the most intimidating way possible: publicly dispatching a very tall, powerfully built federal agent to deliver a vaguely worded subpoena to the sick man’s bedside. Two months later, FBI agents sent an even clearer signal to the community when they began an investigation of Chow’s business partner, Doon Wong. One of the most powerful men in the community, Wong led the Bing Kung Tong and the CCBA Anti-Communist League, which he helped create in 1950. The FBI’s probe into Wong was an unmistakable power play and an irrefutable signal to the community that no one was beyond the reach of the authorities. Ironically, the Wong interrogations further undermined community confidence in the anti-communist ROC, despite US officials’ use of anti-communism as a major reason for the immigration probe. The Chiang regime had protested the investigations since the very beginning, yet ROC pleas were worse than useless: the FBI was

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now questioning a KMT leader who often traveled to Taiwan in his capacity as an honorary advisor to the Chiang regime!44 By late 1956, however, federal officials had already begun to mix conciliation with such strong-arm tactics, for the immigration probe created logistical problems for the INS and the Justice Department. As historian Mae Ngai points out, both agencies found that even when they uncovered fake family trees, they often lacked sufficient evidence to deport most of the “family” members. Thus, the federal government was investing considerable resources for relatively few returns and creating a class of stateless people in the process. Complicating issues even further, many paper sons had fought for the United States during World War Two or the Korean conflict, earning the right to naturalize. Faced with these choices, the INS began experimenting with a “Chinese Confession Program” to allow paper sons without criminal records or supposedly compromised politics to confess, implicate their paper relatives (and thus expose other fraudulent entries and eliminate potential slots for new immigrants), and possibly but not definitely receive the right to remain in the United States and eventually become citizens.45 The INS sought to cooperate with some of the most activist members of San Francisco’s Chinese American community, its veterans. In mid-1956, Bruce Barber, the local INS head, introduced the Confession Program in a meeting with the Cathay Post of the American Legion, a group whose members included post commander Lim P. Lee and other politically active men. The INS chose the Cathay Post for two major reasons. First, its members were likely more willing to confess than other Chinese, since as veterans they could quickly naturalize (although their confessions put their paper relatives at risk of exposure). In addition, the Cathay Post was one of the most prominent groups involved in fighting the subpoenas and the immigration probe. If enough members participated in the Confession Program, their cooperation would help muffle one of the most vocal, visible, and prestigious opponents of the INS. Within the next few weeks, about one hundred men, including many younger veterans, reported to the INS and confessed their status. One of them was Lim P. Lee himself; exposed by a disgruntled clansman in Hong Kong, he confessed his status and became a legitimate American citizen in September 1956, just in time to register to vote in November.46 As news of the INS’s possible compromise flew through the San Francisco community, it provoked a mixture of hope, fear, and suspicion. Barber sparked unease by assuring the assembled Cathay Post members that they required no assistance from a lawyer to confess. Gilbert Woo warned

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readers not to follow Barber’s advice and bemoaned the lack of honest, fair, and upright people in Chinatown who were familiar enough with immigration issues to help those without access to a lawyer. It was a damning indictment of the way racially discriminatory laws had fostered a culture of corruption and selfishness in regard to immigration issues in the community. Still, Woo, who reported on the Confession Program almost from its inception, was cautiously optimistic about it. The participation in the program of community leaders like Lim P. Lee and other veterans also burnished its image and helped publicize it. The CCBA endorsed it almost a year later.47 Chinese American veterans were crucial to advertising the program both locally and nationally. Two months after Barber’s meeting with the Cathay Post, the Chinese American caucus of the American Legion met at the Los Angeles CCBA headquarters on the eve of the Legion’s national convention in the city. The main topic on the agenda was immigration, with the men discussing the ongoing fraud probe as well as the Confession Program. The INS could not have asked for a more effective way to spread the word about the program to its target audience, since fellow Chinese American veterans elected Lim P. Lee as the group’s English secretary. The meeting helped spread word of the Confession Program to the rest of the country, including New York, where Legionnaire Thomas C. Wong brought news of it back to his fellow veterans.48 In 1957, the INS expanded the program to the rest of the country. As in San Francisco, community liberals in New York tended to embrace the Confession Program as the best solution for a difficult and longstanding problem. Benjamin Gim, a young Democratic activist and immigration attorney who was gaining community renown for his success against the INS, handled many of the confession cases and regarded the program as generally beneficial. He and other lawyers certainly understood its drawbacks, however. Government authorities made no promises to those who confessed, choosing to bar from citizenship at least some whose politics seemed too leftist. Federal agents also used the confessions of paper sons and daughters to pressure and coerce paper relatives into similar confessions. As a result, community distrust of the INS never really dissipated; some wags dubbed the agency the “Irritation Service,” and its continued investigations of Chinese Americans into the 1960s angered even Confession Program supporters like Gilbert Woo. Still, as this book has suggested, the vast majority of Chinese Americans were not leftists, and for most paper sons and daughters, the “Chinese Confession Program” offered a chance to come clean and rid themselves of the burden of a false identity. It was also

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probably the best deal Chinese Americans could have gotten at the time, given the prevailing anti-communist mood in the United States. Hundreds and eventually thousands of Chinese Americans confessed.49 The Chinese immigration fraud investigation of 1956 was a political turning point for Chinese America. It convinced Chinese Americans of all different political orientations that they needed to organize permanently and vigorously to defend their community. In the two years after the immigration probe started, several groups emerged and publicly committed themselves to safeguarding Chinese American rights. These organizations represented distinctly different responses to the 1956 events and to the ongoing threat to Chinese Americans. Some continued to cultivate a transnational political identity and recognized the Republic of China as an important defender of Chinese Americans. Most activists abandoned this position, however, convinced that the events of 1956 had proved the ROC’s inability to protect Chinese American rights.

Shing Tai Liang and the Strange Career of the National Chinese Welfare Council KMT officials quickly tried to control and co-opt these growing activist impulses in the Chinese American community. In early 1957, Shing Tai Liang announced that CCBAs across the country would hold a “National Conference of Chinese Communities in America” that March in the hope of creating a permanent national Chinese American civil rights organization. According to historian Him Mark Lai, the real purpose of the conference was “to discuss anti-Communist actions and support for Taiwan,” but organizers “reached the conclusion that, in view of the ongoing US government investigation of Chinese immigration fraud in which many Chinatown leaders were implicated, such a conference would have broader support if it focused on immigration and refugee issues.” Lai’s allegations are a touch too cynical, however. To start with, a national CCBA anti-communist organization already existed and routinely participated in community events to highlight Chinese American loyalty to the ROC and the United States. In addition, CCBA leaders in New York began discussing in March 1956 the creation of a national Chinese American civil rights organization because of the ongoing immigration investigations.50 Hardly selfless, these CCBA discussions were in fact the organization’s attempt to co-opt those Chinese Americans who were calling for the formation of a group to protect their civil rights. The CCBA was supposed to be such an organization, yet the immigration probe had shown just how

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little influence its leaders actually wielded with American officials. More subtly, the probe revealed the Taiwan government’s inability to help Chinese Americans as well. As a CCBA-NY leader, Shing Tai Liang sought to retain the group’s central role in the community; as a KMT official, Liang’s job was to solidify Chinese American support for the ROC. He cobbled these two goals together into the National Conference of Chinese Communities in America, which he wanted to serve ROC aims but knew must also address immigration and civil rights matters in order to command community support.51 Many Chinese American observers viewed the meeting with skepticism even before it convened, citing the KMT affiliations of its founders and the irregularities in its organization. Gilbert Woo warned that “if this meeting of the overseas Chinese continues to put politics first, regardless of the welfare of the overseas, our delegation should withdraw, and separately convene a meeting of Chinese American citizens.” Chinese World publisher and CDCP leader Dai-ming Lee, concerned about the motives of the KMT operatives who dominated New York’s CCBA, warned before the inaugural meeting that “the Chinese conference must divorce itself from all thoughts of Chinese politics and stay clear of political strife in Formosa.” One of Lee’s readers wrote in to complain how, during the February 1957 planning session, the CCBA representatives stipulated that the March conference would be a CCBA-only affair; however, after Shing Tai Liang returned to New York, he allowed various other Chinese American organizations from the East and Midwest to send delegates, thus creating two sets of rules for eastern and western Chinese Americans.52 Yet even skeptics hoped, not without reason, that the conference might represent a step forward for Chinese American rights. On March 5, 1957, more than one hundred Chinese Americans, including traditional leaders and younger, American-born people, arrived at the Willard Hotel for the National Conference. As Gilbert Woo noted, the meeting “has certainly not begun with a contentious spirit and also is not motivated by preconceived ideas about loyalty to the ancestral land.” The behavior of conference attendees, including CCBA members, suggested that many saw themselves as Chinese American community representatives, not overseas Chinese demonstrating loyalty to the Chiang regime. Despite rumors beforehand, delegates from the outset announced to the press that they were discussing only domestic issues. Ambassador Hollington Tong also noted that his government played no role in the conference.53 The actual deliberations inside the conference hall remained off the record, but the San Francisco delegates were among the most likely sources

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of moderation. The New York delegation, by far the largest to attend, consisted almost exclusively of men tied to the traditional organizations. Several were KMT activists or officials. The handful of American citizens in the group tended to be men in their fifties and sixties; the only one involved in American politics was Thomas H. Lee, the Tammany attorney. In contrast, the San Francisco delegation was far younger and more active in US politics. It included Republicans Earl Louie and James H. Loo, and Democrats Jackie Wong Sing, Joseph Quan, John Yehall Chin, and S.K. Wong, among others. Several had a history of simultaneous involvement in both the KMT and American political parties, but even these attendees understood that the conference needed to avoid China politics. The San Francisco CCBA’s attorney, Marvin Lewis, suggested as much, warning delegates as they departed California to exercise great caution at the meeting.54 The desires of ordinary conference delegates apparently clashed with the intentions of the most active KMT leaders, however. By the end of the often contentious three-day meeting, the delegates had crafted a multi-point platform that addressed immigration issues, endorsed San Francisco congressman Jack Shelley’s proposed immigration overhaul, appraised the state of Chinese American education, and mandated the creation of a civil rights group called the National Chinese Welfare Council (NCWC). The new organization consisted of CCBA representatives from every part of America and was supposed to meet every two years. But politics began to creep in as the convention closed. The three men the conference elected to run the NCWC during its inaugural year—Alfred Leong of Chicago, She Gong Lee of San Francisco, and Shing Tai Liang—issued a booklet at the meeting’s end that set out the new group’s five goals, which included “encourage[ing] the fighting spirit of Free China” and contained an oblique defense of more American aid to the Taiwan regime. At least some of the meeting attendees must have been very surprised indeed.55 In the months that followed, the conduct of Shing Tai Liang dismayed the many Chinese Americans who initially placed great hope in the NCWC. Liang quite early on emerged as the real leader in the group, guiding it with the passive acquiescence of Alfred Leong and She Gong Lee. Because the organization was supposed to represent all Chinese Americans, Liang announced that he was resigning temporarily from the Kuomintang and taking a leave of absence from its New York newspaper, the Chinese Journal. Three months after the Washington meeting, Liang took advantage of his leave to publish a shocking guest editorial in the Chinese Journal. In the article, Liang called for peace negotiations in China and the temporary allocation of all areas north of the Yangtze River to the communists, the island of

5.2. The opening banquet of the National Conference of Chinese Communities in America, which took place in Washington, D.C., in March 1957. The meeting created the National Chinese Welfare Council, whose leaders included several Kuomintang officials. Among those seated at the head table are pro-KMT Catholic bishop Paul Yu-pin (fourth from left); KMT official Shing Tai Liang (tenth from left); ROC Ambassador Hollington Tong (thirteenth from left); and Rep. Walter H. Judd (eighteenth from left). (Photo from the Frank Fat Collection, courtesy of the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, the Library, California State University, Sacramento)

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Taiwan to the KMT, and the area south of the Yangtze to the overseas Chinese. The “Shing Tai Liang affair” caused a sensation in Chinese American communities and prompted the New York KMT to convene an emergency meeting to recommend Liang’s expulsion from the Nationalist Party. Almost immediately afterwards, the Chinese Journal disavowed the very article it had just published. The Chinese consul general in San Francisco wrote to the San Francisco Chronicle to assure Americans of the “unalterable position of my government against any peace talks with the Communists.” Remarkably, the Taiwan regime never made any official comment on Liang’s provocative article. However, it quickly dispatched Overseas Chinese Affairs Commissioner Cheng Yen-fen to reassure American KMT members and, perhaps, to explain to them the purpose of Liang’s editorial.56 In the end, the Chinese Journal piece further eroded community confidence in the NCWC, reaffirming Liang’s reputation for factionalism and, significantly, his identity as a KMT official tied to a particular party clique. British officials in Washington and Chinese Americans throughout the country assumed that one of the factions in Taiwan was really behind the piece. Some wondered if it meant that despite the ROC’s anti-communist rhetoric, the Nationalist regime was already engaged in peace negotiations with the PRC. Others suspected that some faction in Taiwan was hinting at the possibility of negotiations in order to scare the US government into providing more support for the Chiang regime’s military ambitions; by 1957, officials on Taiwan had come to believe that popular rebellion was imminent in the PRC, but US officials did not support their desire to launch a campaign to retake the mainland. Liang may also have believed that the editorial would enable him to cement his leadership of the NCWC, because the piece asserted the importance of the overseas community he now purported to head. Instead, the editorial simply demonstrated that Liang had, in fact, not cut his ties to either the Journal or the KMT.57 Within a few months, Liang further alienated those Chinese Americans who still hoped the NCWC could become a real civil rights organization free from China politics. Without consulting his co-leaders or, apparently, anyone else, Liang hired three white lawyers in Washington, D.C., who proceeded to register the NCWC using an English name for the group that differed from the one the February 1957 conference had designated. Daiming Lee caught wind of the news and published it in the Chinese World, prompting much grumbling in the San Francisco community. After completing the registration process, Liang’s office sought approval for it from the San Francisco CCBA, which refused to consent to it. Eventually, Liang simply announced that he had received approval from San Francisco leader

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Shee Gong Lee during a telephone call; Lee emphatically denied this. Obviously, someone was lying.58 By November 1957, when the NCWC convened its first official meeting, its members and the community as a whole were already questioning its legality and integrity. “We are now faced with a problem, which is how to restore faith of all the overseas Chinese organizations in the NCWC,” noted Gilbert Woo. “Because of Mr. Liang’s work style, public opinion has grown critical in this Chinatown as well as in New York.” Trying to salvage the situation, delegates quickly voted to throw out the original registration and file a new one in Washington the next year. After much heated debate among the attendees, Shing Tai Liang offered his resignation to the group, yet he retained his influence in the organization through his Chinese Journal colleague Kock Gee Lee.59

The CCBA-NY Loses More Credibility As Shing Tai Liang’s national prestige crumbled, he further alienated Chinese New Yorkers through his mismanagement of the CCBA-NY, which he chaired until early 1958. Already, a growing number of Chinese Americans in the city viewed the group with suspicion because of its weakness during the immigration investigations of 1956. From his vantage point in San Francisco, Gilbert Woo guessed that Shing Tai Liang promoted the NCWC so energetically and undemocratically because the CCBA-NY chairman felt it would “be his ‘great achievement’ and restore his prestige” after the investigations and the “Shing Tai Liang affair.” The chances for this restoration greatly diminished in early 1958, when Chinese Americans in the city discovered that the New York CCBA-NY had briefly gone bankrupt during Liang’s term and was still in sorry financial shape. In addition, under Liang’s leadership, the city’s Chinese School had fallen several thousand dollars into debt. Finally, frustrated CCBA-NY representatives leaked the news that during Liang’s chairmanship, the organization had changed its by-laws to make outgoing chairs rotate immediately into the chairmanship of the CCBA-NY building committee. The CCBA-NY had been planning for more than a decade to erect a grand edifice that would serve as a community center, Chinese school, and CCBA-NY headquarters. Progress on the project, already minimal, fully stalled during Liang’s 1956–1958 chairmanship, even as expenses for the building continued. Now, under the new by-laws, the man who had driven the CCBA-NY into bankruptcy was poised to take over the chairmanship of the building committee.60 The final blow to the credibility of Liang and the CCBA-NY came in Feb-

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ruary 1958, when former chairman Woodrow Chan sued the organization, revealing once again the group’s factionalism and financial irregularities. The suit stemmed from an incident during Chan’s own period as chairman in the early 1950s, when he personally replaced funds stolen from the CCBA-NY but never received reimbursement for the expense. The organization promised to make good on the debt right before Shing Tai Liang became chair in March 1952 (his first term) but never did. After trying to push Liang to make good again, during Liang’s second term Chan gave up, hired a lawyer, and sued.61 Unfortunately for both Chan and Liang, at just this moment Dai-ming Lee launched a New York edition of his popular Chinese World newspaper. No doubt spurred in part by the declining prestige of New York’s KMT press, Lee aimed his bilingual newspaper squarely at a tusheng audience increasingly skeptical of China politics. To boost sales, Lee hired the longtime journalist and gadfly Y.K. Chu to write a series of guest editorials about the New York community. Chu had been publishing a magazine called the China Post since 1946, but he still jumped at the chance to write for a daily paper again. Already the Chan case had embarrassed the CCBA-NY, which seemed unable to get anything right; most recently, the group had even botched the Chinese New Year celebration that drew so many tourists to New York Chinatown. Now it faced off against an old adversary: Chu had first published critical articles about the CCBA-NY in the 1930s, when he edited the Shangbao and the CCBA-NY tried to suppress the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance and put his newspaper out of business.62 Apparently, Y.K. Chu held a grudge, for he used his newfound soapbox to attack the CCBA-NY and especially Shing Tai Liang, further degrading the standing of both in the eyes of many community members. Chu, who contended that Liang promoted pernicious factionalism to benefit a handful of his allies, also made public the CCBA-NY’s financial woes. He criticized Liang for ignoring public opinion and suppressing democracy, and he alleged that the KMT official manipulated the 1958 CCBA-NY chairman elections in order to ensure the victory of his ally and Chinese Journal colleague Kock Gee Lee. The Chan lawsuit worried Y.K. Chu for another reason, however. Just as in the 1930s, Chu believed that the CCBANY, although in desperate need of reform, could under honest leadership become a community asset. He initially sympathized with Woodrow Chan and pressed the former chairman to explain himself to Chinese American New Yorkers. As Chu put it, “No matter who wins or loses [the potential lawsuit], the CCBA-NY’s putrid situation will be completely revealed and

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put right in front of the Westerners [whites], producing an outcome for which both the CCBA-NY and Woodrow Chan will be responsible.” Only after Chu failed to prod Chan into action did the columnist then proceed to report in detail about the Chan debacle. In the process, he exposed the CCBA-NY’s longtime mismanagement: Woodrow Chan’s onetime financial administrator confessed that the former chair had routinely violated CCBANY regulations in his handling of the group’s treasury. Chu’s columns disabused those community members who hoped that Shing Tai Liang, and not the CCBA-NY’s very culture, was the source of the group’s problems.63 When Shing Tai Liang’s chairmanship ended in March 1958, his reputation was in tatters, his power grabs had fostered deep national concern about the NCWC, and his management of the CCBA-NY had destroyed many residents’ faith in the group. The problems that beset the CCBA-NY were not all of Liang’s making, of course: the Chan affair revealed as much. Regardless, Liang’s tone deafness and arrogance angered many in the New York community, particularly because he refused to address the accusations that now flew around Chinatown. Despite national anger over the NCWC registration—and Liang’s own apparent resignation from the group leadership—he continued to hold court at the NCWC eastern headquarters in the Lin Sing Association, where a banner with the incorrect English name flapped over a moon gate. Refusing to respond to Chu’s accusations, Liang instead sent friends to try to pressure the journalist into silence.64 Most Chinese American New Yorkers already knew that the KMT had essentially taken over the CCBA-NY in the late 1940s, but the implications of this for the community as a whole—rather than just a handful of leftists—became apparent beginning in 1956. Like previous KMT officials and activists who led the CCBA-NY, Shing Tai Liang sought to build his party’s strength and influence and pull the Chinese American population closer to the ROC. Instead, Liang inadvertently showed the community just how little real protection the Chiang regime could offer ordinary Chinese New Yorkers. The conduct of Liang, Kock Gee Lee, and Woodrow Chan also strengthened the kinds of negative feelings many New Yorkers already had about the KMT—that it was still the corrupt, factionalized, and incompetent party responsible for losing the civil war. Surveying the community in the aftermath of the CCBA-NY meltdown, moderate editor Chin-fu Woo lamented how “self-promoting politicians have incited such discord that [New York’s overseas Chinese] hardly know themselves anymore.”65

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A New Direction: The Chinese American Democratic Club of San Francisco As Chinese New Yorkers surveyed the wreckage China politics had left, their San Francisco counterparts worked to create a new kind of organization free from KMT interference and focused on the betterment of the community rather than the ROC. Many of the San Franciscans who played early roles in the NCWC eventually gave up hope that the organization would ever serve as anything but a KMT front group. Even a number of those still tied to the ROC came to believe after the 1956 immigration probe that transnationalism was a losing strategy in the fight for Chinese American civil rights. The CCBA’s early attempts to bring in ROC officials, and the failure of the Chiang regime to stop the investigation, showed just how ineffective the old transnational politics had become. Chinese Americans could still support the ROC, but they needed to separate its fate from their own lives in America. For Chinese American Democrats in the Bay Area, this realization came at a time of significant changes in their leadership and membership. By 1956, legal problems had diminished the influence of Albert Chow, still the recognized leader of San Francisco Chinatown’s Democrats. He was also in such poor health that he participated in few if any political activities anymore. His protégés, like Jack Chow, Jackie Wong Sing, and Charles Leong, tried but failed to fill his shoes, for in terms of ideological diversity and sheer numbers, the local party was expanding beyond the possibility of control by just one or two people.66 By the time Albert Chow died in October 1957, the organization he had led for a quarter century was moving away from his centrist, transnational approach. Chow’s brother William Jack Chow and brother-in-law Jackie Wong Sing remained active and transnationally minded Democrats; the younger Chow still traveled to Taipei occasionally to meet with government officials, while Jackie Wong Sing helped lead the NCWC, even as the group became essentially a KMT front organization. However, Phil Burton’s 1956 victory and the growing power of the California Democratic Council energized the community’s liberals, whose influence within the Chinatown party increased. The liberals found in their new assemblyman a political patron attuned to their local issues and their civil rights concerns. Within a few months, Burton pushed, albeit unsuccessfully, for a number of bills that dealt with minority rights in general and the specific concerns of Chinese Americans. Among the failed pieces of legislation he sponsored or cosponsored were bills to allow fireworks in Chinatown during Chinese New

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Year and to create a Fair Employment Practices Committee. Despite these setbacks, Burton helped smooth the passage of legislation giving pension rights to longtime residents without American citizenship—a boon to the many Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans who could not become citizens under American law before the 1940s and 1950s. Some of his moves were more symbolic, such as a resolution the State Assembly passed urging Congress to increase the Chinese immigration quota. Whatever the case, each instance reminded Chinese American Democrats that political activism could pay real dividends. By 1958, they were ready to organize for greater influence than ever before and to challenge some of the unwritten rules of Chinese American politics.67 The 1958 gubernatorial election in California forced community liberals to face squarely the issue of Taiwan, despite the desire of many if not most to avoid China politics altogether. In 1958, Senator William F. Knowland, the Chiang Kai-shek confidant known as the “Senator from Formosa,” decided he wanted to run for governor of California rather than for another term in the Senate. Knowland’s campaign pushed to the fore the two issues that Chinese American Democrats believed they needed to avoid: communism and the Chiang regime. In the end, however, the campaign was a turning point in Chinese American politics in the city. Although the issue of Taiwan never disappeared from Chinese American politics, community liberals finally shed their Korean War–era fears of being red-baited for their views. In the process, they won statewide political influence and a new reputation for a community long assumed to be conservative at best and apathetic at worst. William F. Knowland created most of his own problems long before he faced off against Attorney General Pat Brown. The Senator’s first big obstacle was actually Governor Goodwin Knight, a moderate Republican who had no intention of stepping aside for the demanding Knowland. However, the senator and his political allies put intense pressure on “Goody” Knight, eventually coercing him into stepping down and running for Knowland’s old Senate seat. “The Big Switch” angered many voters, who saw Knowland’s strong-arm techniques as undemocratic and troubling. The senator’s robust support for an anti-union open shop ballot initiative he called the “Right to Work” proposition alienated even more voters, driving thousands into Pat Brown’s corner.68 Knowland also raised the issue of communism and demanded to know Brown’s position on recognition of the PRC, further cementing the senator’s image as out of touch on local policy issues. “I frankly think it has little to do with a campaign for the governorship,” Brown said of the China

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question, noting that while he did not support recognition of the PRC, “[Knowland] needs to be reminded, as he has by leaders of both parties for over a decade, that the President—and not a senator or anyone else—holds the reins of American foreign policy.” Expecting the election to be close, Knowland’s staff also used the candidate’s anti-communism to woo “nationality voters” with ancestral ties to communist nations, or what conservatives referred to as “captive nations.” Officials at Knowland-for-Governor headquarters assumed their candidate would thus win the Chinese American vote easily based on his support for the Chiang regime. Nationality Groups Coordinator Robert F. Agnew explained that his boss appealed to such people as “one of the greatest fighters of their common enemy, communism.” The campaign’s Chinese-language primary election ads also emphasized the issue of Free China.69 This campaign rhetoric demonstrated the senator’s thin record on domestic policy, but Knowland’s emphasis on international communism and Free Asia worried many Chinese American liberals. For most of the 1950s, they had tried to avoid discussion of China politics or had simply pledged tepid support to the Chiang regime. They knew that opposing Knowland did not equal support for communism, but they did not necessarily expect the senator’s backers to acknowledge as much. Given the collegial nature of Chinese American politics in San Francisco, liberal activists did not fear red-baiting from seasoned Republican campaigners like Earl Sun Louie, T. Kong Lee, or John C. Young. But they knew that members of some of the traditional organizations with KMT ties viewed anyone who opposed a Chiang supporter as an enemy. Furthermore, Los Angeles residents with KMT ties, such as Emory Chow and F.J. Lew, served on the Chinese American committee for Knowland.70 The tenor of the fall campaign enabled Chinese American liberals to embrace and highlight the Democratic Party as the centrist, sensible alternative to extremism. During the months after the primary, Knowland and his party made what New York Times reporter Gladwin Hill later described as “an extraordinary series of missteps.” At one point, Knowland’s wife helped facilitate the release of an anti-union pamphlet written by a known anti-Semitic extremist, and despite the ensuing furor, Knowland’s campaign refused to repudiate the publication. Knowland also tried to tie Pat Brown to organized crime and to growing narcotics use in California, tactics the San Francisco Chronicle found so dismaying that the stalwartly Republican paper withdrew its previous endorsement of the senator. In the early 1950s, Knowland’s views seemed a perfect match for the McCarthyism of the moment. Now, however, what Hill called the senator’s “long

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identification with ultra-conservatism” worried the Democratic and independent voters who constituted a majority in California.71 As the election neared, San Francisco’s Chinese American Democrats created a united organization dedicated not just to winning the November vote but also to ensuring that victory would advance Chinese American civil rights. By summer 1958, each of the Democrats on the California ballot had separate, although occasionally overlapping, groups of supporters in the Chinese American community. Pat Brown’s backers included his old employee, William Jack Chow, who served as the nation’s first deputy district attorney of Chinese ancestry when Brown was San Francisco District Attorney. Harry Low, a young graduate of Boalt Hall Law School and another Brown appointee, supported his boss as well, but he also campaigned for Phil Burton, now an incumbent assemblyman. Burton’s backers, who overlapped with those of liberal comptroller candidate Alan Cranston and lieutenant governor candidate Glenn Anderson, included Lim P. Lee, Catherine Lee, Gilbert Woo, Henry Kwok (H.K.) Wong, Joe Quan, S.K. Wong, and Jackson K. Hu. Hu was also the Chinatown campaign manager for friend and attorney general candidate Stanley Mosk; the two men first met at the 1952 Estes Kefauver dinner that introduced Hu to politics. Hu and Catherine Lee stumped energetically for Mosk, whose record of opposition to housing discrimination many in Chinatown deeply appreciated. Edwin Owyang was the point person for senatorial candidate Clair Engle, the man who hoped to make Goody Knight regret acquiescing to the “Big Switch.”72 Surveying this range of activists, Phil Burton urged them to unite into a single group, an idea with great appeal to many of them. To begin with, it put them squarely in step with the rest of the active Democrats in the state, where the party was emphasizing unity in order to win the election. Furthermore, San Francisco’s Chinese American Democrats understood the wisdom of disregarding ideological and personal differences. A united party organization in Chinatown would be in a stronger position to make demands of elected officials than would the existing smaller groupings.73 The men and women who came together in September 1958 intended the Chinese American Democratic Club (CADC) to be a permanent political and civil rights organization rather than an ad hoc campaign group that fizzled out after November. According to the Chinese Times, the organization’s goals included far more than just electing Pat Brown and other Democrats; it hoped as well to “fight for Chinese American rights, improve the treatment of immigrants, and promote the welfare of overseas Chinese society.” The events of the previous two years, particularly the subpoena

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5.3. Two of the most active founding members of the Chinese American Democratic Club of San Francisco, Jackson K. Hu (left) and Lim P. Lee (center), talk political strategy with Phil Burton’s brother John (right). (Photo by Kem Lee. Courtesy of the Jackson and Gladys Hu Family Photo Collection)

crisis, the investigation of Chinese American communities across the nation, and the floundering of the NCWC, had convinced Democratic activists of the need for a more partisan approach to developing influence and allies.74 The CADC’s diverse membership demonstrated both the complexity of Chinese American political identification and the fact that even many ardent supporters of “Free China” no longer linked the ROC’s fate to the future of Chinese America. Three of the early and active members of the CADC— Joseph Quan, S.K. Wong, and John Yehall Chin—were among the founding delegates of the NCWC. Tiring of its intrigues, they soon shifted their hopes and energy to the Democratic organization. S.K. Wong’s involvement in the CADC suggests just how completely many Chinese American activists in San Francisco detached their views on China politics from their American political stands. An editor of the KMT journal Young China, Wong fought from 1949 to the 1970s against American recognition of the PRC;

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still, he supported Phil Burton for years, despite rumors about the politician’s communist leanings, and Wong opposed William Knowland, the “Senator from Formosa,” in 1958. Other CADC founders included William Jack Chow, who maintained close ties to the Chiang regime, and J.K. Choy, the onetime Nationalist politician who worked for so long after World War Two to develop an alternative to the KMT and the CCP.75 Perhaps the most surprising member of the early CADC was Doon Wong, the conservative KMT member and honorary ROC official who seemed a more likely Knowland supporter than almost anyone else in the community. Wong’s motives for joining the CADC are unclear, but he probably signed the founding charter as a tribute to his old business partner Albert Chow, the staunch Democrat and friend of President Truman. Wong and Chow had co-sponsored Democratic Party functions since the early 1940s, even though Wong seems to have shown up to very few of them. Furthermore, he may have born a quiet grudge against the Republican Party, for the federal prosecutor whose investigation likely hastened Albert Chow’s death was a Republican appointee, and the Department of Justice later detained and questioned Wong himself. In any case, his name on the CADC’s charter helped neutralize arguments that the group favored the PRC, opposed “Free China,” or was somehow soft on communism, even though Wong never showed up to a club meeting.76 Embracing partisanship as a civil rights tool, CADC members reminded their peers that many politicians who supported “Free China” abroad did little for Chinese Americans at home. The most searing example was the subpoena crisis. “In late February, 1956, the REPUBLICAN United States Attorney in San Francisco attempted to exercise arbitrary sweeping powers of subpoena by the Federal Grand Jury,” noted a CADC ad published in the major Chinese language papers. “Almost immediately, such DEMOCRATIC leaders as Pat Brown, Jack Shelley, Phil Burton, and many others rallied their voices in vigorous protest against the attempted ‘fishing expedition’ of the REPUBLICAN United States Attorney. Strangely enough, from the lips of REPUBLICAN leaders came nothing but abysmal silence.” The ad also reminded readers that President Truman had appointed Judge Carter. At a Chinese American rally for the Democratic ticket, the now immensely popular Phil Burton made a similar point. “Even though Knowland has friends in the Nationalist government, he isn’t a friend of these Chinese [in San Francisco], he doesn’t have the welfare of these Chinese in mind, and he even goes so far as to oppose equal employment!” Burton proclaimed. The crowd roared: opposition to Knowland did not have to mean opposition to Free China.77

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Borrowing from the tactics Burton used in his 1956 upset victory, the CADC printed thousands of slate cards in Chinese and English and distributed them to voters, passed out twenty thousand handbills, and placed ads in the major Chinatown newspapers. Gilbert Woo, a CADC founder whose newspaper quickly came to represent the views of the group’s most liberal Democrats, used the Chinese-Pacific Weekly as a mouthpiece for the party’s candidates. In the weeks before the election, he ran a series of Democratic candidate profiles, none of them particularly hard-hitting. He reminded readers that as a judge, Stanley Mosk had ruled against racial restrictive covenants, and that both he and lieutenant governor candidate Glenn Anderson supported making fireworks legal for Chinese New Year. The stories retained an objective tone but did not hide the paper’s connections to candidates. Indeed, mentioning that “Anderson has visited Chinatown twice, the first time coming to this newspaper’s office to answer questions” showed the political connections of the Chinese-Pacific Weekly itself and reminded readers that Chinese Americans mattered to the Democrats.78 The 1958 campaign demonstrated just how much had changed since the mid-1930s, when Chinese Americans wielded almost no political influence in San Francisco and candidates routinely ignored them. During the fall of 1958, a stream of Democrats visited Chinatown, including Pat Brown, Stanley Mosk, Claire Engel, and Alan Cranston. A few Republicans, such as Goodwin Knight, made the trip as well. Invited to candidates’ forums, they showed up; engaged to speak at lunches, they ate plates of Chinese food, usually at the Kuo Wah Café; riding through the city in caravans, they stopped to speak at the foot of Grant Avenue. In September, the CADC held a Pat Brown rally, where thousands heard the native San Franciscan say that while talking about racial equality was easy, acting on it was harder, but that he had done so by hiring Chinese Americans. The crowd cheered wildly.79 The CADC campaign and the candidates’ visits reminded Chinese American voters that China politics had failed as a political strategy. Knowland and Brown both cross-filed in the primary, and in June 1958 the “Senator from Formosa” defeated the Democrat in Chinatown. The creation of the CADC and its energetic campaigning began to change minds in the neighborhood, however. The Democrats urged voters to ask whether Knowland’s support for “Free China” offset his lackluster record on civil rights and immigration issues. Although he supported the nonquota treatment of Chinese wives, the senator later ignored Chinese American lobbying against the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act. More recently, he said nothing publicly about the 1956 immigration probe, in contrast to the vehement criticism

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that Democrats heaped on the investigation. More generally, he opposed civil rights legislation, supporting the weak Civil Rights Act of 1957 only after President Eisenhower asked him to abandon his initial opposition to it. Knowland’s domestic record stood in stark contrast to Pat Brown’s support for nonwhite rights and his long history of hiring Chinese Americans. Unlike Knowland, Brown also publicly promised to appoint even more Chinese Americans if elected governor.80 As Brown gained in Chinatown, the Chinese American Republicans scrambled to catch up but found that neither leaning on their traditional backers nor emphasizing “Free China” was a sufficient strategy. As usual, the Chinese American GOP convinced the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, with which it overlapped, to endorse Knowland and almost the entire Republican ticket. But the crowds at the extremely successful “Pat Brown Day” worried the local GOP and prompted the Knowland campaign to bring the senator to Chinatown, where T. Kong Lee organized a rally and parade for him. Goodwin Knight also stopped in Chinatown to appear at a YMCA candidates’ forum. These visits helped firm up the traditional Republican vote in the Chinese American community; still, more Chinese American citizens than in the past spoke English and could easily follow the Knowland campaign’s controversies in the mainstream press. Canny Republican publicists tried to appeal to the moderates in this group by running two kinds of ads. The Chinese-language ones emphasized Knowland’s defense of the ROC and his stance on the need to protect Quemoy and Matsu, the sparsely populated offshore island groups that Chiang Kaishek refused to abandon; they also trumpeted his anti-labor advocacy and his support for small business, two major issues in a community where many people owned their own small companies and worried about recent attempts to unionize such businesses. In contrast, Knowland’s Englishlanguage ads in the Chinese American press blandly described the senator as a man “who has demonstrated his friendship for us” and avoided the controversial aspects of his record.81 Despite such GOP tactics, the CADC succeeded in changing the 1958 election in Chinatown into a debate about civil rights, and by doing so, the group helped deliver the neighborhood to the Democrats. Chinatown still endorsed a few moderate Republicans, such as Goodwin Knight, but their margins of victory in the area were tiny (Knight lost statewide anyway). At the same time, Chinatown moved decidedly to the left, rejecting the antiunion Proposition 18 and overwhelmingly backing Phil Burton and Stanley Mosk, both of whom won three times the number of votes their opponents did in Chinatown. Most significantly, the CADC persuaded hundreds

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of Knowland primary supporters to back Brown in the general election. The Senator from Formosa, who won 60 percent of the Chinatown vote in June, received only 49 percent in November. Brown won 51 percent. Chinese Americans likely supported Brown by more significant margins in other areas of the city, where many second-generation middle-class people migrated beginning in the late 1940s. Such Chinese Americans cared far less about China politics than about the discrimination they still faced in applying for jobs and buying homes. “As the Chinese-Americans move farther away from the ‘heart of Chinatown,’ they are less influenced by the socalled Formosa policy of Senator Knowland,” noted Lim P. Lee.82

Building Influence through Political Activism The immigration probe of 1956 had underscored the tremendous insecurity of many Chinese Americans in both San Francisco and New York. Postwar civil rights gains had benefited many, yet thousands were still paper sons and daughters who feared the exposure not only of their own fake identities but also of their entire paper family trees. And while the worst hysteria of the McCarthy years had subsided by 1956, anti-communism and red-baiting still remained powerful forces in the United States, giving the immigration investigation a supposed legitimacy and urgency. Chinese Americans in New York and San Francisco responded to the probe in ways that reflected the politics, structure, and demographics of their communities. In both cities, the CCBAs attempted to work through the ROC and paint it as the defender of the Chinese American population. But in San Francisco, second-generation Chinese American activists turned to local politicians for assistance, relying on political networks that dated in some cases to the 1930s. In contrast, Chinese Americans in New York lacked such networks and depended instead on a small American-citizen broker class that the investigation decimated. As a result, the immigration probe in New York inadvertently strengthened the power of China-born men with ROC ties, even as it undermined residents’ faith in them. After the immediate crisis had ebbed, leaders and activists organized new groups to protect their communities—groups that reflected the distinct and divergent political cultures of their respective cities. In New York, KMT official Shing Tai Liang founded a national organization, the NCWC, in an attempt to channel the frustration and activist impulses the 1956 probe had created into a group he and other KMT members could control. But Liang’s manipulative and erratic behavior disillusioned the thousands of Chinese Americans who placed some hope in the NCWC. Revelations

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about financial improprieties within the CCBA-NY simultaneously undermined community confidence in the organization. In contrast, the Chinese American Democratic Club sparked real change in San Francisco by avoiding China politics and focusing on community needs. As early member Harry Low recalled, “The CADC was a new, different organization. It got involved in social issues—mainly immigration reform, social equity, racial fairness, civil rights and of course politics.” And it positioned itself perfectly by helping to deliver Chinese American votes at a crucial moment— the 1958 Democratic sweep of state offices in California.83 By late 1958, San Francisco’s Chinese Americans were increasingly receptive to the message of community activists who ignored China politics and preached that American politics were what mattered. Bay Area Chinese Americans became even more receptive in the years that followed, as highlevel Democrats fought for fair housing and employment laws and distributed significant patronage to their community. Three thousand miles away, young Chinese American professionals in New York took notice, using San Francisco as an example of the rewards of American political activism. Yet by the mid-1960s, debates over civil rights had eroded the liberal consensus in the United States. In the midst of such shifts, Chinese Americans in both San Francisco and New York had to decide not just whether to get involved in American politics, but also how to define themselves once they took the plunge.

SIX

Chinese Americans, Orientals, Minorities: Politics in a New Era

By the early 1960s, Chinese Americans in San Francisco had begun to exercise actual political influence at the local and regional levels and to inspire their peers in New York to copy their methods. In both cities, China politics continued to complicate political activism, but its influence declined, despite the best efforts of the Kuomintang (KMT). For New Yorkers, the slowly diminishing hold of the KMT did little to change the ossified political culture of a poor and aging population. But in San Francisco, the weakened grip of the Nationalists highlighted the ongoing emergence of a Chinese American ethnic identity independent of China and its politics. Still, the burgeoning civil rights movement inescapably complicated this identity. People of Chinese ancestry began to ponder whether to organize and identify as Chinese Americans, “Orientals,” or racial minorities. They debated whether they should embrace the nascent “model minority” ideas that cast them and other Asian Americans as superior to blacks and Latinos, or support the fair employment, affirmative action, busing, and housing legislation and remedies that other communities of color demanded. And by the late 1960s, intense turmoil in the United States over civil rights and the Vietnam War threatened to destroy the collegiality of Chinese American politics in San Francisco and the organizations and networks it had produced. That this did not occur reflected the strength of what the second generation had built in the city, as well as the uniqueness of San Francisco’s political culture in a state and nation rapidly shifting to the right. The 1960s were a period of extraordinary political transition in both the Bay Area and New York. Exuberant liberalism flourished in early 1960s California, with Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown and his Democratic allies in the state legislature expanding the public university system, launching huge infrastructure projects, and creating fair employment and housing

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bills to combat racial discrimination. However, a conservative movement rooted in the suburban communities of Southern California simultaneously organized around issues of anti-communism, opposition to civil rights initiatives, and resistance to social welfare programs. These two visions of the state’s future clashed repeatedly, including in a memorable battle over a 1964 anti–fair housing ballot initiative known as Proposition 14, and again in 1966, when right-wing Republican Ronald Reagan defeated Pat Brown in the gubernatorial election. The transformation of New York City politics at this time was less dramatic but equally significant. By the early 1960s, Tammany Hall, which had dominated Manhattan’s Democratic Party for much of the century, essentially ceased to exist. The electorate itself was also changing, as hundreds of thousands of white New Yorkers moved to the suburbs and Sunbelt states even as blacks and Puerto Ricans continued to pour into the city. The newcomers struggled to find a foothold in a deindustrializing economy and a racialized housing market.1 The degree to which the particular regional politics of the Bay Area and New York influenced Chinese American activism was now more than ever a reflection of the relative importance of China politics in each place. The Bay Area’s Chinese-ancestry population continued to face racial discrimination in California, lagging behind the white population in terms of education, income, and access to decent jobs and housing. Still, the position of Chinese Americans in San Francisco had improved exponentially over the previous two decades: they enjoyed new civil rights and greater economic opportunities than ever before, and, less tangibly, other residents no longer viewed their community as sinister and wholly alien. Since the war, Chinese Americans in the city had also learned to use political activism in savvy new ways, achieving greater economic and residential mobility and creating valuable alliances with local, state, and federal officials. By any measure, Chinese American San Francisco in the 1960s was thus miles ahead of New York. Instead of members of an activist second generation, Chinese American leaders in New York still tended to be KMT officials who prioritized the survival of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime over the good of the local community. In contrast, Bay Area Chinese American leaders by the early 1960s not only received political patronage from both parties but were strengthening nascent political organizations into permanent groups that remain influential today. Significantly, a growing number of Bay Area Chinese Americans, including Chinese American Republicans and the Chinese American Democratic Club, started to explore the possibility of forging alliances with other nonwhite communities.2 During this same period, Chinese New York still reeled from the impact

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of the late 1950s immigration investigation, which devastated the network of brokers and lawyers who provided most of the city’s American citizen leadership. The Justice Department’s probe and subsequent INS actions left China-born men linked closely to the Nationalist regime more in control of the community than ever. Still, the incompetence, factionalism, and corruption of KMT representatives like Shing Tai Liang increasingly angered and alienated large numbers of Chinese Americans; so did the CCBA-NY’s mishandling of the construction of the Chinese Community Center, which left the organization embroiled in a nasty lawsuit with the building’s contractor. Fed up, a small group of young Chinese Americans started actively copying the organizational and political strategies of their West Coast counterparts, who had helped their community create a Chinese American politics largely distinct from China politics. After the demise of Tammany Hall, local activists in New York formed or reactivated at least two Chinese American Democratic Party clubs that included older machine stalwarts and younger liberals. Chinese American Republicans unconnected to the Nationalist regime also attempted to reassert their control over the New York Chinese American GOP. Yet they struggled to organize a relatively poor community in which longtime political patterns remained deeply entrenched.3

San Francisco: The Sweet Smell of Patronage In early 1959, only a few months after the Democratic landslide in California, Assemblyman Phil Burton called Jackson K. Hu to congratulate him on his good fortune. The new Democratic comptroller, Alan Cranston, had just appointed Hu a state inheritance tax appraiser, making him the first Chinese American to ever receive one of the coveted positions. Cranston made a definite statement with the appointment: when African American activists asked his predecessor, the Republican comptroller Robert Kirkwood, why he refused to name any people of color to be state inheritance tax appraisers, Kirkwood told them that the presence of a nonwhite appraiser would make grieving families even unhappier! The position was quite a patronage plum too, for the job came with a salary of about $3,400 a year as well as tens of thousands of dollars in annual commissions.4 Hu’s appointment was merely the first of many that Chinese American Democrats in California received after participating in the 1958 Democratic victory in the state. Attorney Delbert Wong of Los Angeles became the first Chinese American municipal court judge and later joined the superior court. Architect Worley K. Wong became the first Chinese Ameri-

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can member of the State Board of Architectural Examiners. Dr. Raymond Eng, an East Bay optometrist who ran for the Oakland City Council several times before finally winning a seat in 1967, joined the Department of Social Welfare’s Advisory Committee on Optometry as its first Chinese American member. George Ong, founding president of the Chinese American Democratic Club, became the first Chinese American member of the Governor’s Committee of One Hundred on Problems of the Aging. Joseph Quan joined the World Trade Center Authority, the first Chinese American to do so. State officials sent Gilbert Woo to the White House Conference on Aging and made Lim P. Lee the first Chinese American member of the Veterans Welfare Board. J.K. Choy joined the Citizens Committee on Constitutional Rights as its first Chinese American member. While Chinese American politics remained heavily male-dominated at this time, Phil Burton helped elevate Catherine Lee to the state party central committee, making her the first Chinese American woman to hold that position.5 Some of these appointments were merely ceremonial, while some came with stipends or salaries, but all of them demonstrated to the Chinese American communities of California the practical rewards of political involvement. So, too, did the actions of the new administration and its supporters in the State Senate and State Assembly: in 1959, the State Legislature passed a fair employment bill and a civil rights act, both with Pat Brown’s endorsement. The legislation signaled to nonwhite voters not just the new governor’s own beliefs but also his recognition of the important role that communities of color played in his election. Chinese Americans, despite persistent discrimination against them, filed few racial discrimination complaints under the new laws.6 Regardless, the lessons of the election were unavoidable, especially since most of the new state appointees were founding members of the CADC, including Lee, Hu, Woo, Ong, and Choy.7 The Democratic administration’s appointments put pressure on Republican officials to recognize Chinese Americans as well. Given the shortage of Republicans in statewide office after the 1958 election, local leaders used their federal connections to reward Chinese American activists. In May 1959, President Eisenhower, likely at the behest of California Republicans, invited longtime Chinatown Republican Earl Sun Louie to the White House Conference on Refugees. Days later, Vice President Richard Nixon scribbled a hasty note to his staff regarding Louie: “we need a Chinese appointment and he would be fine.” California was shaping up to be a battleground in the 1960 elections, in which Nixon planned to run for president; although Nixon was a native son, the 1958 Democratic landslide suggested that winning California might prove challenging for him.

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Chinese Americans comprised a tiny portion of the state’s population, but even a handful of votes could tilt the results in an electoral district. And the Brown administration’s flurry of Chinese American appointments required some GOP response.8 The CADC continued to include a diverse array of Chinese American Democrats but now tacked more to the left than Albert Chow’s old Chinatown Democrats ever had. Right after the 1958 election, CADC president George Ong began to inquire about affiliating the club with the liberal California Democratic Council, one of the organizations credited with rallying the Democrats that year. As a CDC representative who visited the club soon after wryly noted, “Their only worry was that we had repeatedly gone on record for a large oriental country [but] I told them we never had.” Community conservatives’ attempts to use China politics to cast aspersions on the CDC, and through it, the CADC, failed miserably. In 1959, the CADC counted more than two hundred members and affiliated with the CDC, whose convention seven Chinese American Democrats attended. Gilbert Woo reported that at the meeting, CDC members in a break-out session voted almost unanimously in support of recognizing the People’s Republic of China (PRC); the one holdout was a Chinese American delegate, who either personally opposed the idea or understood that publicly, at least, he had no choice but to object. However, the item prompted little comment, and the CADC continued its CDC affiliation. China politics no longer constrained San Francisco’s Chinese American politics nearly as much as they had in the past.9

The Changing National Scene: The 1960 Campaign and China Politics The California Democratic Council’s position on China elicited little response from Chinese American conservatives partly because of the slowly changing consensus about the PRC even within the Eisenhower administration. In the summer of 1958, the PRC began shelling the offshore island group of Quemoy, where Chiang Kai-shek had defied American officials’ desire for restraint by increasing the Nationalist military presence to 100,000 soldiers. Democrats in Congress condemned the idea of going to war with the PRC over Quemoy, and public opinion in the United States overwhelmingly opposed American military action as well. Speaking to the press, President Eisenhower projected bellicosity; in private, he and his staff expressed frustration at how Chiang Kai-shek’s provocations of the PRC and desire to invade it affected US security. Finally, Secretary of

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State John Foster Dulles traveled to Taipei and pressured Chiang to back down. At the end of the meeting, the Taiwan regime issued a communique in which it renounced the use of force as a tactic for retaking the mainland. As E.W. Kenworthy of the New York Times pointed out, “Implicit in this renunciation . . . is the recognition of a ‘two-Chinas’ policy—at least for the foreseeable future.” No longer was Taiwan to be the launching pad for an invasion of the mainland, as Chiang had promised numerous times in the past. Furthermore, a Republican administration had sought and won this concession, prompting condemnation from China Lobbyists across the United States and the Pacific.10 But the 1960 election campaign raised anew the kinds of foreign policy issues that CADC members and other Chinese American liberals saw as divisive and potentially dangerous. The election pitted Vice President Nixon against Senator John F. Kennedy, a centrist Democrat who in 1949 joined Republicans in criticizing the Truman administration’s “loss” of China. Still, Kennedy was among the many Democratic Party leaders who by 1958 questioned the wisdom of defending Quemoy. Despite having already taken this stand two years earlier, Kennedy provoked a furor when, in a televised debate with Nixon, he supported protecting Taiwan but not the offshore island groups of Quemoy and Matsu, calling them “not strategically defensible . . . [or] essential to the defense of Formosa.” The vice president pounced on the statement, contending after the debate that Kennedy’s policies broadcast American weakness and would lead the United States into another Korean War situation. Within days, the Quemoy and Matsu issue became a defining one in the campaign, while in Taiwan, the Nationalist regime made its displeasure at Kennedy’s stand apparent.11 On both coasts, the Quemoy-Matsu issue divided Chinese Americans in significant and revealing ways, forcing centrists in particular to decide how the issue of China should influence them. This tug-of-war demonstrated yet again the different roles China politics played in San Francisco and New York and also prompted public discussions about the relationship of Chinese American voters to the ROC. New York’s Chin-Fu Woo, the centrist, independent publisher of the United Journal and the ChineseAmerican World, had made a career of criticizing the undemocratic Chiang regime and the KMT party factions it sheltered. His closest San Francisco counterpart—and, during the brief run of the Chinese World New York Edition, his competitor—was Dai-ming Lee, another centrist who supported “Free China” but loathed Chiang Kai-shek’s authoritarianism. Both journalists uncharacteristically chose to endorse presidential candidates in 1960, something they had avoided in the past; the debate over Quemoy

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and Matsu seemed to each man to require such a statement. “Every Chinese American citizen who loves and cherishes the Republic of China, of course should choose [Nixon],” Woo contended, basing his endorsement on the single, and to him, paramount, issue of Quemoy and Matsu. Dai-ming Lee had once admired Eisenhower but now faulted his administration for enabling a dictator like Chiang and turning a blind eye to the ROC’s lack of democracy. And Lee also saw other issues—immigration, general military strength, and Nixon’s history of dirty campaigns—as equally important. Just days before the election, he endorsed Kennedy.12 The Quemoy-Matsu issue suggested that Chinese American politics and identity in San Francisco, but not New York, could now exist divorced from the Republic of China. The Chinese-language press in New York, with the exception of the leftist China Daily News, closed ranks around Nixon, despite the lingering effects on the community of the Eisenhower administration’s repressive 1956 immigration investigations. William Yukon Chang, the publisher of the Chinese-American Times, New York’s first Chinese American English-language newspaper, decided that under the circumstances, the wisest course of action was to avoid the debate altogether. “Right now, everything is so foggy, and we have not been able to see the forest for the trees,” he wrote in an editorial. “In all fairness, we prefer to take a neutral stand rather than influence our thousands of readers.”13 His peers proved far less reticent—at least those who supported Nixon. Kennedy and Nixon were both avowedly anti-communist, but in assessing them, Kock Gee Lee’s right-wing KMT Chinese Journal and Chin-fu Woo’s centrist Chinese-American Weekly agreed for once. According to Woo, Americans of Chinese ancestry had a duty to “cast their ballots for candidates who are beneficial to the Republic of China”—which apparently meant whomever the ROC itself deemed beneficial and whoever would pledge to defend Quemoy and Matsu. Yu Huan, KMT member, Nixon committee member, and onetime editor of the now defunct Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, concurred. “Regardless of whether one is a native citizen or a naturalized American, we are all of the same blood, and the life or death of the Republic of China is our shared honor or shame.” The KMT-dominated Nixon committee then sent letters to all Chinese American voters in New York telling them to vote the straight Republican ticket because of Quemoy and Matsu.14 The tone of political discourse differed markedly in San Francisco, where Chinese Americans without KMT connections ran the local campaigns. The Chinese American Nixon committee emphasized anti-communism and Quemoy and Matsu and ridiculed Kennedy as “childish” and “impulsive.”

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Yet its advertisements and speeches never claimed that Chinese Americans had a special ethnic duty to support the Chiang regime or “Free China.” Republican leader T. Kong Lee, a Nixon friend and committee member, was editor of the widely circulated Chinese Times, but he refrained from using the paper to argue that Chinese Americans had an obligation to cast ballots for Nixon because of their ancestry. Rather, the Chinese Times, and the community’s pro-Nixon groups, addressed its readers as voters and citizens, not as people with a duty to follow the dictates of the ROC. And like Dai-ming Lee, the San Francisco Nixon committee understood the issues that concerned local Chinese Americans. In addition to emphasizing foreign policy, its ads erroneously cast Nixon as having opposed the hated McCarran-Walter Act back in 1952.15 The extensive debate about the offshore islands occurred in the midst of a tight race in which the two campaigns saw the votes of so-called nationality group members as especially valuable. A large number of “ethnic” Democrats cast their ballots for Eisenhower in 1956, prompting Democratic leaders to change their vote-seeking tactics in ways that shaped the Chinese American campaign as well. Surveying the electoral terrain as the 1960 campaign season began, Kennedy strategist Michel Cieplinski urged Democrats to adapt to “changes in the nature of the leadership of nationality groups during the past four or five years . . . includ[ing] the development of a more intellectually sophisticated group of spokesmen, in contrast to the old-style type of ‘clubhouse’ organizer.” Among other alterations, the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) Nationalities Division quietly removed the longtime New York Chinese American leader George Chintong, who had chaired the DNC’s Chinese American effort during every presidential campaign since 1936. Chintong seems to have been entirely unaware of the move; he even continued to send out campaign literature with his old title on it. Nevertheless, Kennedy staffers replaced him with a younger and more energetic man, Gung-hsing Wang. A Chicagoan, Wang as publisher of that city’s Sanmin Morning Paper wielded far more influence among Chinese Americans than Chintong, the aging tusheng businessman and Tammany hack. Wang originally came to the United States to serve as an ROC vice consul in Chicago and then New Orleans, eventually settling in America after 1949 and naturalizing in 1953. Despite his service in the ROC diplomatic corps, he seems to have avoided extensive entanglements with the KMT regime or party after 1949. At the same time, his former Nationalist credentials made him an attractive candidate for the ChineseAmerican section chairmanship, cementing his anti-communist legitimacy in the midst of the Quemoy-Matsu debate.16

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The 1960 campaign highlighted geographical and generational divergences that Wang did not always perceive, including the growing gulf between Chinese Americans in San Francisco and New York. In midNovember of that year, Wang conceded that “the Chinese American leaders, with a few exceptions, generally voted for Mr. Nixon,” but he felt that “we have the support of the rank and file . . . in Illinois . . . [and] this may also be the pattern in other parts of the country.” In New York City, Wang’s instincts proved wrong. Until the late 1960s, the city lacked any majority Chinese American precincts, making the vote there difficult to gauge. However, in the most heavily Chinese American precinct in Manhattan, voters chose Nixon by a small majority, in contrast to every other precinct around it. Records for 1960 also show that numerous Chinese Americans registered to vote for the first time that year, presumably to support Nixon. Democrats enjoyed a huge advantage in liberal New York City—Kennedy won almost twice as many votes in Manhattan as Nixon—so the behavior of Chinese American voters in 1960 affirmed the influence of the KMT and the pro-Nixon Chinese American press there.17 In San Francisco, where the CADC stumped energetically for the Massachusetts senator, the results were quite different. George Ong and Ngai Ho Hong ran the Chinese American campaign for the CADC, and Harry Low, one of the youngest members of the club, recalled that their energetic work for the 1960 Kennedy-Johnson campaign earned the CADC widespread notice from other Democratic groups in the state. At the end of the campaign, Nixon won only about seventy more votes than Kennedy in the ten majority Chinese American precincts of San Francisco. In addition, Kennedy handily defeated Nixon in the majority Chinese American precincts outside the old core of Chinatown. In such areas, younger voters predominated, and they rejected a candidate whose red-baiting tactics so many of them associated with the recent persecution of Chinese Americans.18 In San Francisco, the Kennedy-Nixon race signaled the rapid demise of a Chinese American politics wrapped up in and legitimized by China politics, especially the demands of the Chiang regime. San Francisco Chinese Americans’ rejection of William F. Knowland in 1958 had hinted at this shift, but the KMT government largely avoided commenting on a purely domestic gubernatorial contest. The 1960 race was different, however: it was a presidential election at a critical moment in the Cold War. Furthermore, the Taiwan government angrily and publicly denounced Kennedy’s Quemoy-Matsu position, making its sympathies in the upcoming election completely clear. Historian Ellen D. Wu has observed that “the simultaneous existence of a ‘bad’ China (the People’s Republic) and a ‘good’ one

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(the Nationalists on Taiwan) after 1949 meant that Chinese Americans could position themselves as anti-Communist Overseas Chinese committed to both the KMT and United States.” In 1960, a huge number of Chinese Americans in San Francisco rejected this “commitment” to the KMT, choosing Kennedy despite the displeasure of the Nationalist regime. The election results confirmed Lim P. Lee’s prediction during the 1958 gubernatorial race: “As the Chinese-Americans move farther away from the ‘heart of Chinatown,’ they are less influenced by the so-called Formosa policy of Senator Knowland.” Two years later, Nixon also gained little traction among younger Chinese American voters in the city with his own Formosa policy. In San Francisco, in contrast to New York, Chinese American politics and China politics had become distinct and separate entities. Despite the best efforts of the Nationalist regime, China politics could still influence Chinese American politics in San Francisco, but they could not dictate them anymore.19

Shifting Political Winds In hidebound Chinese American New York, where Chinese American politics was still mainly China politics, longtime political practices limited the impact that generational change could make. Two men unconnected to the KMT, the lawyer Edward Hong and the mortician Benjamin Kimlau, emerged as the most active members of the Chinese American Republicans after 1960. However, KMT officials continued to exert significant influence within the organization, which they saw mainly as a vehicle for protecting Taiwan. On the Democratic side, George Chintong found himself increasingly sidelined, as reformers citywide helped kill the Tammany Hall machine once and for all by 1961. A few younger people who lived outside Chinatown, including Benjamin Gim and Norman Lau Kee (Sing Kee’s son), attempted to breathe new life into the Chinatown Democrats, which still included members like Peter Fok-leung Woo, Shavey Lee’s old business partner James Typond, Lee’s brother Thomas H. Lee, and Lester W. Fong and James Eng, comrades of Peter Woo and former Kimlau post commanders. Some of these longtime members realized after 1956 that the community needed a truly robust party organization in order to safeguard Chinese American civil rights, and they wanted to enlarge their group and engage with newer voters. Others saw little need to disturb the status quo.20 By 1962, events elsewhere convinced the activists among the Chinese American Democrats that they could achieve real political influence in New York if they worked for it. The 1959 election of Republican candidate

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Hiram Fong as one of Hawaii’s two senators, while not unexpected in a majority Asian American state, greatly cheered Chinese Americans around the country. Three years after Fong’s victory, a Washington State attorney named Wing Luke became the first Chinese American to serve on Seattle’s city council, relying on a diverse coalition of voters for his victory. Across the country, Chinese Americans were similarly testing the political waters. Wing F. Ong, who in 1946 became the first Chinese American to serve in Arizona’s state assembly, was now talking about a 1964 bid for the state senate. In Alameda County, optometrist Raymond Eng ran for Oakland City Council, while a school board member named March Fong challenged an incumbent county supervisor. While Fong and Eng lost their initial races, William SooHoo won his bid to become a city councilman in Oxnard, California. The CADC in San Francisco had also demonstrated the newfound political influence of Chinese Americans, racking up patronage in a way that Democrats in New York could only watch enviously. Inspired, by fall 1962 a group of Chinese American New Yorkers reactivated the moribund Chinatown Democratic Club, which James Typond originally registered in 1956, and launched a voter registration drive in the Chinese American community with the 1962 gubernatorial election and 1964 presidential contest in mind.21

“Ask about the Hughes Loan”: The Brown-Nixon Race Across the country, their models, the Chinese American political activists of the Bay Area, were engaged in an arduous gubernatorial campaign that once again involved accusations of communism. The race pitted Pat Brown against Richard Nixon, who lost the White House to John F. Kennedy in 1960. Despite Nixon’s denials, he hoped to relaunch his presidential ambitions through Sacramento, and as in 1960, he and his subordinates used alleged softness on communism to attack his opponent. The gubernatorial race produced probably the most famous moment of Chinese American political history: at a Los Angeles rally, political trickster Richard Tuck gave Chinese American children signs to hold that read “Welcome Nixon” in English and “ask about the Hughes loan” in Chinese. The signs referred to a controversial and possibly unethical loan that Howard Hughes made to Richard Nixon’s brother Donald in 1957. Nixon, who stood in front of the signs, thought they were simple welcoming banners until a Chinese American supporter tipped him off. On camera, Nixon grabbed the signs from the children and ripped them up, helping cement his reputation for churlishness and humorlessness.22

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In Chinese American San Francisco, Democrats and Republicans did not shy away from some of the tougher aspects of campaigning, even if they never participated in Tuck-style tricks. In March 1962, both Brown and Nixon rode in San Francisco’s large and popular Chinese New Year parade, which slowly wound through the packed streets of Chinatown. Discovering that Brown was fifth in line, Nixon, a distant thirteenth, tried to maneuver his way closer to the front of the parade. But the parade committee, led by Jackson Hu and other Democrats, thwarted Nixon’s attempts. For his part, Nixon Chinatown campaign leader T. Kong Lee used his status as former Chinese Chamber of Commerce head and CCBA president to invite scores of community leaders from across the state to what was essentially a Nixon campaign banquet after the parade. When the CACA uncharacteristically endorsed Brown for governor rather than Nixon, T. Kong Lee, Earl Sun Louie, Thomas Wu, John Young, and a host of other leading Republicans formed the “Bipartisan Chinese American Citizens for Good Government.” The “bipartisan” group supported only Republicans, except for Congressman Jack Shelley (who was running unopposed), and Lee published the group’s endorsements in a standard story on the same Chinese Times page where the CACA endorsements generally ran. Outside of China politics, such tactics were what passed for political hardball in early 1960s Chinatown, where the collegiality of American party activism persevered and prevented local Republicans in particular from adopting Nixon’s anti-communist innuendos.23 The results of the vote in Chinatown demonstrated a slow but definite leftward trend, and a growing class consciousness, in community politics. In Chinese American majority precincts, Brown defeated Nixon fifty-two to forty-eight percent, winning most of his votes in the younger and newer precincts, the same way he had in 1958 and Kennedy had in 1960. The heart of Chinatown went to Nixon, but by far smaller percentages than he and Knowland had won in 1960 and 1958, respectively. Lieutenant Governor Glenn Anderson, a liberal Southern Californian little known in San Francisco, lost almost every heavily Chinese American precinct to the still popular former San Francisco mayor George Christopher. Yet Alan Cranston, the comptroller candidate known in Chinatown for appointing Jackson Hu to be a state inheritance tax appraiser, demolished Republican Bruce Regan by huge percentages in every area. Chinese American Republican poll-watchers must have been particularly concerned at the trend in the Ping Yuen housing project, one of the only heart-of-Chinatown areas with a heavily youthful population. Ping Yuen’s low-income voters often

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worked in Chinatown for Chinese American employers and spoke Chinese at home. These characteristics exposed the project’s voters to the politicking of traditional organizations and of conservative associations like the CACA. Regardless, in 1962 Ping Yuen’s residents were the only group in the heart of Chinatown to reject Nixon.24

An “Oriental” Identity Emerges While working-class Chinese Americans thwarted the attempts of conservatives to define a political Chineseness, their middle-class counterparts increasingly explored an identity that transcended ethnicity altogether. In the Bay Area, numerous middle-class, American-born and educated professionals of Chinese ancestry started to express commonality with other Asian Americans, people known in the language of the time as “Orientals.” This kind of identity emerged primarily on the West Coast because of the sheer diversity of its Asian American groups, which included not just Chinese Americans but Japanese Americans, Filipinos, and Korean Americans. New York lacked this array of Asian Americans until the 1970s. As activist Helen Zia recalled, in the 1960s “in New York, if you were Oriental, odds are you were Chinese.”25 Scholars almost uniformly dismiss as unimportant the early “Oriental” identity that developed on the West Coast and instead highlight the late 1960s emergence of Asian American identity as a new and uniquely empowering development. In her path-breaking study of Asian American pan-ethnic organizing, for example, sociologist Yen Le Espiritu contends that the term “Oriental” was “merely [a] convenient label . . . used by outsiders to refer to all Asians,” and that “a meaningful pan-Asian movement was not constructed until the late 1960s.” But while the Asian American movement was incredibly significant, it built on the existing foundations of an older Oriental identity. And though this “Oriental” identity did not become overtly political until the early 1960s, the first pan-Asian organizations date from the late 1950s and suggest that for a growing number of Chinese Americans, “Oriental” was not merely an imposed label but a potential basis for identity and political activism.26 The stirrings of an expressed rather than imposed “Oriental” identity dated to the Korean War era and represented a distinct break from the past. Before and during World War Two, Asian American ethnic groups often took great pains to separate themselves from each other to a white American public that usually viewed them as essentially the same. This earlier

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brand of politics reflected international conflicts, racial ideologies, and legal ambiguities: Korean Americans expressed dismay at being mistaken for Japanese Americans, since Korea was a Japanese colony between 1910 and 1945, while many Japanese immigrants, especially well-educated elites, considered Chinese and Chinese Americans racially inferior. After Pearl Harbor, when Japanese Americans became targets of public and official hostility, Chinese Americans even wore signs and buttons and carried identification cards to prove their ethnicity to whites. While benefiting from the Sino-American alliance during World War Two, Chinese Americans suffered harassment and official scrutiny after the founding of the PRC and that nation’s entry into the Korean conflict. Few saw any reason for political cooperation with Japanese Americans, however; as chapter 4 demonstrates, lobbyists from the two communities lined up against each other during the battle over the McCarran-Walter Act.27 Still, even before the McCarran-Walter dispute, at least some secondgeneration Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans began to express in small ways a sense of “Oriental” commonality, a trend that accelerated once immigration laws put all Asians on an equal footing. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Chinese American and Japanese American basketball teams played each other in “Oriental” tournaments, including the California Oriental Championship and the National Oriental Championship. Asian American journalists expressed particular interest in exploring and promoting this kind of Oriental identity. In May 1952, Thomas Tong, who created the popular daily Golden Star Chinese Hour radio broadcast, collaborated with Gilbert Woo to publish an English-language supplement for the Chinese-Pacific Weekly. To edit the short-lived venture, the men hired Victor K. Wong, the 25-year-old son of Young China board member S.K. Wong and a recent journalism graduate from UC Berkeley. Wong chose subjects he hoped would appeal to the younger readers Woo and Tong wished to attract: these topics included the activities of Japanese Americans, the only ethnic group besides Chinese to receive attention. At about the same time, the Japanese American Citizens League paper Pacific Citizen began publishing similar items about Chinese Americans, especially those who faced discrimination. A year later, Charles Leong, who had just founded the Chinese News, called “the Nisei [the] group whose problems are more parallel to ours than any other racial group” and saw news items about other Asian American groups as of particular interest to his readers. Leong eventually helped put together a 1955 junket for a group of Asian and Asian American journalists, who traveled to Harrah’s Casino in Reno.

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During the visit, the editors and reporters discussed creating an Oriental Journalists Association, which they established later that year. By 1959, Gilbert Woo, a founding member, began referring to it by a new name: the Asian American Press Club.28 These journalists expressed an idea that national and regional politics further encouraged. Within the federal government, racist Southern congressmen fearful of creating a majority nonwhite state were by the late 1950s losing their battle to prevent Hawaiian statehood. Commentators on both sides of the issue emphasized the islands’ mixture of Asian ethnicities and speculated about how it would shape politics, while Time magazine celebrated the first election in the new state, which brought “42 candidates of Oriental descent” into office.29 This slowly emerging Oriental political identity was hardly just the imposed product of outsiders, or of Hawaiian statehood. In 1955, the Japanese American Republican Assembly of Los Angeles helped sponsor a new local chapter, an L.A. Chinese American Republican Assembly. White party leaders who favored organizing members along “nationality” lines encouraged such separate groups; at the same time, the Asian American assemblies purposely reached out to each other socially, conscious of the occasional animosity that had characterized the relationship between their communities in the past. Months later, Gilbert Woo pushed more overtly for “Oriental” unity when he made one of the first attempts to convince Chinese Americans to bloc vote with other Asian Americans for shared political goals. As Woo explained to his readers: In this year’s California election for senator, the ballots of Orientals have a decisive function. In terms of numbers, California together has 90,000 Japanese, 70,000 Chinese, and 45,000 Filipinos. Among them, the issues are not identical, but because of the nature of many issues as applicable to all, they can fully in the political arena make up an Oriental bloc.

Woo, who made his plea at the height of the 1956 immigration investigation, sensed that an “Oriental” identity could shield Chinese Americans from at least some of the targeted official harassment that had intensified since 1949. A liberal Democrat heartily tired of the hold of China politics, he also saw in a racial rather than an ethnic identity a better way for Chinese Americans to engage in political activism that focused on civil rights issues rather than foreign policy. Woo and other Asian Americans thus hailed the election in 1962 of the state’s first legislator of East Asian ances-

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try, Alfred Song, a Korean American. When Song won a State Assembly race to represent part of California’s San Gabriel Valley, the JACL newspaper Pacific Citizen celebrated him as “the first U.S. citizen of Oriental descent” to do so.30 Residential trends in California also encouraged the formation of “Oriental” identity in the state. By the late 1950s, gradual Asian American dispersal and suburbanization began in the Bay Area and, slightly later, in Southern California. Middle-class Asian Americans who enjoyed greater residential opportunities than African Americans left old ethnic enclaves in search of better and more spacious homes, especially in the suburbs. Had black integration proceeded at the same pace, Asian Americans homeowners might primarily have seen themselves as “minorities” breaking into the all-white suburbs. However, greater Asian American residential mobility meant that new arrivals often shared and sometimes bonded over the experience of being the only “Orientals” in otherwise all-white neighborhoods. Some real estate firms recognized this identity and acted accordingly. Familiar with which areas accepted “Orientals,” the sizable Japanese American Kashu Realty Company of Los Angeles advertised in the Chinese American press and hired agents of Chinese ancestry. Asian American home seekers who encountered housing discrimination even began to ponder organizing along “Oriental” lines to fight it: when Sammy Lee, a Korean American Olympic champion, faced bigotry during his 1957 Southern California home search, Chinese American theologian Robert Lee lamented that “there are no protest organizations equivalent to the NAACP, Urban League, or Anti-Defamation League to champion the Oriental’s cause.” In framing the problem this way, he essentially described what he saw as the most potent way to address it.31 In San Francisco, organizations such as the Chinese American Democratic Club increasingly shared Robert Lee’s opinion and attempted at points to make it part of their mission. In the years after 1956, the liberal Chinese American Democrats close to Phil Burton embraced his ideas about coalition building at all levels. Burton hoped to construct a nonwhite political bloc in the city but also emphasized the particular importance of Asian American unity. As part of this, and to appeal to his diverse array of Asian American constituents, he mentored Patsy Takemoto Mink, a Hawaiian Japanese American activist who later entered Congress. Gilbert Woo and the CADC applauded Burton’s decision to help Mink win office in the Young Democrats. While not the full-fledged movement it became a few years later, the shift from strictly ethnic politics toward an “Oriental” political identity was thus underway by the early 1960s.32

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The Black Civil Rights Movement and Questions of Identity The growing prominence of the black civil rights movement, and the national attention it attracted, eventually complicated this emergent “Oriental” identity. In 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. accepted an invitation to participate in the ongoing drive to challenge white supremacy in Birmingham, Alabama. Across the nation, stunned television viewers during the spring and early summer of that year watched in horror as white police brutalized waves of nonviolent African American protestors, including children, in Birmingham. The Alabama violence sickened Chinese Americans as well, provoking their anger and disgust but also prompting debates about the tactics that black protestors used and the proper solutions to American racial problems.33 The black civil rights movement had been underway for years before Birmingham, and Chinese Americans on both coasts were familiar with its impact in their own cities. In New York, African American activists fought for decades for equal employment and housing opportunities, struggles their Bay Area counterparts increasingly joined during and after World War Two. Still, Birmingham not only brought home the brutal reality of Southern Jim Crow to Chinese Americans but also raised questions about the place of Asian Americans in a racially unequal society.34 In both New York and San Francisco, Chinese Americans were acutely aware of their identity as nonwhite minorities, yet they also understood quite well that whites saw them as different from, and sometimes preferable to, blacks.35 The two groups’ trajectories differed markedly in postwar New York and San Francisco, especially in the important field of housing, which often determined educational and job opportunities as well. Black and Chinese American residential patterns began to diverge in New York and San Francisco in the 1950s as African American migration and Chinese immigration changed both cities. Occasionally, the two groups moved to some of the same areas. In the years after 1945, as Chinese wives arrived to join their husbands in New York, these growing families sought larger apartments and homes than the “bachelors” had once occupied. Workingclass Chinese American and black families, both contending with a discriminatory housing market, sometimes settled in the same deteriorating neighborhoods of the city, like Brownsville in Brooklyn. Wealthier people of Chinese ancestry experienced less segregation than African Americans of similar status, however. A number secured homes in places like Forest Hills, Queens, a leafy enclave with very few black residents; even more left the city altogether for the Long Island suburbs, where African Americans

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faced much greater resistance from white homeowners. Middle-class Chinese Americans enjoyed greater residential mobility than their black counterparts in the Bay Area as well, a reversal from prewar years and a trend that frustrated and angered some African Americans. In the late 1940s, scores of Chinese Americans moved from San Francisco’s Chinatown into neighboring areas like Nob Hill; by the 1950s, even more migrated to the Richmond and Sunset districts and parts of the peninsula south of the city. They continued to face considerable housing discrimination, especially in suburban areas, yet white homeowners put up less resistance to them than to African Americans.36 As both communities sought better homes and jobs, tensions occasionally flared between them over a host of different issues, from civil rights activism to housing to crime. In New York and San Francisco, Chinese American business owners sometimes adopted discriminatory practices in the belief that white customers preferred segregation; restaurateurs occasionally refused to seat blacks or treated them with rudeness in the hope that they would not return. These instances angered African American commentators, who found discrimination at the hands of other nonwhites especially galling. At the same time, each city’s distinctive culture shaped the nature of interracial friction there. In New York, Chinese Americans on occasion vented their feelings more at Jews, especially the landlords from whom many laundry owners rented storefronts, and saw blacks in the less intimidating role of employee or customer. In San Francisco, on the other hand, a number of Chinese American store owners identified blacks as potential thieves and muggers, a trend that intensified during a crime wave in 1958. Many Chinatown residents also supported the San Francisco Housing Authority’s quiet policy of admitting only Chinese Americans into the neighborhood Ping Yuen housing project, despite black objections. The issue flared up repeatedly in public forums throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s. So did the tensions that arose when Chinese Americans opened stores in black neighborhoods. In 1962, African American activists even picketed a Chinese-owned store south of Market Street when the owner refused to hire black employees.37 At least some Chinese Americans, particularly liberals with connections outside the community, worried that ordinary blacks now felt a special kind of resentment towards people of Chinese ancestry in San Francisco. Gilbert Woo tried to explain this developing anger—and what it meant for Chinese Americans—in a story he recounted in his popular “Passing on Grant Avenue” column. When an African American mugger tried to rob a friend of Woo’s, the friend chastised the robber, arguing that “we are both

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minorities!” In response, the robber snapped: “We are both minorities? Chinese people discriminate against black people just like the whites do!” The story Woo told had a happy ending, for his friend, who apparently shared the journalist’s liberal convictions, produced an NAACP membership card and got his wallet back. But as Woo reminded his readers, the robber’s words showed how many African Americans believed that Chinese Americans not only avoided association with blacks but also readily discriminated against them.38

Navigating the Rights Revolution When the televised violence in Alabama occurred, Chinese Americans in San Francisco and New York were thus already grappling with their own sometimes uncomfortable relationship with African Americans. In the Bay Area, black activists inspired by the Alabama protests publicly took aim once again at what many saw as a symbol of retrograde Chinese American racial attitudes: the Ping Yuen public housing complex. Flouting court orders, the San Francisco Housing Authority for many years kept the project all Chinese, irking African Americans but gratifying many in Chinatown. During the Birmingham crisis, the sole black member of the San Francisco Housing Commission decried the segregation of Ping Yuen, facing off against another board member, the fair housing opponent T. Kong Lee.39 In other ways, too, the Birmingham crisis exposed the fissures in the city’s Chinese American politics, because approaches to racial and ethnic identity had begun to divide many activist community members. During the Birmingham movement, T. Kong Lee’s Chinese Times counseled patience and argued that civil rights laws already in place (including some Lee had publicly opposed) would eventually solve the nation’s racial problems. “This is why we think the black people’s campaign for equality should set about managing its long-term goals, fighting for equal opportunities in economics and politics,” the paper counseled. “The rest of the issues will be solved naturally.”40 Chinese American liberals, including CADC members, proved far more willing to accept the aims and methods of the black civil rights movement. By the early 1960s, the club itself inducted a growing number of members who shared the progressive values of people such as Gilbert Woo and Phil Burton, including the social worker Alan Wong and the liberal Christian activist Larry Jack Wong. Most of these new CADCers embraced the nonviolent black civil rights movement as necessary and correct. During the Birmingham crisis, while the Chinese Times counseled patience, the CADC

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launched a fundraising drive for the NAACP. As club president Harry Low reminded community members, “Many of our gains are directly the result of vigorous efforts on the part of Negro leadership.” Gilbert Woo also praised the black civil rights movement and the Chinatown clergy members who participated in protests with African Americans. “We must sympathize with and support the exceptional black struggle for equality,” he said. “This is the only way, and we are duty bound to follow it. Our advantages and disadvantages and the advantages and disadvantages of the black struggle for equality are the same.”41 While Chinese American conservatives viewed the black movement’s aggressive nonviolence with concern and dismay, community liberals believed that African American civil rights activists’ victories greatly benefited people of Chinese ancestry. In mid-1963, just months after Governor Brown’s reelection, the Chinese American Democratic Club and the Greater Chinatown Community Service Association paid for Lim P. Lee to travel to Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress and President Kennedy on immigration reform. Lee almost certainly recalled that his onetime mentor, Albert Chow, had made several similar trips in the late 1940s in an attempt to win nonquota immigration rights for the spouses and children of Chinese American citizens. Now, Lee had become Chinatown’s most politically influential Democrat, and immigration law changes seemed more possible than they had in decades. As Lee noted, the death of Congressman Francis Walter, who stymied reform for more than a decade, meant that the major “roadblock to liberal immigration legislation is gone.” Furthermore, Kennedy used his executive authority to admit several thousand Chinese refugees under a special parole program, indicating to Lee the president’s good intentions. But Lee also paid tribute to the way black civil rights activists were pushing issues like unfair immigration laws to the fore, and he reminded his backers that “we owe a debt of gratitude to our Negro brethren for stirring up the civil rights issue and mak[ing] the white folks conscious of racial discrimination, be it black, yellow, or brown.”42 Still, the fact that Chinese American activists deemed immigration reform of such importance revealed one of the major dilemmas of those who wished to create a multiracial political coalition in San Francisco or California as a whole. Chinese Americans and blacks both grappled with discrimination in the 1950s and 1960s, but as historian Mark Brilliant has observed, “The different axes of discrimination confronted by the state’s different racial groups translated into different avenues of legal and legislative redress.” Furthermore, civil rights liberalism, which focused on changing laws more than on challenging deeply ingrained structural and

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institutional inequalities, tangibly benefited Asian Americans more than blacks. Before the 1940s, Asian immigrant and “alien ineligible for citizenship” were synonymous. That meant legislators could deny rights to “aliens ineligible for citizenship” (and, in reality, their children) without running afoul of the 14th Amendment, which would have invalidated such statutes had they specified their targets as “Japanese,” “Chinese,” or “Orientals.” Of course, the end result was the same. The repeal of exclusion acts, alien land acts, and similar kinds of legal inequities, and the end of the racial bar to citizenship in 1952, thus made a tremendous and visible impact on Asian Americans. These laws were certainly not the only repressive force that Asian Americans faced, but they were a major one. Unequal laws played a less important role in the discrimination faced by California’s black population, which struggled with longstanding private practices that state neglect and collusion encouraged.43 Such differences further cemented the growing sense of Oriental identity among Asian Americans in the mid-1960s. So did increasing public perceptions and comparisons of Asian American and African American “success”—the idea that people of Asian ancestry, especially Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans, were “model minorities.” Whether or not Chinese American liberals accepted this idea (most did not), they felt far more comfortable with moderate rather than radical black activists, who challenged not just racist laws but the very underpinnings of what they deemed a repressive, white supremacist America.44

The Unbeatable Phil Burton Such tensions remained below the surface in the early 1960s, a time when black and Chinese American liberals began to work together in San Francisco to elect candidates both groups favored. Such cooperation peaked in 1964, after Rep. Jack Shelley successfully ran for mayor. Shelley’s resignation from Congress set off a scramble to fill his seat in the Fifth Congressional District. Phil Burton quickly emerged as the frontrunner, despite the tacit opposition of the new mayor and other moderates who disliked the brash, hard-drinking, and sometimes obnoxious assemblyman.45 Burton’s run energized his strongest supporters, including many in the CADC, but it also revealed the strange fault lines that the civil rights movement and the receding importance of China politics were creating in the Chinese American community. Burton’s bare-knuckle political style and sometimes ruthless tactics in the Assembly had earned him many enemies in Democratic circles, where some even attempted to red-bait him, but

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in his own district voters often adored the outspoken legislator. Burton’s stand on civil rights and civil liberties was key to his popularity: he enjoyed incredible support from the substantial black population in his assembly district, which largely overlapped with the Fifth Congressional District. Many white union members and leaders in the district also backed the liberal candidate, whose record on labor issues was impeccable. In a strange echo of Burton’s 1956 assembly race against Tommy Maloney, however, reporters initially wondered whether Burton could win Chinatown. As in the past, Burton again contended with rumors that he favored US recognition of the PRC.46 Community conservatives and Republican-leaning groups like the CACA could tolerate Burton in the Assembly, where his work for the community sometimes earned their praise, but the prospect of him serving in Congress, where he could affect foreign policy, unnerved many of these same people. Burton’s stand on China—he favored trade with the PRC and frequently had to deny that he supported its admission to the United Nations—now prompted the most diehard ROC supporters, and those who benefited financially from favored trading relationships with the KMT regime, to come out strongly against him. Increasingly, Burton’s outspoken support for civil rights measures also annoyed those like T. Kong Lee, who opposed some of those policies. For all these reasons, the heavily Republican Chinese American Citizens Alliance endorsed Burton’s little-known Republican opponent, Nick Verreos, despite having favored Burton in his assembly races since 1958. Some community leaders and conservatives even hooted and booed when Burton appeared at the Miss Chinatown pageant just days before the February 1964 special election to fill Shelley’s old seat. Facing such opposition, Lim P. Lee, Burton’s campaign director in the community, expressed his own deep frustration to the candidate about the “reactionary enemies that you and I face in the Chinese Community. . . . we seem to get the same political foes, the Doon [Wong]s, the [Jack] Chows, the Earl Louies, the C.A.C.A., and the Kuo Min Tang.”47 In spite of the booing, rumors, and high-profile opposition, Chinese Americans of all political stripes streamed to the polls for Burton, backing him in every precinct and delivering a strong rebuke to the conservative Chinese community leaders who publicly opposed him. Unsurprisingly, Burton won huge majorities—75 to 80 percent of the votes—in the precincts where younger, middle-class, civil rights–minded, and increasingly liberal Chinese Americans had moved since the late 1940s. But he also decimated Verreos in the heart of Chinatown, where the KMT and the traditional organizations exercised the most influence. Significantly, Burton

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earned a massive 86 percent of the vote in the Ping Yuen housing project, where Chinese Americans saw him as a defender both of working-class people and minorities.48 The results reiterated what elections beginning with the KnowlandBrown contest of 1958 had suggested: that fewer and fewer Chinese Americans responded any longer to politicians and community leaders who used red-baiting and the PRC-ROC conflict to influence voters. Chinese Americans still cared about China, but most also accepted the permanence of the PRC, however they felt about communism. As in the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy race, Burton’s victory showed that more and more San Franciscans of Chinese ancestry were embracing a Chinese American ethnic identity unconnected to China politics. The PRC-ROC question played little role in their voting behavior anymore, despite the efforts of Chinatown conservatives to keep the question alive. Days after the election, Gilbert Woo mused about what the Chinese American results meant. “In our opinion, the overseas Chinese are no longer willing to follow a group of people blindly in casting their votes,” Woo wrote. “They make a careful study of the candidates to determine who really takes a deep interest in the welfare of the Chinese community (not necessarily favorable to Chiang Kai-shek or Mao Tsetung) . . . [and] merely branding these overseas Chinese as ‘leftists’ does not frighten them.” It was a moment that Woo had hoped for since the political ferment in the district in the late 1940s: his readers and others in the community were abandoning China politics and forging alliances with other minority groups. In the process, they were becoming Chinese Americans.49

Struggling for Relevance: The 1964 Election in New York By 1964, a similar transformation seemed possible in New York, where Chinese Americans increasingly voiced their discontent over the state of politics in the community. KMT officials directly linked to Taipei still dominated the CCBA-NY, yet the antics of Shing Tai Liang and other recent leaders substantially eroded the power and influence of the umbrella organization. The factionalism and intrigue of the late 1950s produced nothing of value, and increasingly community residents were not afraid to say so. As one reader complained in a letter to the Chinese-American World, “In these past few years, looking at the many absurd affairs made me detest [overseas Chinese leaders] ever more . . . [they just] love the limelight, fish for fame and compliments, and are not merely incompetent, but also shoulder not the least bit of responsibility.” Reader Hu Yongsheng put the matter in even

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plainer language. “I have lived in New York for some 20 years or more, and I can’t bear this business, with the dignified CCBA-NY being continuously manipulated by the KMT,” he wrote. “New York in total contains tens of thousands of overseas Chinese, and it is said that those in the KMT number just around 100 people . . . isn’t it extraordinary that with each election KMT leaders are the only ones who get elected?”50 At a time of rising incomes and aspirations in the United States, the rumbles of discontent also reflected the anger and frustration of Chinese New York’s aging and increasingly poor population. The median income of Chinese Americans in New York lagged behind that of most other groups in the city, including African Americans. The average Chinese American man in New York was also much older than the average male Chinese American in any other major city in the country. Hand laundries, a mainstay of the population, were a shrinking industry at a time when white middleclass residents fled to the suburbs and washing machines and Laundromats proliferated. And in 1960, Chinese-American Times editor William Yukon Chang detected a new threat to the Chinese American economy: canned chow mein that might put restaurants out of business.51 Seeing traditional community organizations unwilling or unable to address such issues, a small but vocal group of Chinese American activists began agitating to change the New York community’s prevailing climate of suspicion and apathy towards American party politics. The deeply flawed Chinese Confession Program, which enabled thousands of former paper sons to obtain citizenship, aided this crusade by forcing many of these once fearful people to interact with the state. Thousands eventually gained citizenship, and some even registered to vote. Still, in a heavily alien community that the KMT long dominated, Chinese Americans expressed concern about the consequences of political participation. “It seems that Chinese joining American politics is an inevitable trend,” noted one New Yorker, but he worried that “if I contribute very much to the first party, certainly the second party will retaliate against me.”52 Community activists and independent journalists struggled to overcome such attitudes, rooted both in China’s political past and in New York’s Chinese American political culture. Frank Hom of Jamaica, Queens, where the middle-class Chinese American population was growing, pointed out to his peers that “the Negroes in the South have to risk bodily harm when they vote [and] YET THEY GO TO THE POLLS.” Citing Phil Burton’s recent ascent to Congress, William Yukon Chang urged New York readers to follow the example of San Francisco Chinese Americans, whose votes proved so crucial to the candidate. Chin-fu Woo counseled, “If everyone casts their

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ballots, they can raise the status of the Chinese in politics. If the majority of people neglect their voting rights, it will put them out of the public eye forever.” James Typond’s Democrats and the Lower East Side Rutgers Democratic Club both launched registration drives in Chinatown.53 Still, New York activists regardless of their party affiliations found changing the tenor of politics in the neighborhood difficult. The local GOP unit, though no longer completely under KMT sway, remained deeply conservative in its orientation. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where most longtime Republicans of Chinese ancestry leaned moderate, the right-wing Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater drew much of his Chinese American support from China-born KMT members. Within the New York City organization, however, Goldwater appears to have been an uncontroversial selection, despite having defeated popular liberal Republican New York governor Nelson Rockefeller for the nomination. By the 1960s, after two decades of KMT influence, Chinese American Republican politics tilted ever more to the right, even as they returned to the hands of non-KMT residents. The Chinese American Republicans had long trended more conservative than their GOP counterparts in the city and state. Even during the Depression, the local GOP under the native-born activist Wilbur Pyn forged ties to the moderate governor Thomas Dewey instead of the Roosevelt ally Fiorello LaGuardia. But the KMT’s influence in the 1950s moved the Chinese American GOP even further to the right. By the early 1960s, Chinese American Republicans’ new mentor was Henry Del Rosso, a conservative Republican who steered the group squarely towards Goldwater.54 The 1964 campaign in New York demonstrated how profoundly Chinese American politics there now diverged from the mainstream in the city and state. Although Goldwater picked upstate New York congressman William E. Miller as his running mate, the New York Times characterized the latter as “not . . . part of the New York Republican tradition that produced Thomas E. Dewey and Nelson A. Rockefeller.” Indeed, Republicans Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating, who represented New York in the Senate, refused to endorse Goldwater, whom they viewed as an extremist. New York GOP activists Edward Hong, an immigration attorney, and Benjamin Kimlau, a mortician, had no such qualms about the Arizona senator, whom they embraced with gusto. Hong and Kimlau dug into their own pockets to finance in Chatham Square a huge Goldwater billboard assuring passersby that Chinese Americans supported the Republican candidate—and were thus appropriately anti-communist. Hong also lent the use of a storefront he owned to the Republican campaign for free. The literature they sent to voters in the community accused Presidents Truman and Roosevelt of hav-

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ing betrayed China years earlier, thus discrediting the Democratic Party forever. “Senator Goldwater not only opposes Chinese communist entry into the United Nations, but he also advocates that the US must permit the government of Nationalist China at an early date to counterattack the mainland, and save the people of the mainland who are in dire straits,” a Chinese American Republican mailing proclaimed. The flyer had far less to say about domestic politics, showing once again the fusion in New York of China politics and Chinese American politics—and the way both were profoundly out of step with opinion in the city as a whole.55 If Chinese American Republicans diverged from the mainstream New York GOP, the Chinese American Democrats looked a little too much like their fellow partisans in Manhattan. After Tammany Hall’s demise, various factions of the city’s Democratic Party sought to assert their authority in the city, and the discord touched Chinese Americans as well. The Chinatown Democratic Club emerged as the establishment, “regular” organization and the one that New York politicians, from Robert Kennedy to Mayor Robert Wagner, visited during the campaign. Some of its younger affiliates, including attorneys Norman Lau Kee, Benjamin Gim, and Stanley Chin, worked to make the group relevant to the local community, but the club struggled to move beyond its old role as a conduit for bribes and a roost for On Leong leaders: George Chintong continued to play a role in the organization, and On Leong member Peter Fok-leung Woo now led the organization.56 Frustrated with this political status quo, a group of younger liberals, few of whom lived in Chinatown, formed the alternative Chinese-American Democratic Club of New York in spring 1964. The new group purposely borrowed the name of San Francisco’s increasingly influential liberal club, whose electoral successes attracted the attention of Chinese Americans around the country. Leaders of the new organization also reached out to the city’s Democratic reformers and expressed their desire to work on community welfare, civil rights, immigration reform, and education. Lee Chuck Fon led the group, but much of its energy came from its vice president, Henry H. Lee, a former Republican and the travel agent son of a prominent Chinatown businessman.57 National Democratic Party leaders convinced the two clubs to work together to help reelect President Johnson, but while the organizations agreed, their collaboration was a bit awkward. With the blessing of the national leadership, reformers Henry H. Lee and Lucy Wang helped put together a diverse Chinese American presidential committee. It included a number of younger liberals, such as Chinatown Democratic Club members Benjamin Gim and Norman Lau Kee and reformist local business-

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people Jenny Lee, Grace Ho, and Put Chou. For a presidential campaign committee that had barely changed in two decades, this was a step forward. In some ways, the club was even more progressive than its San Francisco counterpart, since its leading members included three women, two of them entrepreneurs and one a community activist. Henry Lee and Lucy Wang could not fully exclude China politics and old-line Democrats: Peter Woo and former CCBA-NY chairman and Chinese Hongmen Party member Lau Ying-cho received seats on the campaign’s executive board, while Lester Fong became its “advisor.” Still, younger activists were numerically dominant.58 The reformers’ momentum stalled after the presidential election, however, with the elders in the Chinatown Democratic Club quickly reasserting their influence. Although New York City’s old-line and reform Democrats briefly united during the 1964 campaign, the party’s ranks quickly divided in 1965. Still, even New York’s progressive politicians showed little inclination to challenge the status quo in the Chinese American community. Given the few votes Chinese Americans had to offer, Democratic officials who claimed to oppose bossism, including Robert Kennedy, continued to recognize the Chinatown Democratic Club as the “real” Chinese American party organization. The head of the Chinatown Democratic Club even received the only patronage position given to a Chinese American community member after the election. Younger activists who wanted to challenge the local power structure thus found few allies outside Chinatown.59 Tammany Hall was dead, but Democratic leaders with roots in the old machine retained significant power in the city, the party, and the Chinese American community. In New York as a whole, some reformers who disliked the old-line Democrats joined the tiny Liberal Party, while others sought to change the Democratic Party from within. Others gravitated to liberal Republicans such as John V. Lindsay, who won the Republican mayoral nomination in 1965. His opponent was regular Democrat Abraham Beame, who emerged victorious from an acrimonious mayoral primary that further highlighted the tensions within the party. Old-line Chinatown Democratic Club members used their ties to Beame and other regular Democrats to reiterate their claim to represent the party in the Chinese American community. Frustrated and disillusioned, New York’s ChineseAmerican Democratic Club dissolved.60 The 1965 mayoral election further discouraged younger Democratic activists who wanted to increase their influence and change the tenor of community politics. In November 1965, large numbers of progressive voters in New York backed Lindsay instead of Beame, and some of

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the younger Chinese American liberals who supported Lyndon Johnson in 1964 were among those who made the switch. As Bronx resident Dan Gong complained, “Even registered Democrats can get tired of the same sad menu.” Still, community conservatives aligned with the CCBA-NY elbowed aside young activists to chair the pro-Lindsay Chinese American group in the community, while the Chinatown Democratic Club’s usual suspects stumped for Beame. When the club held an energetic Beame parade and rally, it inadvertently revealed the festering generational and political tensions in the community. During the parade, Chinese American youths heckled the mayoral candidate and trashed his literature, angering and embarrassing the candidate’s hosts, particularly James Typond.61 The election’s results satisfied few Chinese American Democrats, no matter whom they backed. When Beame lost, the community’s old-line Democrats found themselves shut out of City Hall, but Lindsay’s administration largely ignored its own Chinese American supporters. While the new mayor reached out to blacks and Puerto Ricans during his first term, he paid almost no attention to Chinese Americans, even as immigration from Hong Kong surged after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965. One result was that Chinatown received no federal War on Poverty funding, in contrast to other high-poverty neighborhoods, while local officials who created urban-action task forces to improve city services to such places neglected the Chinese community.62 This treatment frustrated a growing number of younger, activist Chinese Americans, whose discouragement with city politics led them to seek other means for solving community problems. Sing Kee’s son Herbert Kee, a doctor, and his daughter-in-law Virginia Kee, a schoolteacher, created the Chinatown Planning Council to address the issues of the new immigrants. They and other Chinese Americans active in federal anti-poverty programs lobbied City Hall for funding for Chinatown but came away with nothing. Only after the 1969 election, during which conservative Republican John Marchi accused Lindsay of neglecting the Chinese American population, did the mayor acknowledge the community by appointing Democrat Norman Lau Kee to the city’s Human Rights Commission. By then, younger and more radical Chinese American activists were rejecting out of hand the kinds of electoral solutions the Kee family had long pushed. For the next decade, both the radicals and moderates in the community channeled their efforts into demanding more social services and affirmative action for Chinese Americans rather than trying to gain representation in city government. That route had proved fruitless.63 Chinese American powerlessness pushed even conservative Republicans

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in the Chinese American community to embrace identity politics. “We have no recognition at all,” complained Edward Hong, the 1964 Goldwater supporter. “There are maybe 90,000 Chinese in the metropolitan area, and we have not one judge or deputy commissioner.” Frustrated, in 1965 he campaigned himself for a seat in the Assembly, despite joking that “I haven’t a Chinaman’s chance” to win a majority in the heavily Democratic 66th Assembly District. As he predicted, he lost badly, and then lost again the next year when redistricting prompted a new election. Journalist William Yukon Chang tried to remain optimistic about the results, hoping that Hong’s run would “ma[ke] it a bit easier for the next Chinese-American to seek public office.” In fact, almost forty years passed before a Chinese American successfully ran for the New York State Assembly, and he was elected from the growing, middle-class Asian American community of Flushing, Queens.64

Ethnic Identity, Race, and Liberalism: The Debate about Proposition 14 In San Francisco, Chinese American political organizations proved more able to reap patronage and withstand simmering generational discord, but they struggled to come to grips with the growing racial tensions in the city and throughout the state. Even as Pat Brown and liberals in the State Legislature pushed for fair employment and housing legislation, a white backlash against civil rights was growing across California. It was particularly strong among the millions of white homeowners who deeply valued the racial homogeneity of the state’s segregated suburbs and schools. Following the passage of the 1963 Rumford Fair Housing Act, named after Assembly sponsor William Byron Rumford, the California Real Estate Association and other conservative organizations mobilized to put a proposition on the ballot in 1964 to repeal the law. According to Time magazine, “In California, the intensity of interest in the ‘Rumford’ issue overshadows that of such relatively piddling contests as the one between Johnson and Goldwater, or between recently appointed Democratic Senator Pierre Salinger and Republican challenger George Murphy.” Chinese American political organizations and civic groups debated what stand they should take on the issue, and a few outside journalists even claimed that “Orientals” as a whole would support Prop. 14 and oppose fair housing.65 In San Francisco, some Chinese American Prop. 14 opponents worried that their peers would back the measure, but overall the initiative not only united community liberals and moderates but also attracted the support of a few conservative leaders and organizations. Chinese American

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groups across San Francisco, from the Republican-leaning Chinese Chamber of Commerce to the Chinese American Democratic Club to the Greater Chinatown Improvement Committee, unequivocally condemned the measure. CADC activists, including Jackson Hu, J.K. Choy, Gilbert Woo, and Harry Low, visited numerous clubs and civic groups to urge voters to reject Prop. 14. Cognizant of reports that some Chinese Americans might see discrimination as a problem of the past, Choy and other speakers reminded listeners inside the community that even well-educated Chinese American professionals still faced bigotry as they sought homes and jobs.66 The campaign to defeat Prop. 14 hastened the development of the kind of “Oriental” political identity and organization already underway in California. Across the state, especially in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Chinese American Democrats and moderate Republicans not only formed groups to oppose Prop. 14 but also reached out specifically to other Asian Americans to cooperate along “Oriental” lines. In San Francisco, the Asian American Press Club, founded in 1956 and probably the first group to ever use the name “Asian American,” publicly opposed Prop. 14, the first time it had ever taken a political position. The club argued that Prop. 14 “would destroy everything which stands for Americanism, a goal for which hundreds of thousands of Americans of Asian ancestry have strived.” Others in the community agreed. Jackson Hu organized a group of local Chinese American and Japanese American businesspeople opposed to the ballot initiative and took out ads to argue against the measure. J.K. Choy and Harry Low, leaders of San Francisco’s main Chinese American anti-Prop. 14 group, emphasized the initiative’s impact on Asian Americans, rather than simply people of Chinese ancestry, even when speaking in Chinatown.67 The trend was even more obvious in diverse Southern California. There, a group of Chinese Americans, Filipinos, Korean Americans, and Japanese Americans held an event to rally support against the measure and hear Pat Brown speak about the initiative’s problems. Four hundred Asian Americans in Los Angeles also formed an “Oriental” committee to fight the proposition and disseminate information about it. Officers included Judge Delbert Wong’s wife, Dolores Wong; Japanese American Judge John Aiso; Korean American Assemblyman Alfred Song; the president of the city’s CACA; and the wife of the local CCBA chairman. The organizations that participated in the new group, including the JACL, the CACA, and the CCBA Los Angeles, were the nucleus of a more permanent association, the Council of Oriental Organizations, formally founded three years later.68 In San Francisco, Prop. 14 united almost every Chinese American community organization with a few significant exceptions, the most glaring of

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which was the San Francisco branch of the CACA. The group, after moving rightward beginning in the late 1940s, shifted to the center briefly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, perhaps in deference to the rising community influence of the Chinese American Democratic Club; the local CACA even endorsed Pat Brown and a number of other Democrats in 1962. Yet the San Francisco CACA made no formal recommendation about Prop. 14 in 1964, even as other important branches, including those in Oakland and Los Angeles, took strong stands against the measure, and even as opposition to the initiative became a major cause in Chinese American communities around the state. This silence was puzzling, since the local CACA published its endorsements in the Chinese Times, the newspaper it had founded, during every election. The CACA’s neglect of Prop. 14 suggested an unwillingness to buck community sentiment but an equal resistance to taking a stand against a measure that at least some important members backed. The two most well-known Republicans in the community, T. Kong Lee and Earl Sun Louie, made no public statements about Prop. 14, although Lee had publicly criticized fair housing measures in the past.69

“A Vote for Your Fellow American Chinese” Earl Sun Louie’s silence on Prop. 14 reflected the tactics of many 1964 Republican candidates, a group he joined in the spring of that year. After Phil Burton entered Congress, his old Assembly seat was up for grabs, and Louie quickly announced his intention to run for it. Louie’s bid made him the first Chinese American to seek that office, and had he won the race, he would have been only the third Asian American and the first of Chinese ancestry to serve in the Assembly. The Chinese American Democratic Club’s emphasis on political empowerment, and its record of electoral successes, made the Republican’s bid rather ironic. “Like the Russians who [are] trying to get a man in orbit, we are toying with the idea to get a Chinese candidate for public office,” Lim P. Lee joked in a CADC newsletter in 1960. “The Russians may not get their man back alive, and we [might not] either, but [it’s] worth the try.” However, the group never followed through on the idea. Although numerous CADC members received patronage appointments in the early 1960s, none of them chose to run for office. The most likely candidate would have been Lim P. Lee himself, who according to friend Harry Low “toyed with the idea [but felt] it was difficult for an Asian to garner enough votes to be successful in politics.” Earl Sun Louie disagreed, especially when John Burton, Phil Burton’s younger brother, announced his intention to run for the vacant seat. A longtime leader of the

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community’s Republicans, Louie was determined to halt the creation of a Burton dynasty.70 So were others in the Chinese American community, including CADC moderates uncomfortable with John Burton’s liberalism. John Burton’s main primary opponent was John Francis Delury, an assistant to State Senator Gene McAteer and the onetime executive director of the city’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. McAteer’s popularity and Delury’s work on the EEOC and the city’s Civic Unity Council gave him significant credibility with the 20th AD’s nonwhite voters. A devout Catholic deeply involved in the church, Delury also enjoyed the covert backing of the Archdiocese of San Francisco and public endorsements from a number of leading officials long at odds with Phil Burton, including Governor Brown and Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh. Moderate Chinese American Democrats, many of whom opposed the growth of the ultraliberal Burton clan’s influence within state political circles, backed Delury as well. Albert Chow’s widow, Florence, and the late Democratic leader’s friends Arthur Chinn and George Kwok all endorsed Delury, while Jack Chow remained neutral. CADC members with KMT ties, including S.K. Wong and John Yehall Chin, backed Delury too; after all, John Burton was a leader in the California Young Democrats, which now supported recognition of the PRC and American withdrawal from Vietnam. In the primary, Burton won the Chinese American precincts anyway, but he did so by what Lim P. Lee, who ran his campaign in Chinatown, considered a worrying small margin. “We won only 60% to Delury’s 40%,” Lee noted. “For a Burton name in Chinatown, this is not too flattering.”71 Entering the general election, John Burton struggled to balance his disparate constituencies. Despite Lim P. Lee’s optimistic contention in June 1964 that “they have called us Communists but the public don’t buy that anymore,” Louie gained traction berating Burton for speaking in front of the W.E.B. DuBois Club, a mass front organization that the Communist Party created to attract “New Left” students. The club engaged in direct nonviolent action for civil rights in the Bay Area at a time of rising black anger over white liberal vacillation and moderation on racial issues. John Burton’s decision to appear before the group was thus a politically astute one in a district whose voters included the frustrated and long segregated African American community at Hunters Point. But in Chinatown, Earl Sun Louie exploited concern over the issue in a community that still vividly recalled the anti-communist overtones of the 1956 immigration investigation. His arguments convinced not just conservatives but many moderates, and he soon secured the endorsement of most of the major

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6.1. Republican Earl Sun Louie poses with a giant fortune cookie during his campaign for the California State Assembly in 1964. Louie eventually lost to John Burton, Phil Burton’s brother. (From the Fang Family San Francisco Examiner Photo Archive, courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)

English-language newspapers (although they tended to lean Republican anyway), the CACA, and the Italian Federation of California.72 Still, Louie’s tactics during the campaign also demonstrated that the increased liberalism of Chinese American voters was pushing local Republicans to move to the center, despite the fact that the California Republican Party was speeding the other direction. In 1964, far-right conservatives took over the California Republican Assembly, the party’s counterpart to the California Democratic Council and an organization in which Louie had once served. Southern Californian voters, especially militant anti-communists who opposed civil rights legislation, also ensured right-wing presidential candidate Barry Goldwater’s crucial California primary victory over moder-

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ate Republican Nelson Rockefeller. In other words, the conservative tide that eventually swept the nation in the late 1960s was already rising in California. Earl Louie bucked the trend. Although he made an obligatory appearance at a San Francisco Goldwater rally, he spent much of the campaign avoiding any discussion of the man at the top of the ticket. Instead, he publicly reached out to Japanese Americans, Latinos, and African Americans and promised to fight for more special education funding for minorities and better housing, including protection for the “temporary” World War Two defense housing that still stood at Hunters Point. And he exploited the wounds of the primary election: Jack Chow, despite his continued prominence in the Democratic Party and the CADC, declined to publicly endorse John Burton, while Pei Chi Liu, political advisor to CADC founder Doon Wong, forcefully backed Louie.73 The 1964 election foreshadowed most of the political trends of the decade to come, both in Chinese American San Francisco and in the city and state as a whole. California voters followed the nation and backed Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater; still, LBJ’s margin of victory was smaller than expected, while Democrat Pierre Salinger lost to Republican challenger George Murphy, a genial former film actor whose success Ronald Reagan repeated two years later against Pat Brown. Even more significantly, 66 percent of voters statewide supported Prop. 14, an affirmation of the kind of property-rights and racial conservatism that rapidly became a hallmark of California politics. In yet another sign of things to come, Goldwater, and Prop. 14, drew the most support from Southern California, home of Orange County conservatism, important branches of the extremist John Birch Society, and the insurgent conservatives who had taken over the California Republican Assembly. Prop. 14 in particular demonstrated how the segregation of the suburbs had created a kind of political apartheid: the measure lost only in heavily nonwhite urban areas, while winning overwhelming in largely white suburbia.74 In contrast to much of the rest of the state, politics in San Francisco and in the Chinese American community were becoming multiracial in composition and, increasingly, left-leaning. In 1964, for the first time, Chinese American Democrats and Republicans alike had forged strong ties to other nonwhite communities. While Earl Louie sought allies among blacks at Hunters Point and Japanese Americans in the Western Addition, the CADC stumped for Phil Burton and then endorsed and campaigned for a young African American Assembly candidate, Willie Brown Jr. Brown later rose to become the most powerful speaker in Assembly history and, eventually, the first black mayor of San Francisco, but in 1964, he was simply a young,

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ambitious Phil Burton protégé. At the end of the day, Chinese Americans voted very similarly to African Americans in the city: overwhelming for Lyndon Johnson, Democratic senatorial candidate Pierre Salinger, and Phil Burton himself. Voters in every Chinese-majority precinct rejected Prop. 14 as well, with the low-income, working-class Ping Yuen housing project’s residents defeating it most soundly of all. Furthermore, even Chinese Americans who failed to mark their votes for president or senator made sure to reject Prop. 14. San Francisco’s Chinese Americans were not moving left at quite the same rapid clip as many other residents of the city, but their slow, steady shift over time was undeniable.75 Chinese Americans voted like blacks in every way but one. In February 1964, Phil Burton swept every majority Chinese American precinct when running against Nick Verreos. In November, his brother John lost all but three of the Chinese American precincts to Earl Sun Louie. While black voters lined up solidly behind John Burton, ensuring his victory, Chinese Americans overwhelmingly supported the man who reminded them to “vote for your fellow American Chinese.” Lim P. Lee had predicted as much. “Earl Sun Louie will raise the race issue . . . [that] every Chinese

6.2. Lim P. Lee stumps for the Democratic ticket during an October 1964 Chinese American Democratic Club Johnson-Humphrey pre-victory parade in San Francisco’s Chinatown. (Courtesy of the Lim P. Lee family)

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should and must vote for a Chinese,” Lee warned Phil Burton before the election. “Harry Low, Larry Jack Wong, Howard Choy, Joe Quan and myself are putting on our best thinking caps together as to how we can meet this issue.” They never figured out a way.76 As political engagement increased in Chinese American San Francisco, so too did community members’ desire for ethnic representation in government. Across the West Coast, other Chinese Americans, from Seattle’s Wing Luke to Oxnard’s William SooHoo to Alameda County’s March Fong, were already running for office. In this context, San Francisco, with its huge Chinese American population, seemed not just behind but remiss. Ironically for the Democrats, the patronage positions that CADC members received after 1958 whet the appetite of voters for real representation and thus worked to Earl Louie’s advantage, despite his party affiliation. In Chinese American majority precincts, voters in 1964 rejected every other Republican candidate for office except Louie. Ethnicity did not so much trump ideology as substitute for it; despite the Burton family’s close ties to the community, most Chinese American voters saw Louie as serving their interests better because he was one of them. Many felt it was simply time for a Chinese American to represent the community.77

Not Even If His Name Were Lei Gen With John and Phil Burton and Willie Brown, CADC activists after 1964 worked to continue building a multiracial, liberal, pro–civil rights, and, increasingly, pro–women’s rights coalition in San Francisco, even as more and more voters statewide rejected liberalism and civil rights. In 1965, the Watts Riot in Los Angeles revealed the intense anger and frustration of African Americans grappling with unemployment, police brutality, and residential and educational segregation in the midst of a booming economy that visibly benefited whites. Although Governor Brown responded to the unrest with genuine sympathy, other officials, especially Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty and police chief William Parker, dismissed accusations of racism and viewed the rioters as simple agitators. The riots did nothing to improve conditions in Watts; even worse, many white Californians viewed the unrest as criminal and rushed to purchase weapons to protect themselves. As historian Lisa McGirr notes, such people, like “increasing numbers of white and middle-class suburban Americans . . . were concerned with social and cultural changes and with the threat to their own privileges and entitlements posed by the radicalized demands for change, empowerment, and social justice put forth by other social groups.”78

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By 1966, a number of high-profile issues—student protests for free speech and against the Vietnam War, the Watts Riot and general racial unrest, and the property rights conservatism of Prop. 14—helped former actor and conservative spokesman Ronald Reagan defeat Pat Brown in an election that foreshadowed rising conservatism across the country. Reapportionment and court decisions about representation helped Reagan by shifting power in California from the comparatively liberal north to the more populous and conservative south, particularly the Los Angeles and San Diego areas. In addition, Republican Party registration outpaced Democratic registration for the first time in years. But Reagan also won because so many Democrats, especially the many white, working-class union members who opposed fair housing and saw Brown as its champion, deserted the governor.79 San Francisco’s Chinese American voters moved the opposite direction, an indication that many in the community increasingly embraced the fight for civil rights, even if some felt uncomfortable with the radical tone of certain black activists. The question of African American civil rights loomed large in San Francisco during the last month of the 1966 gubernatorial campaign because of rioting that broke out in the heavily black Hunters Point area in late September. Under the direction of T. Kong Lee, the Chinatown Reagan committee attempted to exploit the issue: its advertisements in the community press emphasized not only Reagan’s opposition to Communist China but also his commitment to law enforcement and the restoration of public order. Demonstrating that Chinese American Republicans, like their Democratic counterparts, were gaining influence in local political circles, Lee also arranged for Reagan to speak at a large rally in Chinatown in early November. Still, the Reagan campaign failed to gain traction in the Chinese American community, where voters had strongly opposed Prop. 14 just two years earlier.80 Reagan’s longstanding opposition to civil rights measures undermined his appeal among a group that continued to grapple with considerable racial discrimination in many areas. Discussing the campaign, the liberal journalist Gilbert Woo confessed that nothing could make him cast a vote for the Republican gubernatorial candidate, whose name the Chinese American press transliterated as “Lei Gen.” “Even if Reagan’s real surname were Lei, and he was a son of the Yellow Emperor [Chinese], I still wouldn’t vote for him,” Woo wrote. But even community moderates rejected the actor, whose prolonged and public opposition to the Rumford Act they could not ignore. While Reagan never mentioned the housing issue in his Chinatown speech, three years of ugly public debates over the question reached

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6.3. Arthur B. Chinn, Joseph S. Quan, San Francisco Supervisor and State Senate candidate George Moscone, Congressman Phil Burton, and Governor Pat Brown campaign in Chinatown in 1966. Ronald Reagan defeated Brown in the gubernatorial election that year. (Photo by Kem Lee. Courtesy of the Jackson and Gladys Hu Family Photo Collection)

even the most tuned-out voters. To at least some who attended the Chinatown rally, Reagan further cemented his reputation as racially insensitive by labeling all Chinese Americans immigrants. In the end, San Francisco’s Chinese-majority precincts rejected the actor and supported Pat Brown 55 percent to 45 percent. Even more remarkably, the incumbent governor improved his showing in the community, winning every precinct—including the heart of Chinatown districts he lost to Richard Nixon in 1962. Although Pat Brown’s support for the Rumford Fair Housing Act and his opposition to Prop. 14 turned off many white voters, they finally won him the wholehearted support of Chinese Americans. In the midst of Brown’s tremendous defeat, Chinese Americans had fully joined the multiracial liberal coalition that was becoming central to San Francisco politics.81

A Meteoric Rise, for a Chinese American A year before Reagan’s decisive victory in California, Phil Burton heard that John Fixa, postmaster of San Francisco, was planning to step down after seventeen years in office. Fixa’s retirement created a major patronage position that Burton, as the only Democratic Congressman representing San

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Francisco, would have first priority to fill. Burton spoke with Lim P. Lee, his district manager and longtime friend, and offered him the job if he was willing to take it immediately; the congressman knew that he would quickly be swamped with office-seekers if he did not put forward a name right away. Lee asked for a minute to call his wife, Catherine, and after receiving her support, accepted the job. Although only Senate approval would make the appointment permanent, on January 25, 1966, Lee took the oath of office as temporary postmaster from his longtime friend, the California Supreme Court justice Stanley Mosk. Once sworn in, Lee became the second highest ranked Chinese American in the federal government, behind Senator Hiram Fong of Hawaii. Musing on the news, a happy yet jaded Gilbert Woo captured the appointment’s many layers of significance in just a few words: “If [Lee] had been born into a white family, he would have experienced a meteoric rise in which a trifling postmaster position would not have been considered the same thing!”82 Lee’s appointment reflected and contributed to the emerging multiracial liberal coalition that he, much of the CADC, and Phil and John Burton saw as so important to the future of San Francisco politics. Burton’s protégé Patsy Mink, a Japanese American from Hawaii who was elected to Congress in 1964 as its first nonwhite woman, contacted Postmaster General Lawrence O’Brien to urge approval of Lee’s appointment. In San Francisco itself, Assemblyman Willie Brown attended Lee’s swearing-in as acting postmaster, while Carlton Goodlet, publisher of the African American San Francisco Sun Reporter, hailed Lee’s selection. Just two months later, Goodlet also presented “Citizen of Merit” awards to Lee and fellow CADCer J.K. Choy, the vocal Proposition 14 foe who promised to “do my bit to persuade and educate the minority racial groups to be more conscious of political united action and social and economic solidarity.” Finally, after Mosk swore Lee in, the acting postmaster himself spoke briefly. While acknowledging the “early California Chinese pioneers, [whose path was] not . . . an easy one,” he also noted that “I welcome the new partnership in San Francisco between the Asian Communities, the Negro community, the Spanish-speaking community, and the community at large.”83 Lee’s fight for Senate confirmation verified that while China politics still played a role in the Chinese American community, it was no longer nearly as influential as it had once been. Lee remained acting postmaster for more than a year, targeted by enemies of Phil Burton, including powerful FBI head J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, convinced that Burton was a communist, did everything in his power to block Lee’s appointment when the Civil Service Committee and the Postal Inspection Committee conducted their rou-

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tine background investigations of the candidate. Hoover also considered Lee racially suspect; just two years later, the FBI director told a House subcommittee that “we are being confronted with a growing amount of work in being alert for Chinese-Americans and others in this country who would assist Red China.” Within Chinatown, conservatives who loathed Burton and Lee tried to stop the process as well. After rumors first leaked out that Lee would receive the postmaster appointment, Gilbert Woo noted that “in the past thirty years, [Lee] has fought for admission into white society and resisted discrimination, but his greatest obstacles have come from his own Chinatown.” In this instance, community members who even the FBI’s agents admitted were “act[ing] out of spite” contacted the bureau and accused Lee of favoring the Chinese Communists. With the help of Hawaiian Republican Hiram Fong, Lee finally received Senate confirmation, but only in June 1967. And yet he did receive confirmation, despite incredible opposition.84 Although Lim P. Lee’s confirmation represented a major triumph for the multiracial liberal coalition that he and Phil Burton envisioned for the city, the group was increasingly fraying, just like the liberal consensus in America itself. Reagan’s victory in 1966 exacerbated existing fissures in the statewide Democratic Party and decreased the influence of ultraliberals like the Burtons and their supporters. Other electoral setbacks took their toll: in 1967, John Burton made an unsuccessful bid for the State Senate, while the brothers and many liberal CADCers backed the losing candidate in the election that made Joseph Alioto mayor of San Francisco the same year. Alioto chipped away at the Burtons’ support in labor and African American circles and wooed Chinese Americans as well. But even more significantly, many Chinese Americans were growing increasingly uneasy with the goals of black civil rights leaders in the city. A few years earlier, blacks and Chinese Americans, although divided on integration of the Ping Yuen housing project, worked together to support fair employment laws in the city and to oppose Prop. 14. Now, questions like school busing to achieve racial integration divided liberal black leaders, who largely supported such action, and the many Chinese Americans who opposed it. And that was the least of the Democratic Party’s problems.85

An Enduring Legacy In 1968, the Democratic Party’s longtime “New Deal Coalition”—the uneasy alliance of working-class Northern white, Northern black, and Southern white voters who had sustained the party since the 1930s—finally fell

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apart. Television cameras at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago broadcast the coalition’s spectacular final implosion live, but the disintegration had begun much earlier. In the years after World War Two, whites in the South sought to stop blacks from gaining the vote and defeating Jim Crow, while Northern whites opposed residential integration of urban and suburban neighborhoods. By the late 1960s, widespread disillusionment with the Vietnam War worsened the Democratic Party’s internal turmoil, and in 1968, the issues of race and the war helped Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon defeat Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey. These same questions roiled Chinese American communities across the country. The Vietnam War touched Chinese Americans deeply, not just because some people fought in the conflict or protested against it, but also because it threatened the unspoken truce on issues related to China. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the status of Taiwan seemed settled, with the United States protecting the island and recognizing “Free China” as part of a larger American strategy to contain the spread of Asian communism. In the Bay Area especially, this fact removed a contentious issue from community politics, alleviated red-baiting, and allowed people

6.4. Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy meets supporters during a May 1968 campaign stop in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Those pictured include Kennedy Chinatown campaign chair Jackson K. Hu, Phil Burton, Gladys Hu, and Catherine Lee. (Photo by Kem Lee. Courtesy of the Jackson and Gladys Hu Family Photo Collection)

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like KMT hardliner S.K. Wong to collaborate with KMT opponent J.K. Choy and other liberal Democrats to oppose people such as William F. Knowland, the “Senator from Formosa.” By 1967, however, a growing number of Americans were questioning the logic of containment, which justified aid for Taiwan but also pulled the United States ever deeper into Vietnam. Across America, and especially on university campuses, protesters clashed with police over the Vietnam War. In the late 1960s, many Chinese American men and women in their teens and twenties began participating in such protests, angering community leaders tied to the KMT and others who just hated communism. The communities that grappled with these questions looked quite different than they had even a decade earlier. In 1965, Congress finally passed the long-awaited immigration reform for which Lim P. Lee had lobbied President Kennedy in 1963. The Immigration Act of 1965 eliminated the old national origins preferences and the 105-person annual quota for Chinese immigrants, replacing them with a system of generous hemispheric (rather than national) quotas that prioritized family reunification. The bill’s authors expected the legislation to result in a major influx of southern and eastern Europeans previously cut off from families in America because of tight quotas. Much to lawmakers’ surprise, the number of Asian immigrants soared instead. Under the earlier Kennedy refugee parole program, the Chinese immigrant population was already increasing in both San Francisco and New York. The influx of Chinese after 1965, however, was faster, more visible, and far more disruptive.86 The new immigrants often settled in existing Chinatowns, replacing the thousands of second-generation Chinese American families by then moving away from the old ethnic enclaves. Newly arrived female immigrants in both New York and San Francisco often found work in garment sweatshops, which became the focus of labor activism by the early 1970s. Many of their male counterparts struggled to gain any foothold in the job market, since they usually lacked advanced education and English language skills. As the immigrant influx continued, some community old-timers began to complain that jobless young men fresh from Hong Kong were loitering, frightening away tourists, and committing crimes. Many of the new immigrants also lived under poor conditions, crowded into the aging and substandard housing stock that still characterized the Chinatowns of both San Francisco and New York.87 Such developments prompted many Chinese American youths, especially second-generation men and women, to participate both in community activism and, increasingly, in the emerging Asian American movement,

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which coalesced in 1968 and 1969. Often, the young activists believed that improving their communities involved challenging old power structures within them. In San Francisco, a number of prominent movement activists, such as L. Ling-chi Wang, George Woo, and Mason Wong, helped lead new organizations like the Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action, the Chinatown Youth Council, and Chinese for Affirmative Action, all of which addressed the poverty and social conditions of the city’s Chinatown and critiqued its leadership. In New York, a group of Chinese American college students formed the radical I Wor Kuen group to address the problems of that city’s Chinatown and challenge community conservatives. New agencies such as the Chinese Youth Council also sued New York’s city government for a fair share of poverty funds to aid Chinese Americans, threatening the CCBA-NY’s role as a community mouthpiece.88 In challenging community leaders and fighting racism, numerous young Chinese American activists took as their inspiration the Marxist anti-imperialist movements in the “Third World.” These included Ho Chi Minh’s struggle against the United States in Vietnam, a conflict that helped catalyze the Asian American movement because, as Yen Le Espiritu observes, the war “raised questions of racism directed against Asian people[,]. . . . angered young Asians Americans[,] and stirred them to protest the prevailing assumption that Asian lives were cheap.” Mao Zedong also became a particularly inspirational figure among American radicals, especially nonwhites who embraced the Chinese communist leader as an anticolonial, anti-imperialist revolutionary theoretician and role model. Such activists, with little understanding of the true nature of China’s Cultural Revolution, frequently heaped praise on it for transforming Chinese society into what they assumed was something far more egalitarian. For young Chinese Americans, Mao proved a particularly alluring figure, a widely admired Chinese radical leader whom many conservatives in Chinese American communities hated and feared. By 1969, a group called the “Red Guard Party” had even formed in San Francisco Chinatown, taking its inspiration from both the Black Panthers and the youths of China who worshipped Chairman Mao.89 The foreign policy issues that most community liberals and moderates spent years avoiding now drove a wedge between them and the young activists with whom they shared many goals. The Vietnam War itself divided young activists from middle-aged Chinese American liberals, who like many other Americans frequently shared the anti-communist beliefs used to justify US involvement in the conflict. But the most divisive foreign policy issue in the New York and San Francisco communities remained the

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question of China. In both cities, many of the men and women who came of age during the Depression and World War Two sought to create a Chinese American politics that avoided the nasty factionalism of China politics. This quest was most successful in San Francisco, where Democrats and Republicans alike pledged surface fealty to Taiwan but focused on increasing Chinese American influence locally. Now, the next generation seemed to want nothing more than to dredge up the problems their elders had avoided, lionizing Chairman Mao and in the process stirring up the anger of the still influential KMT members in the community—and undermining the carefully maintained collegiality of Chinese American politics.90 The often radical young activists who sought to change Chinatowns expressed little regard for the middle-aged liberals who had been challenging traditional leaders in some of those same communities since the 1930s. If the young activists sought older role models, they were the Chinatown leftists and Marxists whom community conservatives had silenced a decade earlier. Many youths simply rejected the middle-aged liberals out of hand for their involvement in mainstream party politics, because numerous younger activists saw the American system of government as imperialist, racist, and undemocratic. To other movement participants, the middle-aged people’s involvement in mainstream party organizations smacked of assimilationism at a time when younger activists were championing ethnic nationalism. And the activities of the older men and women confounded those youths who saw community members in us-or-them terms: as either conservative enemies or part of the masses.91 Many movement activists thus either ignored the liberals or lumped them together with the hated community “leadership.” East/West, the first Asian American movement newspaper to serve San Francisco’s Chinatown, routinely criticized something it called “the Establishment” as the enemy of progress in the community. To East/West journalists, the Establishment was initially the CCBA, but the category quickly grew to include the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the traditional organizations, the Chinatown–North Beach Economic Opportunity Council (which activists believed the CCBA controlled), and, eventually, most middle-class businesspeople and professionals. In New York, David Ho, a young community organizer, and many of his friends echoed the East/West dichotomy. Ho, demanding funding for Chinatown, dismissed the liberal founders of the Chinatown Planning Council as “middle-class,” and, inaccurately, as “non-resident Chinese.” In some ways, then, radical activists expressed the same intolerance of community liberals and moderates as neighborhood rightists long had.92

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Many middle-aged Chinese American liberals were likely astounded when young radicals branded them as part of the hated “community leadership” or “Establishment,” together with the CCBA and even the KMT. After all, neighborhood rightists had for years tried to thwart organizations like the CADC and deny the existence of community problems. In fact, the liberals’ success at undercutting their opponents in the Bay Area created a more favorable environment for the radical youths. Furthermore, the young activists were embracing some of the same ideas and goals that the middle-aged liberals had pioneered years earlier, especially in San Francisco. Movement youth sought to build an interracial alliance of “Third World” people during the 1969 San Francisco State Strike; CADC members hoped to bring black, Latino, and Asian American voters together to make San Francisco politics more responsive to nonwhite residents. Radical community organizations like Leways (“Legitimate Ways,” some of whose members later helped found the Red Guard Party) wanted to create job opportunities for San Francisco Chinatown’s disaffected youths; Lim P. Lee worked towards similar ends as postmaster by creating an equal employment program that opened up scores of postal jobs to women and people of color for the first time. Even the Chinese American youths who sought to forge a pan-Asian alliance and who called themselves “Asian Americans” followed in the footsteps of the middle-aged liberals who once imagined that greater political influence could come from an “Oriental” identity. Liberal activists had recognized and tried to exploit this political potential as early as the 1950s, when Gilbert Woo urged “California’s Orientals” to form a voting bloc. The 1964 campaign against Prop. 14 provided greater momentum for the idea, as did Lim P. Lee’s 1966 call for a new partnership that involved “the Asian Communities” of San Francisco. While the Vietnam War catalyzed the Asian American movement, middle-aged Chinese American liberals, by proposing and eventually attempting to organize as Orientals in the early 1960s, helped lay the foundations for this new way of seeking political power.93 In the end, the major controversies of the late 1960s and early 1970s not only prompted real community mobilization in New York but actually strengthened the political institutions and networks that Bay Area activists built in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Despite being occasionally lumped in with the “Establishment,” the middle-aged liberals in the CADC quietly reached out to the most pragmatic of the young radicals, hoping to combine their own political connections with the energy of the youth movement. A revitalized and increasingly gender-balanced CADC soon launched new initiatives, such as voter registration and fund-raising drives, and be-

242 / Chapter Six

came an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. In 1969, the same year the United States landed a man on the moon, CADC leader George Chinn undertook the mission that Lim P. Lee once joked about, running unsuccessfully for the Board of Supervisors. In 1977, CADCer Gordon Lau, a former student activist who joined the organization in the late 1960s, finally made it to the moon, becoming San Francisco’s first elected Chinese American supervisor. Such early tastes of real ethnic representation hardly alleviated the problems of Chinese Americans in San Francisco, but they signaled the continuation of a shift towards greater political representation there. And they showed that the work, determination, and engagement of two generations of Chinese American political activists had not been in vain.94

EPILOGUE

Scholars, journalists, and community organizers frequently observe that Chinese Americans wield far less political power today than their numbers would indicate. To some extent, the sheer volume of post-1965 immigration explains this, since the voting-age Chinese American population is now a majority foreign-born, and immigrants tend to vote in far smaller numbers than native-born citizens. Those who study contemporary Chinese Americans often attribute the political underrepresentation of this group to other factors too, sometimes highlighting culture and language, the machinations of American political leaders, or the embedded racism of the democratic process in the United States. Lost in this discussion is the importance of understanding the political history of Chinese Americans— probably because most commentators assume that Chinese Americans have little political history to understand.1 Today, a stark gap remains between the political power of Chinese Americans in San Francisco and New York, suggesting the importance of local and regional political cultures and issues to the shaping of this Chinese American political history. Since the 1970s, and especially the 1980s, Bay Area Chinese Americans—many of them with ties to the Chinese American Democratic Club or the Chinese American Republican Association that T. Kong Lee founded—have served as city council members, mayors, state legislators, and other elected and appointed officials. In New York, progress has been far slower. Chinese Americans are the largest and fastest growing immigrant group in New York City, but while people of Chinese ancestry there have created influential social service groups and taken part in major labor organizations, elected office has almost entirely eluded them. In 2001—25 years after Gordon Lau won a term on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors—John Liu of Queens finally captured a seat on the New

244 / Epilogue

York City Council. Until that time, only a handful of Chinese Americans in the city had ever won election even to local school and district boards.2 No single factor can fully explain the discrepancy between the political power of these two Chinese American communities, but their divergent pasts offer important clues. In many ways, the history of Chinese American politics in San Francisco and New York bears out Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill’s famous claim that “all politics is local.” The Tammany Hall political machine, whose patronage-for-votes structure benefited so many immigrant groups in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, simply reinforced the inequitable and undemocratic power structure of heavily alien Chinese American New York in the midcentury years. Not only were San Francisco’s demographics and politics very different, but the local Democratic Party’s hunger for relevance there eventually prompted its most liberal members to recruit Chinese Americans.3 For people of Chinese ancestry, midcentury politics were both local and international at the same time, with the ratio between the two differing from place to place and determining whether or not vigorous activism could and would occur in particular communities. China politics remained influential in San Francisco and New York for decades, but the KMT assigned a far higher value to the latter after World War Two. Under the heavy hand of trained KMT officials, the Chinese American community in New York failed to develop independent and robust political institutions and networks for many years. In contrast, by the 1950s San Francisco’s Chinese Americans created and maintained a political culture largely separate from China politics. Unlike their New York peers, then, Chinese Americans in San Francisco managed to have a politics that was truly local and focused on community betterment and neighborhood concerns—not the survival of the KMT regime on Taiwan. Many of the networks, alliances, and organizations they created in those years endure even now, providing much of the foundation for growing Chinese American political power in San Francisco. Not only are midcentury Chinese American politics important to a fuller understanding of Asian American political power today, but they require scholars to reconsider the relationship between domestic civil rights activism and foreign policy in the Cold War years. The link between these two areas, which has received so much recent attention from historians of African American politics, was actually clearer and far more immediate for people of Chinese ancestry. Deeply aware of longtime negative stereotypes, Chinese Americans certainly tried to shape their public image in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, as students of Asian America have extensively

Epilogue / 245

discussed. This book demonstrates that people of Chinese ancestry, most of them moderates and liberals, also actively sought political influence at every level in order to change the laws and practices that put them at the mercy of officials and other Americans who saw them through the lens of those stereotypes. In other words, Chinese American politics existed far beyond image manipulation; those who participated in them often occupied the center of the political spectrum and helped change their communities just as much, if not more, than those on the far left and far right. Scholars today tend to portray the Asian American movement as having introduced politics and activism to the Chinese American communities of New York and San Francisco. The depiction of these places as starkly divided in earlier decades between pro-KMT rightists and the downtrodden, working-class masses sympathetic to the PRC, provides a heroic backdrop for the exploits of the Asian American movement. But it flattens communities whose politics were often intensely complex, and it obscures the significance of political networks, relationships, and organizations established—or not created at all—in the mid-twentieth century. In 1980, the longtime journalist Charles Leong wrote that “with a vigorous, idealistic new generation of motivated Chinese American citizens who are molding new social patterns and creating headlines, it is so easy not to remember—or not even ever know about—those who led the way.” This forgotten generation challenged China politics and restrictive community power structures at a crucial moment in Chinese American history: the suffocating years of the early Cold War.4

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1.

2. 3.

4.

Chinese World (San Francisco) “Huabu qingxing relie” (Chinatown enthusiastic), October 17, 1952, 3; Chin-fu Woo, “Cong song meiling lai niu kan taiwan zuofeng” (A look at Taiwan’s work style from Song Meiling’s visit to New York), Chinese-American World (New York) October 23, 1952, 6; Matthew Jones, “A ‘Segregated’ Asia: Race, the Bandung Conferences, and Pan-Asianist Fears in American Thought and Policy, 1954–1955,” Diplomatic History 29:5 (2005), 842–846, 864. Jones, “A ‘Segregated’ Asia,” 864. See, for example, Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Renee Romano, “No Diplomatic Immunity: African Diplomats, the State Department, and Civil Rights, 1960–1964,” Journal of American History 87:2 (2000); Justin Hart, “Making Democracy Safe for the World: Race, Propaganda, and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy during World War II,” Pacific Historical Review 73:1 (2004); Jonathan Rosenberg, How Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Gerald C. Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. DuBois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985); Gerald C. Horne, The End of Empires: African Americans and India (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009); Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-Colonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). The definition of “overseas Chinese,” or huaqiao, differs depending on the source. Officials of the Republic of China considered every person of Chinese ancestry, regardless of formal citizenship, to be an overseas Chinese and a citizen of the ROC. The ROC included overseas Chinese from across the world in its legislative bodies and maintained an Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission. The PRC had an Over-

248 / Notes to Pages 3–5

5.

6.

7.

8.

seas Chinese Affairs Office and categorized the families of Chinese abroad as “overseas Chinese,” even when such people themselves had never left China. While the PRC defined overseas Chinese in a manner similar to the ROC, it eventually recognized the foreign citizenship of those overseas Chinese who naturalized or were born abroad. Chinese-language newspapers in the United States often referred to all Chinese Americans as overseas Chinese, “overseas compatriots,” or “the overseas.” Some also used the term “Chinese” to mean “ethnic Chinese.” Although I recognize the politically fraught nature of the term “overseas Chinese,” I use it here and elsewhere because so many of my US-based sources did so. For a detailed discussion of the term and its problems, see Adam McKeown, “Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842–1949,” Journal of Asian Studies 58:2 (1999), 306–337, and Huang Jianli, “Conceptualizing Chinese Migration and Chinese Overseas: The Contribution of Wang Gungwu,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 6 (2010), 1–21. See, for example, Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Blacks and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Meredith Oda, “Remaking the Gateway to the Pacific: Urban, Economic, and Racial Redevelopment in San Francisco, 1945–1970” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2010); Lon Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival in Los Angeles, 1934–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Chiou-Ling Yeh, Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Judy Tzuchun Wu, “‘Loveliest Daughter of Our Ancient Cathay!’ Representations of Ethnic and Gender Identity in the Miss Chinatown U.S.A. Beauty Pageant,” Journal of Social History 31:1 (1997). See, for example, Peter Kwong, Chinatown, New York: Labor and Politics, 1930–1950 (New York: New Press, 2001), 146; Him Mark Lai, “To Bring Forth a New China, to Build a Better America: The Chinese Marxist Left in America to the 1960s,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives 6 (1992), 54; Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 142; Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 213; William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 242. See, for example, Matthew Lasar, “‘Right Out in Public’: Pacifica Radio, the Cold War, and the Origins of Alternative Media,” Pacific Historical Review 67:4 (1998), 514–515; Leilah Danielson, “‘It Is a Day of Judgment’: The Peacemakers, Religion, and Radicalism in Cold War America,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 18:2 (2008), 216, 233–236; Bernstein, Bridges of Reform, 183; Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 272–275; Jonathan Bell, California Crucible: The Forging of Modern American Liberalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 79; Daniel Horowitz, “Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America,” American Quarterly 48:1 (1996), 18–27. K. Scott Wong, Americans First: Chinese Americans and the Second World War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 45–64; Xiaojian Zhao, Remaking Chinese

Notes to Pages 5–16 / 249 America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940–1965 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 54–55; Victor G. and Brett de Bary Nee, Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 154. 9. Bell, California Crucible, 5–6, 262–263. 10. US Bureau of the Census, 1950 United States Census of Population Special Reports: Nativity and Parentage (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1954), 3B-19. 11. US Bureau of the Census, 1960 United States Census of Population Special Reports: Nativity and Parentage (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1965), 217. 12. Erika Lee, “Defying Exclusion: Chinese Immigrants and Their Strategies during the Exclusion Era,” in Sucheng Chan, ed., Chinese American Transnationalism: The Flow of People, Resources, and Ideas between China and America during the Exclusion Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 2–3. 13. Bell, California Crucible, 2–9. CHAPTER ONE

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Yuzun Liu, Dehua Zheng, and Larry Lam, eds., Hu Jingnan Wenji (The collected works of Gilbert Woo) (Hong Kong: Xiangjiang, 1991), 489. Hu Hanmin, Wang Jingwei, and Chiang Kai-shek led rival factions of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang). Joshua M. Zeitz, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 97–99; Daniel Soyer, “Landsmanshaftn and the Jewish Labor Movement: Cooperation, Conflict, and the Building of Community,” Journal of American Ethnic History 7:2 (1988), 23– 24; Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 30–31; Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 66, 158; William Issel and Robert W. Cherny, San Francisco, 1865–1920: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 99–100; William Issel, “New Deal and Wartime Origins of San Francisco’s Postwar Political Culture: The Case of Growth Politics and Policy,” in Roger W. Lotchin, ed., The Way We Really Were: The Golden State in the Second Great War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 72–75. Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 153–184; Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 107–111; Sucheng Chan, “The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870–1943,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives 8 (1994), 75–77; U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark 169 U.S. 649 (1898). L. Eve Armentrout Ma, “Urban Chinese at the Sinitic Frontier: Social Organizations in United States’ Chinatowns, 1849–1898,” Modern Asian Studies 17:1 (1983), 110–113. Him Mark Lai, Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2003), 49–50; Yucheng Qin, The Diplomacy of Nationalism: The Six Companies and China’s Policy towards Exclusion (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), 81. Huping Ling, Chinese Chicago: Race, Transnational Migration, and Community since 1870 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 29–30; Lai, Becoming Chinese American, 60–61.

250 / Notes to Pages 17–21 7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

Lai, Becoming Chinese American, 51–52, 60–61; Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York, “Zhonghua Gongsuo Jieshao” (An introduction to the CCBA-NY), available at http://www.ccbanyc.org/chistorypresidents.html; accessed August 24, 2012. The eighth member of the San Francisco CCBA board, the Yan Wo Association, finally received the right to fill the presidency in 1988. Chan, “The Exclusion of Chinese Women,” 98. Ling, Chinese Chicago, 138; Liu et al., Hu Jingnan Wenji, 553, 588; William Hoy, The Chinese Six Companies (San Francisco: Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, 1942), 31; Federal Writers’ Project, San Francisco in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the City by the Bay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 229. Sue Fawn Chung, “Fighting for Their American Rights: A History of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance,” in K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan, eds., Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 98–100. Christian Science Monitor, “Chinese Abide by Courts of Honor in United States,” August 6, 1928, 2; Chung, “Fighting for Their American Rights,” 95. Jonathan Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1982), 37–53; Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 87–90; Him Mark Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, ed. by Madeline Y. Hsu (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 13; Chung, “Fighting for Their American Rights,” 101. Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, 8, 12, 14. William S. Law, Secretary, Chinese American Citizens Alliance, to Hiram Johnson, August 17, 1934, file “Chinese American Citizens Alliance,” part III, box 29, Hiram Warren Johnson Correspondence and Papers, Bancroft Library; Bing Y. Hall to Johnson, October 31, 1934, p. 1., same file; Robert Hee to Hiram Johnson, July 29, 1931, p.1, same file; New York Times, “Hiram Johnson Asks That Hoover Retire,” November 20, 1931. New York Times, “Chinese Glad Hoover Won,” November 8, 1928, 20; Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 202; Nancy Beck Young, Lou Henry Hoover: Activist First Lady (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 15; Guoqi Xu, China and the Great War: China’s Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 267; Yung, Unbound Feet, 182, 201; San Francisco Register of Voters, 1936, from Ancestry.com, “California Voter Registrations, 1900– 1968” [database online] (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2008); Charlotte Brooks, “The War on Grant Avenue: Business Competition and Ethnic Rivalry in San Francisco’s Chinatown, 1937–1942,” Journal of Urban History 37:3 (2011), 320. Shah, Contagious Divides, 66, 158; Arnold Shankman, “Black on Yellow: AfroAmericans View Chinese Americans, 1850–1935,” Phylon 39:1 (1st Quarter 1978), 14; Wu Yangcheng, Shenghuo zai niuyue tangrenjie (Life in New York Chinatown) (Hong Kong: Juwen, 1957), 178; Rarick, California Rising, 19–20. Francis Carney, The Rise of the Democratic Clubs in California (New York: Henry Holt, 1958), 1; Zeitz, White Ethnic New York, 93; Richard F. Welch, King of the Bowery: Big Tim Sullivan, Tammany Hall, and New York City from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 193. Jeffrey Scott McIllwain, Organizing Crime in Chinatown: Race and Racketeering in New York City, 1890–1910 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004), 100–135; New York Times, “A Ripple in Chinatown,” May 9, 1906, 3. Tong battles, a rarity in San Francisco

Notes to Pages 21–23 / 251

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

by the 1920s, continued to plague New York, where fewer nonviolent community organizations existed to counter tong power and temper the On Leong–Hip Sing rivalry. Victor G. and Brett de Bary Nee, Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 67–69; McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change, 186. New York Times, “Prosperous Chinese Arrested for Voting,” August 17, 1904, 7; New York Times, “Chinatown’s Mayor Now in Police Toils,” April 27, 1905, 7; New York Times, “Chinese Burned to Death,” September 4, 1901, 2; New York Times, “Politicians March in Do Fook Cortege,” September 14, 1926; New York Times, “Governor Smith Mourns Death of Louie Do Fook; Catholic Funeral for Chinese Politician,” September 13, 1926; McIllwain, Organizing Crime in Chinatown, 150–151; Julia I. Hsuan Chen, “The Chinese Community in New York: A Study in Their Cultural Adjustment, 1920–1940” (Ph.D. diss., American University, 1941), 98. The Times identified the dead man’s brother as Wah Do Fook. “Do Fook” was almost certainly not the brothers’ actual surname in Chinese, but it was the way they identified themselves to English speakers. For more on Chinese American naming practices, see Emma Woo Louie, Chinese American Names: Tradition and Transition (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008). Wu, Shenghuo zai niuyue tangrenjie, 176, 178; New York Times, “Force and Bribery Charged at Polls,” November 8, 1932; New York Times, “Ethics of Chinese Aid Children Here,” July 7, 1938; Meidong huaqiao zhinan (Chinese directory of the eastern states) (New York: Sino-American Publicity Bureau, 1954), 132–133, 139; United States Patent and Trademark Office, patent 1867890, granted July 19, 1932; jury challenge, U.S. vs. Eugene Dennis et al. (1949), available at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/ avalon/curiae/html/341–494/004.htm (accessed October 24, 2011); Fifteenth Census of the United States, Population Schedule, Manhattan, New York, District 1136, sheet 66; New York Times, “Drive to Oust Reds Pledged by O’Brien,” November 2, 1932, 8; New York Tribune, “Hyphens Incorporate,” May 30, 1916, 3. Interestingly, both Pyn and his wife, Margaret, were marked as “white” on the 1930 and 1940 censuses. It is unclear whether the census taker determined this or whether the Pyns declared it. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930: Population Number and Distribution of Inhabitants (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1931), 266; Chan, “Entry of Chinese Women,” 75–77; Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 193–198. Lee, At America’s Gates, 193–198. The 1940 census shows that San Francisco’s citizen Chinese American population (which included both native-born and derivative citizens) was 10,668, while its alien Chinese population was 7,114. In New York City, 4,745 Chinese Americans were citizens, while 8,008 were aliens. San Francisco’s Chinese American male citizen population over age 25 had a median school attendance of 6.9 years, while New York’s Chinese American male citizen population over age 25 had a median school attendance of 4.2 years. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Population: Characteristics of the Non-White Population by Race (Washington, D.C. USGPO, 1943), 86–87, 93–94. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Population: Characteristics of the Non-White Population by Race, 86–87, 93–94; Alice Fong Yu to Y.C. Yu, July 14, 1940, file 4, box 7, Alice Fong Yu Papers, Special Collections, Stanford University; McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change, 38.

252 / Notes to Pages 23–27 25. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Population: Characteristics of the Non-White Population by Race, 93–94. 26. San Francisco, 1865–1932, 186, 214; Ethan Rarick, California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 19, 21; Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 25–29; Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 163. 27. Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, 79–84; Judy Yung, Unbound Feet, 179– 180. Lai notes that two of the early Chinese American Marxist journals published in San Francisco both claimed a circulation of five hundred. I suspect, given the identical claims, that “five hundred” simply sounded substantial and influential, whether or not it was real. 28. Lisa Rose Mar, Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4; Chung, “Fighting for Their American Rights,” 109. The many interpreters who held leadership positions in the early years of the CACA probably did not improve its image in the community. 29. Fresno Bee, “Former Fresnan Heads Chinese Six Companies,” July 7, 1941, 1; 1920 Census, Fresno, California, Enumeration District 19, Sheet 1B, Ancestry.com 1920 United States Federal Census [database online] (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2010); Mae Ngai, The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 74. 30. Mar, Brokering Belonging, 9–10; Lee, At America’s Gates, 129; Albert Chow to General Harry M. Vaughan, p. 1, September 11, 1947, file 10-H Misc, Harry H. Vaughn Papers, Harry S. Truman Library Institute, Independence, Missouri; “Interpreters, Chinese,” March 24, 1925, Record 56252/485, Ancestry.com. U.S. Subject Index to Correspondence and Case Files of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1903–1959 [database online] (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2010). 31. Ling Lew, The Chinese in North America: A Guide to Their Life and Progress (Los Angeles: East-West Culture, 1949), 209; Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, 16; Him Mark Lai, “China and the Chinese American Community: The Political Dimension,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives 13 (1999), 24. 32. New York Times, “Presidential Boom for Senator White,” July 16, 1899; Oakland Tribune, “Edward White Mentioned for Chairman,” August 20, 1904, 9; Oakland Tribune, “Fredericks Increases His Lead over His Rivals,” August 26, 1914, 4; Oakland Tribune, “Edward White Sworn in as Commissioner,” October 22, 1915, 1; Bill Simons, “In the Districts,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 5, 1940, 14; San Francisco Register of Voters, 1923, 1924, 1930, 1932; Chow to Vaughan; George Kao, Cathay by the Bay: San Francisco Chinatown in 1950 (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1988), 12. 33. Liu Boji [Pei Chi Liu], Meiguo huaqiao shi, xubian (History of the American Overseas Chinese, sequel) (Taipei: Li Ming Cultural Enterprises, 1981), 544; New York Times, “Lead in California near 400,000 Mark,” November 10, 1932, 3; New York Times, “California Beats Sinclair and EPIC,” November 7, 1934, 1. 34. Statement of Votes Cast at the General Election Held in the City and County of San Francisco, State of California, November 8, 1932, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, California. The three majority Chinese American electoral precincts in 1932 were Assembly District 20, precincts 12, 13, and 15.

Notes to Pages 28–32 / 253 35. Seymour Brody, “Florence Prag Kahn,” Jewish Virtual Library, available online at http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/kahn.html (accessed August 29, 2012); “November 6, 1934 election results,” available online at http:// www.joincalifornia.com/election/1934-11-06 (accessed August 29, 2012); “November 8, 1932 election results,” available online at http://www.joincalifornia .com/election/1932-11-08 (accessed August 29, 2012); “November 4, 1930 election results,” available online at http://www.joincalifornia.com/election/1930 -11-04 (accessed August 29, 2012); “November 6, 1928 election results,” available online at http://www.joincalifornia.com/election/1928-11-06 (accessed August 29, 2012); New York Times, “Lone Japanese Hears His Nation Assailed,” December 12, 1906, 6. 36. Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, 90–101; Sucheng Chan, “The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870–1943,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives 8 (1994), 106; Chung Sai Yat Po (Chinese Western Daily, San Francisco), “Jian furen qing huayou yanhui” (Mrs. Kahn invites Chinese friends to a banquet), October 28, 1936, 3; Chung Sai Yat Po, untitled news brief, November 1, 1936, 3. 37. State Bar of California, Celebrating 75 Years (Sacramento: State Bar of California, 2002), 10, available online at http://www.calbar.ca.gov/Portals/1/documents/75th -Anniversary.pdf (accessed August 29, 2012); Way Wong, “Re-elect F.D. Roosevelt for President” (San Francisco: Thing Wan, 1936), Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Lim P. Lee resume, c. 1966, p. 1, file “San Francisco Postmaster Lim P. Lee,” carton 7, Phillip Burton Papers, Bancroft Library; New York Times, “Mrs. Kahn Is Defeated,” November 4, 1936, 2; Statement of Votes Cast at the General Election Held in the City and County of San Francisco, State of California, November 3, 1936, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, California. 38. Bertram D. Hulen, “Two Pacts Cited,” New York Times, October 7, 1937, 1; New York Times, “U.S. Stand on China Assailed in the House,” November 18, 1937, 5; Yung, Unbound Feet, 233, 242–243; Chu Ji, “Woren gan xuan luosifu hu? Yi ying xuan landun” (Should we vote for Roosevelt? Or Landon?), Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, October 26, 1936, 1. 39. Yung, Unbound Feet, 227–228; C. Martin Wilbur, Cambridge History of China, Vol. 12 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 701; Los Angeles Times, “Peace Asked by General Fang,” March 24, 1936, 12. 40. Fresno Bee, “Former Fresnan Heads Chinese Six Companies,” 1; Lew, The Chinese in North America, 209. 41. Liu, Meiguo huaqiao shi, xubian, 544; Los Angeles Times, “McAdoo Concedes His Defeat; Bancroft and Riley in Close Race,” September 1, 1938, 1. 42. Way Wong, “Let’s Have Havenner for Mayor” (San Francisco: Thing Wan, 1938), Bancroft Library; Fresno Bee, “Former Fresnan Heads Chinese Six Companies,” 1; William Hoy, The Chinese Six Companies (San Francisco: Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, 1942), 16a. 43. San Francisco Register of Voters, 1936 and 1940. 44. Nancy Joan Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 89–94, 167–168, 298–299. The New Deal provisions for blacks were profoundly unequal to those for whites; most programs and agencies discriminated against African Americans. 45. Walter LeFebre, The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations throughout History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 187–189; Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, 171. 46. Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, 92–93, 98–104.

254 / Notes to Pages 32–37 47. Lew, The Chinese in North America, 209; Fresno Bee, “Former Fresnan Heads Chinese Six Companies,” 1. 48. Ling, Chinese Chicago, 63–67. 49. Ken Wong, “Retired Postmaster Lee Still Going Strong at 70,” San Francisco Examiner, September 17, 1980, in file “San Francisco Postmaster Lim P. Lee,” box 7, Phillip Burton Papers, Bancroft Library. 50. Wong, “Retired Postmaster Lee Still Going Strong at 70”; Dorinda Ng correspondence with the author, June 21, 2010; Liu et al., Hu Jingnan Wenji, 588. 51. Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, 92–94, 185. 52. Lim P. Lee, “Under Three Flags,” 20 (unpublished manuscript in possession of the author); Liu et al., Hu Jingnan Wenji, 322. 53. For more about the impact of English literacy tests, see Young In Oh, “As If It Was a Land of Language Diversity: Struggles over Immigrants’ Language in the United States, 1917–1966” (Ph.D. diss., University at Albany, SUNY, 2008). 54. New York Times, “Raids in Chinatown Follow Tong Clash,” October 10, 1924, 21; New York Times, “Tong War Spreads into Five States,” August 26, 1925, 1; New York Times, “Tongmen Kill Nine as War Flares Anew,” March 25, 1927, 1; New York Times, “Tong War Flares; Killings in Four Cities,” October 15, 1928, 25; New York Times, “Police Act to Halt a Tong War Here,” August 5, 1929, 9; New York Times, “Shooting Revives Mock Duck Legend,” February 29, 1932, 4; New York Times, “O’Brien Denounces ‘Slurs’ Upon City,” November 4, 1932; New York Times, “Chinatown Dragon Escorts New Year,” January 26, 1933; Meidong huaqiao zhinan (Chinese directory of the eastern states) (New York: Sino-American Publicity Bureau, 1954), 132; Leong Gor Yun (Y.K. Chu), Chinatown Inside Out (New York: Barrows Mussey, 1936), 81–82. 55. This seems to have been but one of many pieces of misinformation Lee and his associates fed to those who interviewed them. Scholar Julia I. Hsuan Chen, writing in 1941, insisted that “Uncle Sam has around ten thousand citizens of Chinese ancestry in New York’s Chinatown, and approximately seventy-five percent being Democrats [sic].” The 1939 WPA guide to New York City even noted that “in the 1936 Democratic National Convention Wong Lee was seated as a New York delegate,” although in reality no such person attended the event, even as an alternate. Chen, “The Chinese Community in New York,” 98; Federal Writers’ Project, The WPA Guide to New York City (New York: New Press, 1992), 105; Democratic National Committee, Official Report of the Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention Held at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 23rd to June 27th, Inclusive, 1936, Resulting in the ReNomination of Franklin D. Roosevelt for President and John N. Garner for Vice President (Washington, D.C.: Democratic National Committee, 1936). 56. Niuyue huaqiao shehui (New York overseas Chinese society) (New York: Chinese Community Research Bureau, 1950), 40; 1930 U.S. Census, Enumeration Record, Manhattan District 58, Sheet 40; Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Meiji huaren xuanjuhui lianhuan hui zhi sheng” (Chinese American Voting League get-together a success), October 31, 1932, 3; Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, advertisement, October 8, 1936, 3; New York Times, “O’Brien Denounces ‘Slurs’ upon City,” November 4, 1932; New York Times, “Chinatown Dragon Escorts New Year,” January 26, 1933; New York Times, “Lehman to Stress Issue on Utilities,” October 7, 1934; Meidong huaqiao zhinan, 132; Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage, 1975), 325. William D. Lee’s cousin James “Shavey” Lee was a member of the On Leong Merchants Association. Given the overlap of

Notes to Pages 37–41 / 255

57.

58.

59. 60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65. 66.

American-citizen On Leong men and Tammany Democrats, William D. Lee was almost certainly a member too, particularly because many in the community saw the tong as the preserve of restaurant managers—which Lee was. Niuyue huaqiao shehui, 80; Chia-ling Kuo, Social and Political Change in New York’s Chinatown: The Role of Voluntary Associations (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1977), 37, 41; Meidong huaqiao zhinan, 17; Robert S. Bennett, In the Ring: The Trials of a Washington Lawyer (New York: Three Rivers, 2009), 8–9; Bruce Edward Hall, Tea That Burns: A Family Memoir of Chinatown (New York: Free Press, 1998), 208–209. The 1920 census enumeration sheets show that Shavey Lee and his brother Thomas had an older brother named William. Since subsequent newspaper coverage of the family does not name William as a brother, I am assuming he was actually a cousin. Chinese directories from this era show that all three men’s names shared the character 輝 (hui). A shared character is a common Chinese naming practice to designate brothers or cousins of the same generation. Charles Garrett, The LaGuardia Years: Machine and Reform Politics in New York City (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1961), 132–141; New York Times, “Moran Concedes He Got Taxi Cash,” June 4, 1939; New York Times, “340 Chinese Laundrymen Are Rounded Up, All Claiming Insurance Exemption,” February 7, 1936, 3. Bend Bulletin (Bend, Ore.), “Shavey Lee Likes China Some but N.Y. Chinatown Preferred,” July 1, 1947, 12; Hall, Tea That Burns, 208–209. McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change, 213; New York Times, “Tong Peace Signed; NRA Is Credited,” August 18, 1933; New York Times, “More of 77th Come Home Wearing Honors of War,” April 26, 1919, 1; New York Times, “Chinese Leader Is Indicted Here,” May 4, 1956, 1; San Francisco Call Bulletin, “Chinese Hero ‘Velly Good Boy,’ Says Mother,” October 3, 1918; Ancestry.com, “California, World War I Soldier Citations, 1918–1921,” [database online] (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2011); Y.K. Chu, Meiguo Huaqiao Kaishi (History of the Chinese People in America) (New York: China Times, 1975), 139. New York Times, “Tong Man Is Slain, Outbreak Feared,” July 29, 1933; New York Times, “Medal Presented as Johnson Quits,” October 14, 1934; Niuyue huaqiao shehui, 86; Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Niuyue meiji huaren yongdai luosifu” (New York’s Chinese American citizens support Roosevelt), November 7, 1932, 3. Representatives of both the Hip Sing Tong and the On Leong Merchants Association sat on the board of the CCBA-NY and its seven-member business committee. The vast majority of member organizations did not serve on this core committee. In San Francisco, neither tong was officially a constituent member of the CCBA. Leong, Chinatown Inside Out, 33–35. Y.K. Chu used the pen name Leong Gor Yun (when spoken in Cantonese it means “two people”) after receiving an injunction that forbade his paper from criticizing the CCBA-NY. CCBA-NY, “Zhonghua Gongsuo Jieshao”; Leong, Chinatown Inside Out, 33–35; Y.K. Chu, “Lun zhonghua gongsuo xuanji” (A discussion of the CCBA election), Chinese World New York, February 4, 1958, 1, Chinese World New York collection, Asian American Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. My thanks to Ellen D. Wu for helping me access the Chinese World New York collection. Leong, Chinatown Inside Out, 87. Leong, Chinatown Inside Out, 87; Wu Jianxiong, Haiwai yimin yu huaren shehui (Overseas emigrants and Chinese Society) (Taipei: Yunchen Culture, 1993), 351; Proceedings of the New York City Board of Aldermen, March 21, 1933, pp. 1215–1217, reel 88, volume I, New York Public Library.

256 / Notes to Pages 42–45 67. “List or Manifest of Passengers to the United States,” September 17, 1927, “California, Passenger and Crew Lists, 1882–1957,” [database online] (Provo, Utah: Ancestry .com Operations, 2008); Fifteenth Census of the United States, population schedule, Philadelphia district 407, sheet 31A, [database online] (Provo, Utah: Ancestry .com Operations, 2002); Haverford College Class of 1928, The Record (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1928), 85; Haverford College Class of 1931, The Record (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1931), 85; James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 29. 68. Wu, Haiwai yimin yu huaren shehui, 351; Leong, Chinatown Inside Out, 88–93; Renqiu Yu, To Save China, To Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 32–33. The Chinese Vanguard was the other major critic of the CCBA-NY at this time, but it was a Communist paper with a much smaller circulation than the popular Shangbao. 69. New York Times, “Mahon at 36 Becomes Aldermanic Leader,” September 3, 1932, 4; New York Times, “O’Brien in Speech Makes Party Appeal,” October 7, 1932, 15; Wu, Haiwai yimin yu huaren shehui, 351; Leong, Chinatown Inside Out, 34–36, 95; Yu, To Save China, 32, 44, 47–48, 64–66; Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Minzhengdang meiji huarenbu yanhui” (Chinese American Democrats banquet), October 17, 1936, 3. 70. Lee, At America’s Gates, 123; Yu, To Save China, 45, 66–68, 95; People v. Yui Kui Chu 285 NYS 38 (1936); People v. Yui Kui Chu 273 NY 191 (1937). Some scholars have erroneously concluded that the lawsuit and Shangbao boycott forced Chu to close his paper and sell its equipment to community rightists. In fact, Chu’s paper survived the boycott and published until 1944. Y.K. Chu, “Wo lai wei huaqiao shuo hua” (I’ve come to speak to the overseas Chinese), Chinese World New York Edition, February 1, 1958, 1, in box 1958, Chinese World New York collection, Asian American Studies Library. 71. Leong, Chinatown Inside Out, 101, 104–105; Brooklyn Enumeration District 10, Assembly District 13, p. 10, 1925, New York State Census [database online] (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2012). 72. Mason B. Williams, City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013), 114–116, 221–236. Equally confusing, labor union leaders in the city created the American Labor Party in 1936 to enable their anti-Tammany constituents, many of them former socialists, to vote for Roosevelt without supporting the hated Democratic Party. 73. Marilynn S. Johnson, Street Justice: A History of Police Violence in New York City (New York: Beacon Press, 2003), 172; New York Times, “150 Face Shake-up in Police Ranks,” February 1, 1934, 2; New York Times, “Police Push Drive to Doom Gambling,” January 14, 1934, 1; New York Times, “Police Are Active in Gambling Drive,” January 17, 1934, 22; New York Times, “94 Chinese Fined for Gambling,” October 10, 1938, 9. 74. Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Minzhengdang meiji huarenbu yanhui,” 3; Warren M. Van Norden, Who’s Who of the Chinese in New York (New York: Warren Van Norden, 1918), 48; Niuyue huaqiao shehui, 81. 75. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Population: Characteristics of the Non-White Population by Race, 94; Xinyang Wang, Surviving the City: The Chinese Immigrant Experience in New York City, 1890–1970 (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2001), 53; Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, 85; New York Times, “Chinese Children in Baby Parade,” June 21, 1936.

Notes to Pages 46–50 / 257 76. Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Gonghedang meiji huaren zhuce xun” (Chinese American Republicans’ registration report), October 9, 1936, 3. 77. Leong, Chinatown Inside Out, 95; Yu, To Save China, 47–48, 64–66; Garrett, The LaGuardia Years, 107. Quite likely, some of these Chinese workers who emigrated from 1920s Guangdong had already been exposed to the potentials of leftist organizing during the Kuomintang–Communist First United Front. 78. Yu, To Save China, 84–87, 91; Leong, Chinatown Inside Out, 143; Lloyd E. Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China under Nationalist Rule, 1927–1937 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1975), 245–264. 79. Ma, “Urban Chinese at the Sinitic Frontier,” 118–119; Yu, To Save China, 84–87, 91; Chen Ruzhou, Handbook of Chinese in America (New York: Zhonghua Guomin Haiwai Joint Publishing Company1946), 16. 80. A former immigration service interpreter, Lei Feng had been the CCBA-NY’s English secretary a few years before George Chintong. CCBA-NY, “Zhonghua Gongsuo Jieshao”; Records for Louis Fong (52,036–377), 1915 and January 16, 1923, in “U.S. Subject Index to Correspondence and Case Files of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1903–1959” [database online] (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2010). 81. CCBA-NY, “Zhonghua Gongsuo Jieshao”; New York Times, “Chinese Here Greet Tsai, Shanghai Hero,” August 29, 1934, 12; Yu, To Save China, 86. 82. Yu, To Save China, 52; Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2011), 142–145. 83. Wu, Haiwai yimin yu huaren shehui, 340; Wang, Surviving the City, 96; Lai, Becoming Chinese American, 53. 84. Yu, To Save China, 71; Peter Kwong, Chinatown, N.Y.: Labor and Politics, 1930–1950 (New York: New Press, 2001), 78–80. Both scholars use as their main source the Chinese Vanguard, whose objectivity in this case was questionable at best. 85. Yu, To Save China, 91; Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Zhu yaoqu yanjiang kangzhan jinkuang” (Y.K. Chu speaks on recent developments in the war of resistance), November 9, 1940, 7. Renqiu Yu blames Chinese fear of American anti-communist hysteria for the Laundry Alliance’s loss of members, but as historian Ellen Schrecker notes, the period between 1936 and 1938 was the apex of the US Communist Party’s “new respectability,” during which the CPUSA “served as the unofficial left wing of the New Deal . . . [and] was no longer isolated . . . [e]specially in New York City.” Yu, To Save China, 71; Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 15. The House Un-American Activities Committee only formed in 1938, after the internal battles of the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance ended. Peter Kwong also points out that a branch of the Chinese Communist Party openly operated in New York Chinatown by 1937. Kwong, Chinatown, New York, 108. 86. Leong, Chinatown Inside Out, 30. 87. Chinese Vanguard (New York), “NRA ‘jingji fuxing’ lu yu huaqiao” (The NRA “economic revival” law and the overseas Chinese), September 1, 1933, 1; Williams, City of Ambition, 230–233. 88. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Population: Characteristics of the Non-White Population by Race, 87; San Francisco Register of Voters, 1940; Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Vol. II, Population: Characteristics of the Population, Part 5 (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1943), 138; City Record Supplement, New York City Registry of Voters, 1940 (New York: New York Public Library, 1991), reel 41.

258 / Notes to Pages 51–55 C H A P T E R T WO

1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

“List or Manifest of Alien Passengers,” SS General W.H. Gordon, April 30, 1947, in “California, Passenger and Crew Lists, 1882–1957” [database online] (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2008); Niuyue huaqiao shehui (New York Overseas Chinese Society) (New York: Chinese Community Research Bureau, 1950), 87; Sino-American Publicity Bureau, Chinese Directory of Eastern Cities (New York: SinoAmerican Publicity Bureau, 1954), 144. Liang had previously served in the KMT’s central party affairs office and in the ROC’s interior ministry. To the exasperation of Chinese ambassador V.K. Wellington Koo, Liang failed to properly register with the US State Department after his 1947 arrival, jeopardizing his status and causing the Chinese Embassy considerable inconvenience. V.K. Wellington Koo, Gu weijun huiyilu (Reminiscences of V.K. Wellington Koo), Vol. 9 (Beijing: Chung Hwa, 1989), 585–586. K. Scott Wong, Americans First: Chinese Americans and the Second World War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 45–64. Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 72–99; Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 7–10; Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War Two (New York: Little, Brown, 2000), 22–53; John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 164–171. Xiaojian Zhao, Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940– 1965 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 54–55; Victor G. and Brett de Bary Nee, Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 154. Previously, Asian aliens could become citizens only if they had fought in World War One (a right granted in 1935), if they had lost their American citizenship after marrying a male alien (due to an amendment of the Cable Act in 1931), or if Congress passed a special private bill granting them citizenship. Warren I. Cohen, America’s Response to China: A History of Sino-American Relations, 4th ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 156–162. A. Doak Barnett, China on the Eve of Communist Takeover (New York: Praeger, 1966), 55–59, 97–99; Harrison Parker, “International Payments of Postwar China,” Pacific Affairs 21:4 (1948), 353; Chinese-American Weekly, “Zhengfu hai qipian huaqiao ma?” (Is the government still cheating the overseas Chinese?), May 29, 1947, 38; Chinese World, “Meizhou huaqiao baojie dui guoshi zhuzhang” ([North and South] American overseas Chinese journalists’ stand on national affairs), clipping c. 1945, file 3.49, TE8, reel 1, Zhongguo Guo Min Dang records, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif. Stephen Fitzgerald, “China and the Overseas Chinese: Perceptions and Policies,” China Quarterly 44 (October–December 1970), 2; Xiao-huang Yin, “A Case Study of Transnationalism: Continuity and Changes in Chinese American Philanthropy to China,” American Studies 45:2 (2004), 69. Niuyue huaqiao shehui, 81, 85; Harry M. Kimball to J. Edgar Hoover, April 7, 1950, in Pei Chi Liu FBI file, 100–381736, in possession of author; Nee and Nee, Longtime Californ’, 207–208; “Yuey Joe” interview summary, May 5, 1974, pp. 2–3, file 43, box 14, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Library; Liu Boji [Pei Chi Liu], Meiguo huaqiao shi, xubian (History of the American Overseas Chinese, sequel) (Taipei: Li Ming Cultural Enterprises, 1981), 491–492; Ling Lew, The Chinese in

Notes to Pages 55–59 / 259

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

North America: A Guide to Their Life and Progress (Los Angeles: East-West Culture, 1949), 250, 258. Him Mark Lai, Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Alta Mira Press, 2004), 293–294; Nee and Nee, Longtime Californ’, 207–208; Chinese News, “Chinese News Service, Inc., Opens Pacific Coast Office,” January 15, 1942, 6; Office of Special Services, Washington, D.C., “San Min Chu I Youth Corps San Francisco,” June 23, 1944, pp. 1–2, file 18, carton 70, Him Mark Lai Papers; H.S. Covington, “Chinese Situation in the San Francisco Area,” May 26, 1945, pp. 9, 22, file 27, carton 20, Him Mark Lai Papers. The two government reports I cite here were both borderline racist in some of their portrayals of Chinese Americans; at the same time, some of their comments on the political situation are bolstered by other sources. The latter document notes that the Chinese Press embraced the KMT party line. Charles Leong, who ran the Chinese Press, suspended publication of it beginning in 1943 (upon entering the military), so Covington almost certainly meant the Chinese News, the other English-language Chinese American paper operating in San Francisco. Its stories and editorials often do seem to be simple reprints of KMT press releases, and it relied heavily on the KMT’s Chinese News Service. Renqiu Yu, To Save China, To Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 91–92; New York Times, “Leakage in Funds for China Alleged,” June 18, 1933. George Chew interview by L. Eve Armentrout Ma, April 10, 1979, p. 2, file 30, carton 23, Him Mark Lai Papers; New York Times, “Chinese Women Aid Men in War,” July 19, 1942; New York Times, “Bond Sales Record for Day Made Here,” July 1, 1944, 1. The FBI reports I refer to above suggest that at least some US government officials privately questioned Chinese American loyalty because left-KMT members in the United States had followed Chiang Kai-shek’s rival Wang Jingwei until 1938. At that time, Wang voiced support for negotiations with the Japanese and in 1940 agreed to serve as the head of the Japanese puppet regime in China. Victor G. and Brett de Bary Nee, Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 154; Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 268–269; Kaiser Shipyard advertisement, China Daily News, June 2, 1943, 8; Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 145; Dolly Rhee, “Chinese Home Front,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 24, 1942, 6; Yung, Unbound Feet, 269–270. Joshua B. Freeman, Working Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000), 15; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 26; Ann Markusen, Peter Hall, Scott Campbell, and Sabina Deitrick, The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military Remapping of Industrial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 99–100, 121–125; Zhu, Meiguo Huaqiao Kaishi, 129; New York Times, “Chinese Workers Speed War Goods,” February 20, 1943. Zhu, Meiguo Huaqiao Kaishi, 129–131. Wong, Americans First, 43; New York Times, “Chinese July 4th Changed by War,” October 11, 1942. Chinese aliens were not subject to the draft at the beginning of the conflict. “Exemption of Chinese from Military Service in the United States,” December 9,

260 / Notes to Pages 60–62

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

1943, p. 2, Records of the Office of Chinese Affairs, 1945–1955 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1989), roll 2, file 363.3013; Chinese Embassy to Department of State, January 14, 1943, p. 1, same file; Chinese Embassy to Department of State, December 30, 1942, p. 1, same file; “General List of Chinese Officials in the United States,” January 20, 1943, p. 2, same file; K.C. Li to T.V. Soong, October 31, 1942, pp. 2, 9–10, file “Correspondence, K.C. Li,” box 6, T.V. Soong Papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif.; Li Ren, “Zhiwen haiwaibu zhang chen qingyun” (Questions for overseas bureau chief Chen Qingyun), Chinese-American Weekly, July 31, 1947, 41; Yu, To Save China, To Save Ourselves, 168–169; Chinese News, “Chinese Government Urged to Take Over Private Holdings of Chinese in U.S.,” August 15, 1941, 2. New York Times, “British Captain Held in Mutiny Slaying,” April 14, 1942; New York Times, “Chinese Seamen Win Agreement with British Merchant Marine,” May 10, 1942; New York Times, “Crewman Is Killed in a Mutiny Here,” April 12, 1942, 1–15; Peter Kwong, Chinatown, N.Y.: Labor and Politics, 1930–1950 (New York: New Press, 2001), 125–128; Liu et al., Hu Jingnan Wenji, 19. Kwong discusses the sailors at length in his book but incorrectly dates the Ling murder to 1943. Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Hua hai yuan lin yangqi bei cansha jingguo” (Chinese sailor Lin Yangqi was murdered), April 16, 1942, 3; Kwong, Chinatown, N.Y., 126–128. Him Mark Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, ed. by Madeline Y. Hsu (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 23; Nee and Nee, Longtime Californ’, 207–208; Chinese News, “Chinese News Service, Inc., Opens Pacific Coast Office,” January 15, 1942, 6; Kwong, Chinatown, N.Y., 126–128; New York Times, “Chinese Deserters Growing Problem,” April 4, 1943, S11; OSS, “San Min Chu I Youth Corps San Francisco,” pp. 1–2; Covington, “Chinese Situation in the San Francisco Area,” pp. 9, 15, 22; Yu, To Save China, 92–95. Eugenia V. Chen, “Survey of Chinese Youth and Student Clubs in New York City—1945” (Master’s thesis, University of Michigan, 1945), 36–38, 83–84, confirms the greater popularity of the Chinese Youth Club in comparison to the San Min Chu I Youth Corps. According to Chen, the latter group consisted mostly of American-born people, while the former was largely made up of China-born men and did not mingle with the other organizations she discusses. Chin-fu Woo, “Lizheng haiyuan beisha an” (Doing our utmost for the case of the murdered sailor), Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, April 18, 1942, 1; Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, 23, 113; Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Qing zhu yaoqu xuanchuan yanjiang” (Y.K. Chu invited to give publicity speech), November 2, 1940, 3; Yu, To Save China, To Save Ourselves, 95; Huang Wenshan, “Zhu xia zhu huaqiao yimin ruji zhinan xu” (Preface to Y.K. Chu’s guide to becoming a citizen) in Huang Wenshan lü mei luncong (Collected essays from Huang Wenshan’s travels in America) (Taibei: Zhonghua, 1960), 734. Him Mark Lai, “The Chinese Press in the United States and Canada since World War II: A Diversity of Voices,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives 4 (1990), 109; Y.K. Chu, “Wo lai wei huaqiao shuo hua” (I’ve come to speak to the overseas Chinese), Chinese World New York Edition, February 1, 1958, 1, box 1958, Chinese World New York collection, Asian American Studies Library. New York Times, “Louis Hong Dead; Banker, Importer,” April 21, 1974; “Registrants whose public registration statements were in active status as of December 31, 1949 and who listed a foreign principal in the Chinese nationality field,” December 31, 1949, p. 1, file “Correspondence—Special—U.S. Dept. of, A-Z,” box 274, William F. Knowland Papers, Bancroft Library.

Notes to Pages 62–67 / 261 23. Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York, “Zhonghua Gongsuo Jieshao” (An introduction to the CCBA-NY), available at http://www.ccbanyc.org/ chistorypresidents.html; accessed August 24, 2012; Niuyue huaqiao shehui, 83, 90–91. The CCBA website contends that Frank T.F. Young was a KMT member, but the 1950 Niuyue huaqiao shehui details his participation in the Zhigongtang’s political arm and his contributions to the China Tribune. As I discuss in chapter 3, a group of right-wing KMT investors under former Chiang confidante Chen Lifu purchased the China Tribune in 1950, ending the paper’s independence and centrism. 24. Previous aspirants to CCBA-NY offices had sometimes bribed the voting representatives. Whether the KMT continued this practice is unclear, although by the 1950s, the ROC regime on Taiwan had other ways of rewarding loyal overseas Chinese, including through the bestowal of export product monopolies and honorary titles. 25. New York Times, “Louis Hong Dead”; Niuyue huaqiao shehui, 78, 79, 81; Frederic E. Wakeman, Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 236; Lew, The Chinese in North America, 202, 264; CCBA-NY, “Zhonghua Gongsuo Jieshao”; Elsie Wong Wu petition for naturalization, September 21, 1936, in New York, Naturalization Records, 1897–1944 [database online] (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2012). 26. Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, 148–149; San Francisco Chronicle, editorial, June 27, 1942, 1. 27. William Hoy, The Chinese Six Companies (San Francisco: Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, 1940), 16b. John Yehall Chin was actually a paper son who naturalized in 1957. 28. Chinese Times, “Minzhong zhi lingxiu” (The people’s leader), October 29, 1942, 4; Chinese Times, “Snell Gets Things Done,” October 27, 1942, 4; Chinese Times, “Wei zhengqu kangzhan shengli” (To struggle for victory in the war of resistance), October 31, 1942, 4; Chinese Times, “Dabu tongyuanhui qing zhuyi xuanju” (The San Francisco CACA asks you to take note of the election), November 2, 1942; Chinese Times, “Di wen bu ling” (Edmund Brown), October 28, 1943, 5; Chinese Times, “Shizhang luoshi” (Mayor Rossi), October 29, 1943, 5. 29. Earl C. Behrens, “Chinese to Join District Attorney Staff,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 10, 1943, 7; Chinese News, “Four Chinese on Local Draft Advisory Board,” November 1, 1940, 2; Charles Jung advertisement, Chinese Times, October 18, 1942, 1; Ralph G. Wadsworth to Charles Leong, August 29, 1942, p. 1, file 19, carton 3, Charles Leong Papers, Asian American Studies Library; Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 66; Ancestry.com, California, Voter Registrations, 1900–1968, San Francisco, Roll 64, July 1940, Vols. 1–2 [database online] (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2008); George Kao, Cathay by the Bay: Glimpses of San Francisco’s Chinatown in the Year 1950 (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1988), 12–13. The Bay Area Advisory Committee on Discrimination eventually became the Bay Area Council Against Discrimination. In the 1930s, notaries public were considered state officials, albeit of the lowest rank, and the fact that no Chinese American had ever received a notary’s commission is further evidence of just how politically marginalized the community was before the 1930s. 30. Chen Qiufeng and T. Kong Lee, Li Songguang boshi bashi zai fendou huiyi lu (A record of Dr. T. Kong Lee’s memories of eighty years of struggle) (San Francisco: Chinese Times, 1989), 61, 71; San Francisco Chronicle, “Earl Louie Heads GOP Assembly,” December 17, 1954, 2; Chinese News, “Four Chinese on Local Draft Advisory Board,”

262 / Notes to Pages 68–73

31.

32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

November 1, 1940, 2; San Francisco City and County Record, “Jung New Chairman of San Francisco Housing Authority,” November 1956, 18. I am grateful to Edward Jew for providing me a copy of T. Kong Lee’s memorial book. Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, 100–101; Chinese News, “New Playground Petition Signed by More than 2000,” March 14, 1941, 6; Chinese Press, “Chinatown Housing,” May 16, 1941, 1. New York Times, “Tong Peace Signed; NRA Is Credited,” August 18, 1933; Xin Bao (China Tribune, New York), “Hua funü xiezhu tuan” (Chinese woman helps group), November 1, 1943, 7; Zhu, Meiguo Huaqiao Kaishi, 139; Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 9–13. Rhee, “Chinese Home Front,” 6; Chinese Press, “One Year Commemoration,” July 3, 1942, 1. New York Times, “Would Lift Chinese Ban,” February 20, 1943; New York Times, “Chinatown Offers Farm Aid to Dewey,” February 27, 1943; New York Times, “Chinese Women Aid Men in War,” July 19, 1942; New York Times, “Chinese WAC Recruiting,” October 1, 1943; Yung, Unbound Feet, 255; Elizabeth P. McIntosh, Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS (Annapolis: US Naval Institute Press, 1998), 231; Arif Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A Study in Counterrevolution,” Journal of Asian Studies 34:4 (1975), 945–946, 963–965. Shek, whose husband and children were stranded in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong, was the first Chinese American woman to join the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), later serving in the Office of Strategic Services. Shek’s husband and one of her children died during the war. Fred Riggs, Pressure on Congress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), 113; Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, 149. Christian Science Monitor, “Repeal of Chinese Exclusion Asked by California Legion,” August 31, 1943, 8; Robert M. Cullen, “End of Oriental Exclusion?” Far Eastern Survey 17:21 (November 1948), 248. US Department of Justice, Annual Report of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1950), n.p. Zhao, Remaking Chinese America, 80–81; Gerald T. White, “The Chinese and Immigration Law,” Far Eastern Survey 19:7 (1950), 69, 80–81. “Zhonghua Gongsuo Jieshao”; Lew, The Chinese in North America, 246. New York Times, “Fights Immigration Curb,” April 12, 1946; Lai, Becoming Chinese American, 60–61. US House of Representatives, “Hearings before the Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization,” August 9–10, 1945, pp. 331–334; US House of Representatives, “Hearing on the Exemption of Alien Chinese Wives of U.S. Citizens from the Immigration Quota,” November 14, 1945, 1–9; Joseph A. Loftus, “Seats Won by PAC Totaled Only 73 in 318 House Races,” New York Times, November 11, 1946, 1–28; Chinese Times, “Dabu tongyuanhui jian xuan zhi mingdan” (List of San Francisco CACA endorsed candidates), November 4, 1950, 12. One measure of Douglas’s support for Chinese American rights is that the generally conservative CACA endorsed her against Richard Nixon in their infamous 1950 senate race. US House of Representatives, “Hearings before the Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization,” August 9–10, 1945, pp. 331–334; US House of Representatives, “Hearing on the Exemption of Alien Chinese Wives of U.S. Citizens from the Immigration Quota,” pp. 1–9. Chung Sai Yat Po, “Qingqiu xiugai yimin li zhi jingguo” (Urge passage of amendment

Notes to Pages 74–77 / 263

44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

to immigration regulations), November 14, 1945, 7; Chung Sai Yat Po, “Qingqiu xiugai yimin li zhi jingguo” (Urge passage of amendment to immigration regulations), November 15, 1945, 7; US House of Representatives, “Hearing on the Exemption of Alien Chinese Wives of U.S. Citizens from the Immigration Quota,” November 14, 1945, 1–18; US House of Representatives, “Hearing on the Exemption of Alien Chinese Wives of U.S. Citizens from the Immigration Quota,” November 15, 1945, attachments. Mike Masaoka, “Progress report #6,” March 2, 1947, p. 3, file 9, box 64, Mike M. Masaoka Papers, Special Collections, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah; Masaoka to ADC Headquarters, January 18, 1947, p. 1, file 1, box 5, Masaoka Papers; Masaoka report, January 26, 1947, p. 1, same file; Masaoka report, February 9, 1947, p. 1, same file; Masaoka report, February 16, 1947, file 2, same file; Masaoka, ADC Legislative Progress Report, November 17, 1948, pp. 1–3, file 10, box 64, Masaoka Papers. Tom C. Clark to Ernest Besig, Jan 31, 1947, p. 1, file 481, American Civil Liberties Union-Northern California Branch Papers, North Baker Library, California Historical Society, San Francisco, Calif.; Besig to Willard Kelly, August 18, 1947, pp. 1–2, same file; San Francisco Chronicle, “Immigration Dispute: Clark Acts to Speed Entry of Chinese Brides,” January 31, 1947, clipping, same file; Acting Commissioner T.B. Shoemaker to INS S.F., February 13, 1947, p. 1, same file. Niuyue huaqiao shehui, 41; “A Brief History of the Lt. B.R. Kimlau Post 1291,” American Legion Lt. B.R. Kimlau Post 1291 website, available online at http://www .ltkimlau.com/post_history.history.htm (accessed September 29, 2012); Chinese Nationalist Daily, “Huayi tuiwu junren zhengqu hefa quan li” (Veterans of Chinese ancestry fight for legal rights), May 27, 1947, 5; Besig to Tom Clark, August 20, 1947, p. 1, file 481, ACLU-Northern California Papers; Sheridan Downey to Besig, August 26, 1947, p. 1, same file; Besig to Chapman Revercomb, September 22, 1948, p. 1, same file; Chinese News Service-Pacific Coast Bureau, “Special Release 66,” September 28, 1948, pp. 1–3, same file; Besig to Clark, Downey, William F. Knowland, and Franck Havenner, January 29, 1947, p. 1, same file; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Tuiwu junren hui zhi huaqi” (Veterans meet about Chinese wives), June 26, 1948, p. 23. Besig to Kelly, p. 2; Chinese News Service–Pacific Coast Branch, “Special Release 66,” pp. 1–3; Zhao, Remaking Chinese America, 87, 91–92; Besig to Revercomb, p. 1. US Senate, “Hearings before the Subcommittee on the Judiciary,” July 20, 1949, 173. Y.K. Chu, Meiguo Huaqiao Kaishi (History of the Chinese People in America) (New York: China Times, 1975), 138; Simei Qing, From Allies to Enemies: Visions of Modernity, Identity, and U.S.-China Diplomacy, 1945–1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 96; Sergei Goncharov, John Lewis, and Litai Xue, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 13–14; Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo’s Son: Chiang Ching-kuo and the Revolutions in China and Taiwan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 154. Cohen, America’s Response to China, 153–154; Qing, From Allies to Enemies, 76–77. Lai, “The Chinese Press in the United States and Canada since World War II,” 110; Howard L. Boorman and Richard C. Howard, eds., Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, Vol. II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 334; Dai-ming Lee, K.F. Li, and C.Q. Yee Hop to Chiang Kai-shek, Chu The [Zhu De], and Chang Lan, August 16, 1945, p. 1, file 110, carton 13, Records of the Chinese World, Asian American Studies Library; Chinese World, “Meizhou huaqiao baojie dui guoshi zhuzhang”;

264 / Notes to Pages 77–81

52.

53.

54.

55. 56.

57.

58.

59.

60.

Yu Junji report, March 15, 1945, file 3.49, TE8, reel 1, Zhongguo Guo Min Dang records. Jun-ke Choy, My China Years, 1911–1945: Practical Politics in China after the 1911 Revolution (Kowloon, Hong Kong: Peninsula, 1974), 129–171, 248; Boorman and Howard, Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, Vol. II, 334. Chang’s National Socialists had no relation to the German Nazi Party. Jun-ke Choy to Dai-ming Lee, January 20, 1948, p. 1, file 161, carton 13, Records of the Chinese World; Choy to Lee, January 28, 1948, same file; Choy to Dean Acheson, April 17, 1949, p. 1, same file; John Carter Vincent, “Memorandum of Conversation,” July 7, 1947, p. 1, reel 11, frame 444, Records of the Office of Chinese Affairs, 1945–1955 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1989). Vincent would perhaps have supported the two men a year or so earlier. By 1947, however, President Truman was committed to a solution to the conflict that excluded CCP participation in any coalition government—a position that several smaller parties contested. John Carter Vincent, “Memorandum for the Ambassador,” July 22, 1942, p. 10, file “Vincent, John Carter,” Records of the Office of Chinese Affairs, reel 1; Niuyue huaqiao shehui, 92; Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, 25; China Daily News, “Yiguan shishi zuotan xiangqing” (Detailed facts of the Laundry Alliance discussion), January 26, 1949, 7. Chinese-American Weekly, “Zhengfu hai qipian huaqiao ma?” 38; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Yuan hua” (Helping China), November 27, 1948, 2. Yu Junji report; “Request to Send Comrade Wang,” July 3, 1948, file 7.7, reel 2, TE8, Zhongguo Guo Min Dang records; Lew, The Chinese in North America, 255; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xingguo dubangai” (Passing on Grant Avenue column), June 26, 1948, 20; Chinese-American Weekly, “Zhiyi” (A challenge), January 15, 1948, 45; Chin-fu Woo, “Neizhan de zeren” (Responsibility for the civil war), Chinese-American Weekly, April 1, 1948, 44; China Daily News, “Qing kan meizhou ribao zenyang qipian duzhe!” (See how the Chinese Journal cheats readers!), November 4, 1948, 2. Bruce J. Dickson, “The Lessons of Defeat: The Reorganization of the Kuomintang on Taiwan, 1950–1952,” China Quarterly 133 (March 1993), 58–59; Li, “Zhiwen haiwaibu zhang chen qingyun,” 41. Him Mark Lai, “China and the Chinese American Community: The Political Dimension,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives 13 (1999), 24; Los Angeles Times, “U.S. Residents Win Assembly Seats in China,” November 25, 1947, 7; Shen Bao (Shanghai), “Guodadaibiao puxuan gedi xiangji kaipiao” (Vote counts coming in one after another from the National Assembly elections everywhere), November 25, 1947; Shen Bao, “Quan mei gedi huaqiao fenbie xuanju guodai” (Overseas Chinese from across America divide their votes for National Assembly), November 23, 1947. Woodrow Chan appears to have voted with the pro-Chiang forces, but William T.S. Wu’s stand is far less apparent. Hai nei wai zhongwang suo gui zhi sun ke xiansheng (The confidence of people around the world returns to Mr. Sun Ke) (Nanjing: Committee to Elect Chairman Sun Vice President, 1948), 44. Denny Roy, Taiwan: A Political History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 82; Li Zongren, “Reminiscences of Tsung-jen Li,” Chinese Oral History Project, Columbia University, 1961, 459–465; Henry R. Lieberman, “Help to Peasants Urged on Nanking,” New York Times, March 31, 1948, 14; Choy to Lee, December 24, 1947, p. 1, file 161, carton 13, Records of the Chinese World. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin, 2005), 28–31; Cohen, America’s Response to China, 158–159.

Notes to Pages 82–84 / 265 61. Marquis Childs, “Washington Calling,” Washington Post, October 29, 1948, 24; Mary Spargo, “GOP Runaway Is Predicted by Brownell,” Washington Post, October 29, 1948, 18; Chicago Daily Tribune, “Money for China,” July 2, 1948, 10; Henry R. Lieberman, “Deeper Pessimism Observed in China,” New York Times, July 27, 1948, 15; Cohen, America’s Response to China, 160–161. 62. Liu, Meiguo huaqiao shi, 545; Constance L. Hays, “Chinatown Shopkeeper, 71, Called ‘Elder of Heroin Trade,’” New York Times, February 28, 1989, B1–B4. 63. Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Meiji huaren xiezhu duwei jingxuan yu wen” (Chinese American citizen supporters of the Dewey campaign and others, take note), November 2, 1948, 7; China Daily News, “Huabu ‘zhengzhi’ jiufen” (Chinatown “political” dispute), October 28, 1948, 7; China Daily News, “Tangrenjie suo jian suo wen” (What one sees and hears in Chinatown), October 29, 1948, 7. 64. Lai, “China and the Chinese American Community,” 24; Dewey L. Fleming, “Truman to ‘Talk Way Back’ to Washington,” Baltimore Sun, June 14, 1948, 1; ChinesePacific Weekly, “Xingguo dubanxie” (Passing on Dupont Street column), October 16, 1948, 6; Edward Jew interview with the author, March 23, 2011. 65. Bell, The Liberal State on Trial, 122–129, 152–154. 66. New York Times, “Text of the Platform as Approved for Adoption Today by the Progressive Party,” July 25, 1948; Bell, The Liberal State on Trial, 122; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xingguo dubangai” (Passing on Grant Avenue column), April 19, 1952, 27; Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, 98–104. 67. Sources of Chinese Tradition, Vol. II, compiled by Wm. Theodore de Bary, Wing-tsit Chan, and Chester Tan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 116; Jonathan Bell, The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 8, 20; Qing, From Allies to Enemies, 38–47; Edmund S.K. Fung, The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 239–253; Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, 161; Him Mark Lai and Betty Lim, “Gilbert Woo, Chinese American Journalist,” in Yuzun Liu, Dehua Zheng, and Larry Lam, eds., Hu Jingnan Wenji (The collected works of Gilbert Woo) (Hong Kong: Xiangjiang, 1991), 34–35. 68. Bell, The Liberal State on Trial, 126; Nisei for Wallace Bandwagon, “Cracker Barrel,” I:6, August 1948, 3, file 2, box 16, Records of the Independent Progressive Party and Californians for Liberal Representation, Special Collections Dept., Charles E. Young Library, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Calif.; Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 36. 69. China Daily News, “Huayi jimin ying xuan shui” (For whom should Chinese American citizens vote), October 30, 1948, 7; China Daily News, “Meiji huaren chengli yong hualaisi weihui” (American citizen Chinese establish group in support of Wallace), July 20, 1948, 7. In the 1950 Chinese Directory of Eastern Cities (New York: Sino-American Publicity Bureau, 1950), all Wallace committee members not on the China Daily News staff listed their address as the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance. Joshua B. Freeman in Working Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000), 75–76, notes that Wallace won 13 percent of the overall New York City vote, but the labor-left coalition that supported him had already begun to fragment. Fearful of left-wing third parties, New York’s Democratic leaders in 1947 pushed through electoral changes that diminished the ability of third party candidates to win office.

266 / Notes to Pages 85–91 70. Chinese Press, “Chinese for Wallace Committee Organized,” October 1, 1948, 3; Xiao Mai [Liang Xiaomai/Leong Thick Hing], “Women weishenma yonghu hualaisi xiansheng wei zongtong” (Why we support Mr. Wallace for president), Chinese-Pacific Weekly, October 9, 1948, 9. 71. Chinese Press, “Chinatown Voting Heaviest in Years,” November 5, 1948, 5; Will Lissner, “Wallace Vote Is Far Short of His Party’s Expectations,” New York Times, November 3, 1948, 1; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xiyunna furen” (Havenner reelected), November 6, 1948, 6. Warren had broad appeal in California, where he routinely won his elections at the primary stage by cross-filing. 72. Zachary Karabell, The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election (New York: Knopf, 2000), 254; China Daily News, “Benshi huazibao dui meiguo xuanju zhi fanying” (This city’s Chinese-language press responds to the election), November 5, 1948, 7; Chinese Press, “Chinatown Voting Heaviest in Years,” 5; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xinwen jian zhi” (News brief), November 6, 1948, 1. 73. Albert K. Chow and W.F. Doon to Harry Truman, November 14, 1948, pp. 1–2, file “Chow, Albert K. (only),” General Files, Papers of Harry S. Truman, Truman Library Institute, Independence, Missouri; New York Times, “China Reds Spurn Negotiated Peace,” November 15, 1948, 8; Henry R. Lieberman, “Nanking Predicts Chiang Shift Soon,” New York Times, December 29, 1948, 15. 74. Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, 132, 134; John W. Garver, The SinoAmerican Alliance: Nationalist China and American Cold War Strategy in Asia (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 11–12. 75. Yu, To Save China, 181; Cohen, America’s Response to China, 165. The China White Paper included many formerly secret documents that showed how the Chiang regime had disregarded American advice and squandered American assistance in the fight against the CCP. CHAPTER THREE

1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

John F. Mebly, “The Origins of the Cold War in China,” Pacific Affairs 41:1 (1968), 26–32; Gayle B. Montgomery and James W. Johnson, One Step from the White House: The Rise and Fall of Senator William F. Knowland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 92. For more on the activities of the China Lobby, see Ross Y. Koen, The China Lobby in American Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1960); and Stanley D. Bachrack, The Committee of One Million: “China Lobby” Politics, 1953–1971 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). Weili Ye, Seeking Modernity in China’s Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1900–1927 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 94–98. Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, 1945–1992: Uncertain Friendships (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994), 29–32. A. Doak Barnett, China on the Eve of Communist Takeover (New York: Praeger, 1966), 304–306; Tucker, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, 1945–1992, 29. A. Doak Barnett later became a respected historian of China. John Sharnik, “Mott Street Communique,” New York Times Magazine, May 14, 1950, 200; George Draper, “Chinatown Opinion,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 3, 1949, 7. The numbers in reality were probably similar in New York, but the reporter had no way of knowing if he did not speak Chinese; far fewer Chinese New Yorkers spoke English fluently than their counterparts in San Francisco, and the great majority of community elites would have taken an anti-communist stand. Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Huang renjun tongdian fandui toujiang” (Wong

Notes to Pages 92–97 / 267

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

Doon telegram opposes capitulation), April 9, 1949, 7; Liu Boji [Pei Chi Liu], Meiguo huaqiao shi, xubian (History of the American Overseas Chinese, sequel) (Taipei: Li Ming Cultural Enterprises, 1981), 510–511. China Daily News, “Zui zuguo shiju zhi fanying” (In response to the homeland’s political situation), January 25, 1949, 7; China Daily News, “Yiguan shishi zuotan xiangqing” (Detailed facts of the Laundry Alliance discussion), January 26, 1949, 7; Renqiu Yu, To Save China, To Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 182. Lim P. Lee to Charles Leong, c. 1949, file 22, carton 3, Charles Leong Papers, Asian American Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley; Tucker, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, 1945–1992, 22. John W. Garver, The Sino-American Alliance: Nationalist China and American Cold War Strategy in Asia (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 11, 18–19. Gerald T. White, “The Chinese and Immigration Law,” Far Eastern Survey 19:7 (1950), 70; Walter Judd to Joseph C. Grew, April 12, 1949, file 2, box 73, Walter Judd Papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif. Mike Masaoka, “Progress report #5,” March 31, 1949, pp. 4–5, file 11, box 64, Mike M. Masaoka Papers, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah; Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Niuyue zhonghua gongsuo: banli ge yimin an yanju choumu jingfei gao qianbao shu” (New York CCBA: Record of overseas Chinese who have collected funds for the handling of various immigration cases), April 15, 1949, 5. New York Times, “Fights Immigration Curb,” April 12, 1946; Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Huayi tuiwu junren zhengqu hefa quanli” (Veterans of Chinese ancestry fight for their rights), May 27, 1947, 5; Niuyue huaqiao shehui (New York overseas Chinese society) (New York: Chinese Community Research Bureau, 1950), 85; “Niuyue zhonghua gongsuo,” 5; US Senate, “Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee of the Judiciary,” July 20, 1949, p. 170. Xiaojian Zhao, Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940–1965 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 27; Y.C. Hong, A Brief History of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance (San Francisco: CACA Grand Lodge, 1955), p. 5, Special Collections Library, University of California, Davis, Davis, Calif.; Henry Lem to Patrick McCarran, c. 1949, file 2, box 73, Walter H. Judd Papers; Weng Shaoqiu, “Meidong ying xiang meixi kanqi: li zheng huaqiao meiji gongmin qizi ru mei quanli” (The US east should emulate the US west: work hard for the right for overseas Chinese US citizens’ wives to enter the US), Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, March 14, 1949, 2; Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Qiaotuan huanying huang renjun zhou jinchao er shi” (Overseas organizations welcome Doon Wong and Albert Chow), March 7, 1949, 5. Judd to Grew, April 12, 1949, p. 1. Judd did not specifically name Albert Chow in his letter to Grew, but he almost certainly had Chow in mind, given the broker’s leadership in the fight against the Judd bill. Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Niuyue zhonghua gongsuo,” 5; Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Qiaotuan huanying huang renjun zhou jinchao er shi,” 5; Weng, “Meidong ying xiang meixi kanqi,” 2. No copies of the Chinese Journal exist for this period, but the Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, which listed the welcoming party for Chow and Wong in detail, did not mention any reporters from the Chinese Journal. In contrast, three of its own reporters covered the event. Readers Digest, “Washington’s Most Successful Lobbyist—Mike Masaoka,” May 1949; Masaoka, “Progress report #5,” p. 5; Masaoka, “Progress report #7,” June 6, 1949,

268 / Notes to Pages 97–102

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

p. 2, file 12, box 64, Mike M. Masaoka Papers; US Senate, “Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee of the Judiciary,” July 20, 1949, pp. 146, 165, 239. “Immigration and Naturalization,” CQ Almanac 1950, 6th ed. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1951), 236, available online at http://library.cqpress.com/ cqalmanac/cqal50–1377625 (accessed October 28, 2012); Clayton Knowles, “Alien Law Rewrite Urged by M’Carran,” New York Times, April 21, 1950, 16. Tucker, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, 1945–1992, 22–24; Garver, The Sino-American Alliance, 18–19; Warren I. Cohen, America’s Response to China: A History of Sino-American Relations, 4th ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 164–167. Yu, To Save China, To Save Ourselves, 183; New York Times, “Communist Flags Fly in Chinatown,” October 11, 1949; Victor G. and Brett de Bary Nee, Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 214–215, 219; Him Mark Lai, “The Chinese Press in the United States and Canada since World War II: A Diversity of Voices,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives 4 (1990), 110–111. New York Times, “Communist Flags Fly in Chinatown”; Xiaojian Zhao, “Disconnecting Transnational Ties: The Chinese Pacific Weekly and the Transformation of Chinese American Community after the Second World War,” in Wanning Sun, ed., Media and the Chinese Diaspora: Community, Communications and Commerce (New York: Routledge, 2006), 35; Nee and Nee, Longtime Californ’, 211. Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, 135; Zhao, “Disconnecting Transnational Ties,” 36; Liu et al., Hu Jingnan Wenji, 44, 698. The Vancouver Chinese Times, “Kenqin dahui kaimu shengkuang” (Grand inaugural PTA meeting), August 2, 1949, 2, identifies Wen Fu as chairman of the Ying On Association. Yu, To Save China, To Save Ourselves, 183; New York Times, “Communist Flags Fly in Chinatown,” October 11, 1949; Nee and Nee, Longtime Californ’, 214–215, 218, 219; Lai, “The Chinese Press in the United States and Canada since World War II,” 110–111; Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, 104, 133. Several owners of the revamped Chung Sai Yat Po were members of the communist front group Overseas Chinese League for Peace and Democracy in China. Liu, Meiguo huaqiao shi, xubian, 512. Warren Unna, “Report on China: Albert Chow Contends Chiang Is Surrounded by Corruption,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 26, 1949, 6. Liu, Meiguo huaqiao shi, 512. Unna, “Report on China,” 6. Chan Ge, “Huanying li dai zongtong” (Welcoming Acting President Li), Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, December 7, 1949, 2; Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Li dai zongtong liao zai yiyuan; qiaoling liandao zhihou xunwei” (Acting President Li recuperates in the hospital; overseas leaders join in comforting him), December 13, 1949, 7. R.H. Hillenkoetter, “Memorandum,” December 14, 1949, p. 1, Central Intelligence Agency Freedom of Information Act Online Reading Room, available at http://www .foia.cia.gov/docs/DOC_0000884880/DOC_0000884880.pdf (accessed August 29, 2011); V.K. Wellington Koo, diary entry, March 1, 1950, Special Collections, Columbia University, New York, N.Y.; New York Times, “Associates Cable Li Urging Withdrawal,” March 5, 1950. “Daily Presidential Appointments, February 2, 1950,” Harry S. Truman Library Institute, online document available at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/calendar/main

Notes to Pages 103–108 / 269

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

.php?currYear=1950&currMonth=2&currDay=2 (accessed August 29, 2011); Tucker, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, 1945–1992, 30; Cohen, America’s Response to China, 169. Li Zongren, “Reminiscences of Tsung-jen Li,” Chinese Oral History Project, Columbia University, 1961, 553; Chinese World (San Francisco), “Li Zongren chize jiang wei xian fuwei” (Li Zongren denounces Chiang for violating the constitution to regain power), March 2, 1950, 1. President’s News Conference, March 2, 1950, Public Papers of Harry S. Truman, available at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=667&st=&st1= (accessed June 29, 2011); Li, “Reminiscences,” 554. Li, “Reminiscences,” 554; Dai-ming Lee, “Democracy in a Strait-Jacket,” Chinese World, English section, March 4, 1950, 1; Unna, “Report on China,” 6; New York Times, “Hainan Says Red Invaders Hold 3 Towns on the Coast,” March 30, 1950, 8; New York Times, “Formosa Concedes Setback,” April 24, 1950, 3. Tucker, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, 1945–1992, 31–32; Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), 349–350. Li Tsung-jen to Harry S. Truman, June 3, 1950, pp. 1–2, file “Li Tsung-ren: Donated correspondence to and from Li and Dr. Kan—1950,” Li Tsung-jen Papers, Special Collections, Columbia University. Li to Truman, pp. 1–2; Chiang Kai-shek to Harry S. Truman, May 23, 1950, file 150, box 758, Harry S. Truman Official File, Harry S. Truman Library Institute. Chinese Press, “Circulars Hail New China ‘Third Force,’” June 16, 1950, 3; Chung Sai Yat Po, “Disanpai chuandan shifou you feiji fangxia” (Whether the Third Force flyers were dropped from a plane), June 6, 1950, 8; Liu, Meiguo huaqiao shi, 510; Chinese World, “Jiang zhi guangbo yuqing qiaobao kang gong” (Jiang’s broadcast implores overseas compatriots to resist communism,” June 21, 1950, 1. Garver, The Sino-American Alliance, 36–37; Cohen, America’s Response to China, 170–171. “Summary of Interview with Yuey JOE,” May 5, 1974, p. 1, folder 43, box 14, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Library; Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin, 1989), 415; Charlotte Brooks, “The War on Grant Avenue: Business Competition and Ethnic Rivalry in San Francisco, 1937–1942,” Journal of Urban History 37:3 (2011), 323–325; Chinese Press, “California’s Gov. Warren Assures Chinese-Americans,” December 8, 1950, 1; Chinese Press, “S.F. Paper Scores Any Ill-Will against Chinese,” December 8, 1950, 1; Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, 147–148. Chinese Press, “U.S. Citizens of Chinese Origin Speak Up in Crisis,” December 8, 1950, 1–3. Chinese World, “Fan gong zonghui juban da xunyou kaishi mujuan” (Anti-Communist League holds parade to begin fundraising), February 14, 1951, 6; Anti-Communist Committee for Free China, “Statement,” June 10, 1951, file 36, carton 70, Him Mark Lai Papers; Liu, Meiguo huaqiao shi, 512. See, for example, Nee and Nee, Longtime Californ’, 211–213; Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 213; Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, 134–143; Yu, To Save China, 183–194. Wu Yanguang, “Wo zai guangzhou you yi zuo lou hui bei ren ‘fenpei’ qu ma?” (Will the building I have in Guangzhou be “redistributed”?), Chung Sai Yat Po, February 25,

270 / Notes to Pages 108–112

43.

44.

45. 46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

1950, 5; Jian Chen, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 60; Glen D. Peterson, “Socialist China and the Huaqiao: The Transition to Socialism in the Overseas Chinese Areas of Rural Guangdong, 1949– 1956,” Modern China 14:3 (1988), 313–315. Bruce Edward Hall, Tea That Burns: A Family Memoir of Chinatown (New York: Free Press, 2002), 237. As Stephen Fitzgerald notes, the “red blackmail” stories were not the product of pro-KMT journalists in places like Hong Kong or Taiwan, although such sources certainly hyped these reports. A number of Chinese Americans whom I interviewed for this book clearly recalled the anxiety they, their parents, and their friends felt in the early 1950s when receiving such letters. Stephen Fitzgerald, China and the Overseas Chinese: A Study of Peking’s Changing Policy, 1949–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 55–56. New York Times, “U.S. Accuses Peiping of Torture Threats to Extort Money from Chinese Abroad,” July 8, 1951; Chinese World, “Zhonggong lesuo qiaojuan” (The Chinese communists blackmail overseas family members), February 14, 1951, 6; R. Arnold to William F. Knowland, pp. 1–2, December 3, 1951, Records of the Office of Chinese Affairs, 1945–1955 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1989), roll 24, file 501.12001. For another discussion of the “red blackmail” issue, see Cindy I-fen Cheng, Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 160–172. George de Carvalho, “Treasury to Act against Red Extortion,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 15, 1951, 1. A. Guy Hope, “American-Chinese Efforts to Obtain Permission for Remittances,” p. 1, March 18, 1952, Records of the Office of Chinese Affairs, reel 28, file 511.12; Connie Young Yu interview with the author, March 25, 2011. Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, 32; Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Yizhi zhicai gongchan baozhi” (Agreement to sanction the communist newspaper), December 5, 1950, 5; Yu, To Save China, 187–188. United States of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. China Daily News, Inc., and Eugene Moy, Defendants-Appellants, and Chin You Gon, Tom Sung, and Chin Hong Ming, DefendantsAppellants, 224 F.2d 670 (1955). Lai, “The Chinese Press in the United States and Canada,” 111–112; Charles Leong to James Henry, May 11, 1953, file 31, carton 3, Leong Papers; William Yukon Chang interview with the author, June 14, 2013. William Yukon Chang, whose father-inlaw was Tang Enbo, privately disliked Chiang Kai-shek and believed him an incompetent responsible for the loss of the mainland. However, like many Chinese Americans, Chang did not favor the Communists either. Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, 113; Chin-Fu Woo response to reader, Chinese-American Weekly, January 29, 1953, 31; Dai-ming Lee, “Gu quan da ju, nuli fangong” (Showing consideration for the overall situation, work hard to oppose communism), Chinese World, February 20, 1951, 1. Dai-ming Lee, “Strength of the Anti-Red Chinese,” Chinese World, English section, February 15, 1951, 1; Myron Cohen to Dean Rusk, August 9, 1951, pp. 1–2, Records of the Office of Chinese Affairs, reel 22, file 350.2; Everett Drumright to Troy Perkins, December 17, 1951, p. 1, same file; n.a., “Memorandum for the File,” April 10, 1952, p. 1, Records of the Office of Chinese Affairs, reel 27, file 350.2; Perkins to Drumright, January 23, 1952, p. 1, same file. Timothy Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Anchor, 2008), 67; Perkins to Drumright, January 23, 1952, p. 1; Roger B. Jeans, “United States Pol-

Notes to Pages 113–116 / 271

53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

59. 60.

icy and the Chinese Third Force,” Indian Journal of Asian Affairs, 14, no. 1/2 (December 2001), 6; O.E. Clubb, “Organization of Task Force for Work with ‘Third Force,’” April 25, 1951, pp. 1–2, 793.00/4–2551, Digital National Security Archive, “U.S. Intelligence and China: Collection, Analysis, and Covert Action.” Anthony Leviero, “Ouster of General Revives Scrutiny of Graft in China,” New York Times, August 31, 1951, 1; Republic of China vs. Pang-Tsu Mow et al., 101 F. Supp. 646 (1951). Lai, “The Chinese Press in the United States and Canada,” 114; Shih-Chi Wu to Ray T. Maddocks, July 30, 1952, pp. 1–2, file “Committee for a Free Asia 2,” box 37, Alfred Kohlberg Papers, Hoover Institution; n.a., “Dr. Hu Shih Scorns the So-Called ‘Third Force,’” December 1, 1951, p. 1, same file; Liu et al., Hu Jingnan Wenji, 164. Between 1952 and 1955, the circulation of the Chinese World hovered around 8,800, making it the most popular Chinese American newspaper on the West Coast. During the same period, the circulation of the KMT’s Young China plummeted from about 9,700 in 1952 to 4,100 in 1955, while the Chinese Nationalist Daily of America, the other KMT paper in San Francisco, folded completely. N.W. Ayer and Sons Directory, Newspapers and Periodicals, 1953 (Philadelphia, 1953), 112, 116; N.W. Ayer and Sons Directory, Newspapers and Periodicals, 1955 (Philadelphia, 1955), 11. Dai-ming Lee, “The Sincerity of the Anti-Communist League,” Chinese World, English section, February 12, 1951, 1; Dai-ming Lee, “Qing fangong zonghui jinshen xuanchuan” (A request to the Anti-Communist League to be cautious in its propaganda), Chinese World, February 12, 1951, 1; Liu et al., Hu Jingnan Wenji, 164; Lai, “The Chinese Press in the United States and Canada since World War II,” 112. Dai-ming Lee to Police Chief Michael Gafney, May 22, 1951, p. 1, file 10, carton 71, Him Mark Lai Papers; Liu et al., Hu Jingnan Wenji, 164; Pierre Salinger, “Chinatown Dispute,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 5, 1951, 1; Dai-ming Lee, “Anti-Communism and Chiang Kai-shek,” Chinese World, English section, February 14, 1951, 1; Lai, “The Chinese Press in the United States and Canada since World War II,” 112. John Sharnik, “Mott Street Communique,” New York Times Magazine, May 14, 1950, 34; Chinese Press, “U.S. Citizens of Chinese Origin Speak Up in Crisis,” December 8, 1950, 3; “Sometime China Officials” and O. Edmund Clubb, Memorandum of Conversation, March 23, 1951, pp. 1–2, reel 22, file 350, Records of the Office of Chinese Affairs. “Prominent American Citizen Long Connected with Medical Work in China” and Clubb, “The China Lobby: Position of Alfred Kohlberg,” April 30, 1952, pp. 1–2, reel 22, file 350, Records of the Office of Chinese Affairs.; New York Times, “Christopher T. Emmet Is Dead: Writer on Totalitarianism, 73,” February 13, 1974; Alfred Kohlberg to Tingfu Tsiang, August 14, 1952, p. 1, file “Dr. Tingfu F. Tsiang,” box 188, Alfred Kohlberg Papers, Hoover Institution; Kohlberg to J. Edgar Hoover, September 26, 1949, file “FBI 1,” box 63, Kohlberg Papers; “AM” phone memo, December 21, 1952, p. 1, file “FBI 2,” Kohlberg Papers; Kohlberg to Special Agent James J. Kelley, June 22, 1954, same file; Ernest Moy, “A Memorandum to Americans Concerned with China,” April 12, 1951, pp. 1–4, file “Ernest K. Moy,” box 128, Kohlberg papers; Ernest Moy to Christopher Emmet, May 13, 1952, pp. 1–2, file “Ernest K. Moy,” box 91, Christopher T. Emmet papers, Hoover Institution. My thanks to Madeline Y. Hsu for directing me to the Moy file in the Emmet Papers. Ch’en Li-fu, The Storm Clouds Clear over China: The Memoir of Ch’en Li-fu, 1900–1993 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1994), 223. Chu, Meiguo Huaqiao Kaishi, 130–131. The median income of Chinese Americans in

272 / Notes to Pages 116–123

61.

62.

63. 64. 65.

the New York metro area in 1950 was $1822; it was $2027 in the Bay Area. United States Census of Population, 1950, Vol. IV, Special Reports: Nonwhite Population by Race (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1952), 3B-80. Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York, “Zhonghua Gongsuo Jieshao” (An introduction to the CCBA-NY), available at http://www.ccbanyc.org/ chistorypresidents.html; accessed August 24, 2012. As this book’s introduction notes, historians tend to assert that the KMT and the US government destroyed “progressive” activism in Chinatowns during this period. Understanding the term “progressive” here is crucial, however. Americans today often use “progressive” to connote “liberal,” because conservatives have cast the latter word in such a negative light. In contrast, historians of Chinese American politics frequently equate “progressive” with the fairly vague “Chinese left,” a semantic practice more reflective of the 1930s and 1940s. At that time, members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) routinely described themselves as “progressives” rather than as communists or Stalinists, even as they defended Stalin’s purges and aped the Soviet Union’s policy perambulations. Adding to the confusion, Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party contained a mix of liberal New Dealers, especially disaffected Democrats, as well as socialists and communists. Despite their very different views, most of these people considered themselves “progressives.” “Da Renjing” to editor, Chinese-American Weekly, April 13, 1950, 32. Xinyang Wang, Surviving the City: The Chinese Immigrant Experience in New York City, 1890–1970 (Lanham, Md.: Rowan and Littlefield, 2001), 56. Toy Lim interview with L. Eve Armentrout Ma, September 25, 1977, p. 3, file 30, carton 23, Him Mark Lai Papers; Connie Young Yu interview; Edward Jew interview with the author, March 11, 2011. CHAPTER FOUR

1.

2.

3.

4.

Jian Chen, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 87–88, 169; John W. Garver, The Sino-American Alliance: Nationalist China and American Cold War Strategy in Asia (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 54–55. Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, The China Threat: Memories, Myths, and Realities in the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 83–84, 124, 130; Stanley D. Bachrack, The Committee of One Million: “China Lobby” Politics, 1953–1971 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 44, 75–81, 120–138. Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: Harper, 1991), 30–48. See, for example, Business Week, “Overseas Chinese: Still Tied to Peking,” December 4, 1954, 144; US News and World Report, “Reds Gain among Chinese Overseas,” July 2, 1954, 32–33; US News and World Report, “World’s Biggest Fifth Column?” August 20, 1954, 24–26; America, “Southeast Asia’s Potential Fifth Column,” September 5, 1953, 529; Newsweek, “Chinese Millions Overseas Pose a Critical Problem,” January 30, 1956, 44; Stephen Fitzgerald, China and the Overseas Chinese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 77–78. As Fitzgerald argues, the PRC largely followed the ROC’s old nationality policies until about 1954 and even then did not wholly reject the ROC’s approach. Ellen D. Wu, “‘America’s Chinese’: Anti-Communism, Citizenship, and Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War,” Pacific Historical Review 77:3 (August 2008), 391–393; Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 8–9; Tucker, The China Threat,

Notes to Pages 123–128 / 273

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

104–105; John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 7. United States Statutes at Large, 1952, Vol. 66, 82nd Congress, pp. 163–282. David M. Reimers, Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 18–21; Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Immigrants and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 237–239; Madeline Y. Hsu, “The Disappearance of America’s Cold War Chinese Refugees,” Journal of American Ethnic History 31:4 (2012), 17. The law contained a number of draconian security measures that arguably violated the US Constitution and affected many naturalized citizens. US House of Representatives, “Hearings before the President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization,” October 2, 1952, 418–419, 1045–1046, 1093. US Congress, “Joint Hearings before the Subcommittees of the Committees of the Judiciary,” March 6–21 and April 9, 1951, pp. iii-v, 184–189; Gilbert Woo, editorial, Chinese-Pacific Weekly, November 11, 1955, 3. Chinese Times, “Tongyuanzonghui qing tongguo mijialun yimin zhengxiu fa an” (CACA asks for passage of McCarran immigration reform bill), February 21, 1952, 1. Xue Ya, “Deng dai ji ban de liangjian dashi” (Urgently awaiting action on two important matters), Chinese Nationalist Daily, March 20, 1952, 2; US House of Representatives, “Hearings before the President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization,” 1045; New York Times, advertisement, April 24, 1952, 26. New York Times, “Downey Not to Run for 3rd Term,” March 29, 1950, 38; Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 20; Frank R. Havenner, “Reminiscences,” Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, September 1, 1953, 115, 135–136. Woo, editorial, November 11, 1955, 3. Bruce J. Dickson, “The Lessons of Defeat: The Reorganization of the Kuomintang on Taiwan, 1950–1952,” China Quarterly 133 (March 1993), 58–59, 63–64. Dickson, “Lessons of Defeat,” 59–61; Victor G. and Brett de Bary Nee, Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). Dickson, “Lessons of Defeat,” 60; Office of Special Services, Washington, D.C., “San Min Chu I Youth Corps San Francisco,” June 23, 1944, pp. 1–2, file 18, carton 70, Him Mark Lai Papers, notes that Woodrow Chan worked to establish the San Min Chu I Youth Corps in San Francisco. Mo Liren (pseud.), “Niuyue huawen baokan de chuangshang” (The traumas of the New York Chinese language press), World Chinese Weekly, March 18, 2008, available online at http://www.worldchineseweekly.com/weekly_cn/article/show.php?itemid= 1055 (accessed November 9, 2012), notes that Shing Tai Liang served as a secretary to Wu Tiecheng when he was mayor of Shanghai. Chen Hongyu, Wu tiecheng yu jindai zhongguo (Wu Tiecheng and modern China) (Taipei: Overseas Chinese Association, 2012), 177, also notes Liang’s connection to Wu. Liang and Kock Gee Lee were close allies and served on the editorial board of the Chinese Journal together— hence my belief that they were in the same KMT faction, initially associated with Wu Tiecheng until his death in 1953. Dickson, “Lessons of Defeat,” 60; “Operations of China Lobby in U.S.,” March 23, 1950, frame 671, reel 22, Records of the Office of Chinese Affairs, 1945–1955 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1989). Chin-Fu Woo, “‘Dangtuan huodong’ yu huaqiao shehui” (“Party activity” and overseas

274 / Notes to Pages 128–131

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

Chinese society), Chinese-American Weekly, August 25, 1960, 6; Him Mark Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, ed. by Madeline Y. Hsu (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 30. Dickson, “The Lessons of Defeat,” 59–60; Woo, “‘Dangtuan huodong’ yu huaqiao shehui,” 6; Y.K. Chu, “Zai lun zhonghua xuanju” (More discussion of the CCBA election), Chinese World New York Edition, February 5, 1958, 1, in box 1958, Chinese World New York collection, Asian American Studies Library. Joshua B. Freeman, Working Class New York: Life and Labor since World War Two (New York: New Press, 2000), 184–186; Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 164–190; Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 79–151; Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 83–95; Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 138–199. Zhui Fu, “Choujian niuyue zhongguo xincun” (Preparing to build New York’s China Village), Chinese-American Weekly, June 22, 1950, 15–17; Xiaojian Zhao, Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940–1965 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 78–84; United States Census of Population, 1950: Census Tract Statistics, New York, New York (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1952) 9–141. Zhui Fu, “Niuyue huabu xincun jin xun” (Update on New York’s China Village), Chinese-American Weekly, July 28, 1950, 29; New York Times, “New Chinatown Gains Momentum,” June 10, 1950, 32. Greg Umbach and Dave Wishnoff, “Strategic Self-Orientalism: Urban Planning Policies and the Shaping of New York’s Chinatown, 1950–2005,” Journal of Planning History 7:3 (2008), 222. Zhui, “Choujian niuyue zhongguo xincun,” 15, 18; Chiou-ling Yeh, Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 33–34; Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, “‘Loveliest Daughter of Our Ancient Cathay!’ Representations of Ethnic and Gender Identity in the Miss Chinatown U.S.A Beauty Pageant,” Journal of Social History 31:1 (1997), 10–11; Umbach and Wishnoff, “Strategic Self-Orientalism,” 224; New York Times, “New Chinatown Gains Momentum,” June 10, 1950, 32. The consul-general’s involvement in China Village demonstrates the way Nationalist officials routinely blurred the lines between Chinese aliens and Chinese American citizens; only the latter would have been allowed to live in public housing. New York Times, “New Chinatown Gains Momentum,” June 10, 1950, 32; Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Li dai zongtong liao zai yiyuan; qiaoling liandao zhihou xunwei” (Acting President Li recuperates in the hospital; overseas leaders join in comforting him), December 13, 1949, 7; New York Times, “Chinatown Aglow for Business Fete,” November 7, 1950, 42; Zhui, “Choujian niuyue zhongguo xincun,” 15–17; Y.K. Chu, “Zhonghua dalou de wenti” (Questions about the China building), Chinese World New York, February 10, 1958, 1, box 1958, Chinese World New York collection. Woodrow Chan was also a factional ally of the Chicago-based rightist On Leong national leader, James Moy. New York Times, “Assail ‘Socialism’ in Public Housing,” September 30, 1950, 31; Lee E. Cooper, “Drive by Realtors on Curbs Is Hinted,” New York Times, Novem-

Notes to Pages 132–134 / 275

27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

ber 12, 1950, 44; Bernstein, Bridges of Reform, 107–108; New York Times, “Housing Unit Voted despite Criticism,” February 27, 1951, 27. Umbach and Wishnoff, “Strategic Self-Orientalism,” 226–227; New York Times, “Chinatown Plan Moves Forward,” December 30, 1954, 19; Chu, “Zhonghua dalou de wenti,” 1; Y.K. Chu, “Susong shengbai lun: chen zhonghai dui zhonghua gongsuo” (A discussion of the success or failure of a lawsuit: Woodrow Chan versus the CCBA), Chinese World New York Edition, March 3, 1958, 1, box 1958, Chinese World New York collection. McConaughy, “Illness of Madame Chiang and Her Proposed Visit to Hawaii,” July 28, 1952, file 050, reel 24, Records of the Office of Chinese Affairs; Untitled summary from British Consulate, Tamsui, September 1952, frame 87, file 371/99241, British Foreign Office Files China, 1949–1956 (Archives Direct database); New York Times, “Mme. Chiang Welcomed on Coast,” August 18, 1952, 3; New York Times, “First Lady of Nationalist China Arrives,” October 19, 1952, 49; Chin-fu Woo, Jiang furen you meiji (Madame Chiang in America) (New York: Chinese-American World, 1943); Chin-fu Woo, “Cong song meiling lai niu kan taiwan zuofeng” (A look at Taiwan’s work style from Song Meiling’s visit to New York), Chinese-American World, October 23, 1952, 6. The letter from McConaughy is marked “unsent,” but British sources confirm the surprise and annoyance of American officials at Madame Chiang’s suddenly revised itinerary. Woo, “Cong song meiling lai niu kan taiwan zuofeng,” 6–7. Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Aishi yingyun tang huo dangxuan wei zongtong jiang qin fu hanguo xun qu guangrong tingzhan” (Eisenhower says that if elected president, he will go to Korea and bring the war to an honorable end), October 27, 1952, 1; Niuyue huaqiao shehui (New York overseas Chinese society) (New York: Chinese Community Research Bureau, 1950), 79, 82, 85; William Tien Sang Wu naturalization certificate, New York, Index to Petitions for Naturalization filed in New York City, 1792–1989 (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2007); Tong Lun, “Juwairen kan gonghedang” (An outsider looks at the Republican Party), Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, November 11, 1949, 2; Yu Huan, “Juxuan zongtong qizhong zhi wo jian” (My view from the midst of the presidential campaign), Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, October 27, 1952, 6. Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Minzhengdang yonghu shidaiwensheng huayi renshi jihui shengkuang” (Grand rally of Chinese Democratic Party supporters of Stevenson), October 31, 1952, 7; Niuyue huaqiao shehui, 91; Ling Lew, The Chinese in North America: A Guide to Their Life and Progress (Los Angeles: East-West Culture, 1949), 209, 211; Yang Ditang, “Song meifang zhongxue: chen wu minchi xiaozhang gui xiangjiang” (Going back to Mui Fong Secondary School: Principal Chen Wu Minchi returns to Xiangjiang), Chinese Times (Vancouver, Canada), June 25, 1953, 5; Chinese Times (Vancouver), “Zhide gongsuo choubei quanqiu ken qin dahui” (Gee Tuck Association prepares for worldwide meeting), February 12, 1960, 3; Woodrow Chan petition for naturalization, April 7, 1952, Index to Petitions for Naturalization Filed in New York City, 1792–1989 (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, 2007); Shing Hwa Daily News (Toronto), “Chen zhonghai” (Woodrow Chan), March 18, 1954, 5; “San Min Chu I Youth Corps, San Francisco,” June 23, 1944, pp. 1–2, file 18, carton 64, Him Mark Lai Papers, Ethnic Studies Library, UC Berkeley. Chan was active in San Francisco’s San Min Chu I Youth Corps, a group that included Pei Chi Liu [B.K. Lau], the political advisor of Albert Chow’s business partner, Doon Wong. Chan

276 / Notes to Pages 136–140

32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

may also have simply been a supporter of social welfare programs; he was arrested for welfare fraud in the mid-1960s and served more than a year in an upstate New York prison. Jonathan P. Hicks, “Tammany Hall’s Last True Boss,” New York Times, March 12, 1997, B1–B4; New York Times, “New Assistant United States Attorneys Sworn In,” August 10, 1951, 36; Niuyue huaqiao shehui, 86; New York Times, “Two Democratic Aides Named,” July 15, 1952, 16; New York Times, “Chinatown’s Aged Finding Haven Where They’re Not ‘Forgotten Men,’” May 24, 1951, 47; New York Times, “$3,600,000 Budget for Welfare Unit,” December 15, 1949, 39. Until the mid-1960s, New York State required voters to demonstrate English proficiency if they had not attended primary school in the state, a standard that favored well-educated KMT exiles and discouraged working-class, China-born residents hoping to vote. Wallace Stuart, “Anti-Communist Guerrilla Movement,” May 23, 1951, p. 3, file 430.1, reel 23, Records of the Office of Chinese Affairs; Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Fangong zonghui chengli dahui ji sheng” (Record of the achievements of the anti-communist meeting), June 12, 1951, 7; W.H. Lawrence, “Truman Gives Push to Candidacy Talk,” New York Times, September 5, 1951, 1. Seymour Korman, “Tax Scandal Probers Quiz ‘Boss’ Samish,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 5, 1952, 19; “Summary of Events in Formosa,” May 1952, p. 12, frame 109, file 371/99240, British Foreign Office Papers China (Archives Direct database). Gilbert Woo, “Hu zhuji ren yichuanshui gujia guan” (Jackson K. Hu appointed estate tax appraiser), Chinese-Pacific Weekly, March 5, 1959, 3; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xingguo dubangai” (Passing on Grant Avenue column), April 19, 1952, 27; Lewis L. Gould, The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 176–177; Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 248. Arthur Krock, “In the Nation,” New York Times, June 10, 1952, 26; Lawrence E. Davies, “Californians Disagree over Kefauver Victory,” New York Times, June 8, 1952, E9. Lawrence E. Davies, “Californians Hail Knowland Sweep,” New York Times, June 6, 1952, 12; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xuan hou hua” (A post-election word), June 7, 1952, 2; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xingguo dubangai” (Passing on Grant Avenue column), June 21, 1952, 3; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xingguo dubangai” (Passing on Grant Avenue column), April 19, 1952, 27; Woo, “Hu zhuji ren yichuanshui gujia guan,” 3–4. Havenner, “Reminiscences,” 135–136; Ivan Hinderaker, “The 1952 Election in California,” Western Political Quarterly 6:1 (March 1953), 106; Ethan Rarick, California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 65. Gayle B. Montgomery, James W. Johnson, and Paul Manolis, One Step from the White House: The Rise and Fall of Senator William F. Knowland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 81, 85; Chinese American Pictorial, “Chinese American Democratic Committee, Stevenson-Sparkman Committee,” November 2, 1952, 2. Nipp had worked at one time for the Chinese News Service, an ROC agency. Gilbert Woo, “Waiqin de yiri” (A day in the field), Chinese-Pacific Weekly, May 6, 1950, 25; “Consolidated Special and Municipal Election, June 3, 1952, City and County of San Francisco, Dist. No. 21,” file County Committee (1954 Historical), carton 7, Phillip Burton Papers, Bancroft Library. Jack Wong Sing’s surname in Chinese was Wong (Huang), but he used “Sing” in English.

Notes to Pages 140–145 / 277 41. W.H. Lawrence, “Eisenhower Objective: Hold His Advantage,” New York Times, October 12, 1952, E5; Edward Jew interview with the author, March 11, 2011. 42. Los Angeles Times, “Stevenson Plays Both Sides—Nixon,” October 3, 1952, 11; Los Angeles Times, “Truman Savagely Flays Eisenhower,” October 5, 1952, 2; Gilbert Woo, editorial, Chinese-Pacific Weekly, October 4, 1952, 14; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Suisu wenjin pian” (Conventions and Practices column), October 25, 1952, 10. 43. Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Gongmin tuanjie hui huabu quanjuan shu” (Record of donations to the Council for Civic Unity), March 1, 1952, 26; hearing transcript, p. 5, 1951, file “San Francisco Citizens Committee for Equal Employment,” box 45, Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People–West Coast Branch, Bancroft Library; Woo, editorial, October 4, 1952, 14; Edward Jew interview; Connie Young Yu interview with the author, March 25, 2011; Chinese Times, “San Francisco Lodge Chinese American Citizens Alliance Endorsements,” November 3, 1952, 11; The Pictorial, “Chinatown Sets Record in Primary Election,” June 7, 1952, 1; Wayne Hu email to the author, June 15, 2011. 44. Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, 184–209. 45. Los Angeles Times, “The Day in Sacramento,” June 6, 1951, 10; 1952 California general election ballot, p. 16. 46. Brooks, “Sing Sheng vs. Southwood,” passim; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Paihua yu qi dang” (Anti-Chinese and cross-filing), October 11, 1952, 2; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Meizhou tongyuan zonghui wei qiu tongguo shisihao an xuanyuan” (CACA declaration on the campaign for the passage of Prop. 14), November 1, 1952, 17; Chinese World, “Meizhou tongyuan zonghui wei qiu tongguo shisihao an xuanyuan” (CACA declaration on the campaign for the passage of Prop. 14), November 3, 1952, 3; Chinese Times, “Tongyuan zonghui wei qiu tongguo shisihao an xuanyuan” (CACA declaration on the campaign for the passage of Prop. 14), November 3, 1952, 11. 47. Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xingguo dubangai” (Passing on Grant Avenue column), October 18, 1952, 6; Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 102–113; Paul Frymer, Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 96; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, photo, October 11, 1952, 5; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xingguo dubangai” (Passing on Grant Avenue column), October 11, 1952, 31. 48. Moon Yuen, “Sanyan Liangyu” (In one or two words), Chinese-Pacific Weekly, July 26, 1952, 3; Chinese Times, “Helun zai huabu yanjiang qingxing relie” (Enthusiasm for Warren’s Chinatown speech), November 4, 1952, 1. 49. Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xingguo dubangai” (Passing on Grant Avenue column), October 18, 1952, 6; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Jingxuan hou” (After the election), November 8, 1952, 3. 50. Adrian Buxton, “Overseas Chinese,” c. November 1952, frame 70, file 371/99376, British Foreign Office Files China, 1949–1956 (Archives Direct database); E.H. Jacobs-Larkcom, “Note on the Overseas Chinese Conference,” November 2, 1952, frames 96, 111, same file; Chen Ruzhou, Handbook of Chinese in America (New York: Zhonghua Guomin Haiwai Joint Publishing Company, 1946), 16; “Extract from China News Commentary, No. 25,” March 10, 1952, frame 30, file 371/99376, British Foreign Office Files China, 1949–1956; M.C. Gillett, memo, October 7, 1953, frame 167, file 371/105340, British Foreign Office Files China; J.F. Brewis to Addis, November 18, 1953, frame 182, British Foreign Office Files China; “Peking Government Try to Please Overseas Chinese,” January 29, 1955, frame 111, file FO 371/115191, British Foreign Office Files China.

278 / Notes to Pages 146–150 51. “Project for Organization of ‘Free China Committee,’” October 26, 1950, frame 128, reel 15, Records of the Office of Chinese Affairs, 1945–1955 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1989); G.V. Kitson to Foreign Office, London, May 30, 1952, p. 1, frame 32, file 371/99376, British Foreign Office Files China. 52. J. Edgar Hoover to Office of Security, Department of State, February 27, 1957, p. 2, FBI file of Chinese Anti-Communist League (in author’s possession); “Espionage and Internal Security Investigations,” April 13, 1954, and passim, Pei Chi Liu FBI file (in author’s possession); Raymond Farrell, “Dr. Pan Chao Ying,” December 16, 1955, p. 1, file 56364/51.6, box 598, Record Group 85, National Archives and Records Administration I, Washington, D.C. 53. Liu et al., Hu Jingnan Wenji, 527. 54. New York Times, “Overseas Chinese ‘Frighten’ Nehru,” September 30, 1954; New York Times, “Indonesia to Ban Dual Nationality,” November 14, 1954; Dudley to Foreign Office, February 10, 1954, pp. 1–2, frames 21–22, file 371/110377, British Foreign Office Files China; Fitzgerald, China and the Overseas Chinese, 107–108. For examples of American press treatment of the overseas Chinese issue, see, for example, James Reston, “Chiang’s Stock Rises,” New York Times, April 2, 1954, 2; Robert T. Hartmann, “U.S. Troops May Have to Fight in Indo-China,” Los Angeles Times, April 17, 1954, 1; Marquis Childs, “Self Government on Trial in Singapore,” Washington Post, December 16, 1955, 20; Philip Potter, “Far East Picture Remains Somber,” Baltimore Sun, January 3, 1956, 1; Daily Boston Globe, “Red China Seeks Allegiance of People Overseas,” May 27, 1956, B24; William Henry Chamberlin, “Pounding the Door,” Wall Street Journal, January 10, 1956, 14; Ronald Stead, “Peking’s Chou Speaks Softly at Bandung,” Christian Science Monitor, April 20, 1955, 18. 55. Dai-ming Lee, “Peiping Asserts Authority over Chinese, Everywhere,” Chinese World, English section, August 8, 1955, 1. 56. G. William Skinner, “Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia,” American Academy of Political and Social Science 321 (January 1959), 138; Fitzgerald, China and the Overseas Chinese, 9–10; Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 227; Nee and Nee, Longtime Californ’, 72. 57. Anonymous student to editor, Chinese World, August 15, 1955, 5; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Guanyu shuangchong guoji de wenti” (About questions of dual citizenship), November 4, 1955, 4–27. 58. Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Mingtanhui zenyang xuanze yanjiangzhe” (How the Tea Forum selects its speakers), January 6, 1956, 29. 59. “Remarks on the Chinese ‘Third Force,’” April 2, 1951, pp. 1–3, file 350.2, reel 22, Records of the Office of Chinese Affairs; Troy Perkins to Everett Drumright, January 23, 1952, p. 2, file 350.2, reel 27, Records of the Office of Chinese Affairs. 60. Chinese-American Weekly, “Li zongren tu fang kongpao” (Li Zongren’s followers spout hot air), June 5, 1952, 31; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xingguo dubangai” (Passing on Grant Avenue column), May 17, 1952, 27; Dai-ming Lee, “Chiang Renews Promise of Mainland Invasion,” Chinese World, English section, January 4, 1954, 1. 61. Chinese World, English section, “Li Tsung-jen Repudiated by Two Free China Political Organizations,” June 20, 1955, 1; New York Times, “Formosa Asserts Wu Twists Facts,” March 16, 1954, 2; New York Times, “Chiang, Reds Assailed,” December 11, 1954, 2. 62. Chinese World, “Li Tsung-jen Repudiated by Two Free China Political Organizations,” 1; Dai-ming Lee, “The General Has Blundered,” Chinese World, English section, June 20, 1955, 1.

Notes to Pages 151–158 / 279 63. “Remarks on the Chinese ‘Third Force,’” p. 2; Carsun Chang, “U.S. Constitution Is Model for Republic of China,” Chinese World, English section, September 14, 1955, 1; Howard L. Boorman and Richard C. Howard, eds., Biographical Dictionary of Republican China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 334. 64. See, for example, Dai-ming Lee, “Xiebu huabu tushuguan wancheng shiming” (Help the Chinatown library accomplish its mission), Chinese World, June 9, 1954, 1; Daiming Lee, “A Protest to the Immigration Officials,” Chinese World, English section, May 26, 1955, 1; Dai-ming Lee, “The Chinatown Detail Is a Relic of Antiquity,” Chinese World, English section, July 18, 1955, 1; Chinese World, “Huaren lai mei yao yanxie: zhongzu qishi wuqu” (Chinese coming to America will be blood tested: racial discrimination hasn’t ended), July 29, 1955, 6. 65. Clipping from Chinese World, August 13, 1954, in file 16, box 14, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Library; Chinese World, “Cai zengji jun ciqu heji sili zhiwu” (Mr. Jun-ke Choy resigns from his duties at Wo Kee), April 13, 1955, 6; Daiming Lee, “Ai zongtong juexin weichi meiguo fanrong” (President Eisenhower’s resolution preserves American prosperity), Chinese World, January 7, 1954, 1. 66. See, for example, Zhongyang Ribao photo 793601, December 1, 1966, Republic of China National Cultural Database, available online at http://nrch.cca.gov.tw/ ccahome/search/search_meta.jsp?xml_id=0000793601&dofile=cca220001-hp -cdn0084568–0001-i.jpg (accessed December 15, 2012); Central News Agency photo 5906445, February 20, 1973, ibid., available online at http://nrch.cca.gov. tw/ccahome/search/search_meta.jsp?xml_id=0005906445 (accessed December 15, 2012). 67. W.F. Doon to Charles Leong, April 2, 1953, p. 1, file 30, Charles Leong Papers, Asian American Studies Library; Albert Chow to Leong, April 7, 1953, p. 1, same file; Leong to Ernest Moy, March 19, 1953, p. 1, file 31, Charles Leong Papers; Leong to Dr. James Henry, May 11, 1953, p. 1, same file; Leong to Brayton Wilbur, July 28, 1953, pp. 1–3, file 32, Charles Leong Papers. Leong divorced Albert Chow’s niece in 1952, but Chow seemed to bear no ill will against the younger man, perhaps because Chow himself had been divorced. 68. Charles Leong to Dan Shaw, August 14, 1954, pp. 1–2, file 32, Charles Leong Papers. 69. Francis Carney, The Rise of the Democratic Clubs in California (New York: Henry Holt, 1958), 1–7, 9, 11. 70. Carney, The Rise of the Democratic Clubs in California, 8; Phillip Burton to Paul Hui, February 20, 1954, p. 1, file “1954 Campaign,” carton 1, Phillip Burton Papers, Bancroft Library; “Candidate’s Campaign Statement for Primary Election,” June 1954, same file; “Democratic County Central Committee 21st Assembly District,” c. 1954, file “County Committee (1954 Historical),” carton 7, Phillip Burton Papers. 71. San Francisco Chronicle, “Chinatown Demo Chief under Tax Probe,” July 2, 1955, 1, 7. CHAPTER FIVE

1.

2.

As chapter 4 indicates, other agencies, including the INS, were already intensifying their own probes of Chinese immigration fraud. The INS and Justice Department initially worked closely together in the 1956 probe, although INS documents show that eventually cooperation between the two agencies broke down. Jian Chen, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001),167–170; Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, The China Threat: Memories, Myths, and Realities in the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 80–82.

280 / Notes to Pages 158–162 3.

Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: Harper, 1991), 46; Mae Ngai, “Legacies of Exclusion: Illegal Chinese Immigration during the Cold War Years,” Journal of American Ethnic History 18:1 (1998), 10; Everett Drumright, “Report on the Problem of Fraud at Hong Kong,” December 9, 1955, pp. 1–3a, file 56364/51.6, box 598, Record Group 85, National Archives and Records Administration I, Washington, D.C. 4. Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 79–97, 113–136; Shana Bernstein, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 186–199; Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 174–184; Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 208, 228; Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 231–240; Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 109–114. 5. See, for example, Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 214–216; Xiaojian Zhao, Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940–1965 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 173–176. 6. Gene Marine, “How ‘the Unbeatable’ Was Beaten,” Frontier, February 1957, file “20th Assembly District (1956) Phil Burton Personal File,” carton 1, Phillip Burton Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Calif.; Political Action Committee, Young Democrats, “The Young Democrats and the Burton Victory,” pp. 1–5, file “Miscellaneous 1956–1964,” carton 7, Phillip Burton Papers. 7. Robert J. Pitchell, “The Electoral System and Voting Behavior: The Case of California’s Cross-Filing,” Western Political Quarterly 12:2 (1959), 462; Marine, “How ‘the Unbeatable’ Was Beaten.” 8. John Jacobs, A Rage for Justice: The Passion and Politics of Phillip Burton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 24–25, 47; Marine, “How ‘the Unbeatable’ Was Beaten”; Gilbert Woo, editorial, Chinese-Pacific Weekly, November 11, 1955, 3. 9. Jacobs, A Rage for Justice, 41–42; Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, 186, 203– 209. For instance, the Bartenders’ Union discriminated against Chinese Americans until the late 1950s, when Phil Burton personally intervened to force the organization to admit people of Asian ancestry. 10. Phillip Burton to Paul Hui, February 20, 1954, p. 1, file “1954 Campaign,” carton 1, Phillip Burton Papers; “Candidate’s Campaign Statement for Primary Election,” June 1954, same file; Jacobs, A Rage for Justice, 53. 11. Jacobs, A Rage for Justice, 51, 53; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Ben bao dui chuxuan de lichang” (This paper’s positions on the primary election), May 25, 1956, 5. In the 1956 primary, several politicians, including Sam Yorty and Jack Shelley, claimed to have been the first to speak out against the subpoenas. Gilbert Woo’s paper published such claims when they appeared in campaign ads for these candidates, but Woo himself wrote at the time that Burton had actually been the first. 12. Jacobs, A Rage for Justice, 47–49. 13. Jacobs, A Rage for Justice, 49.

Notes to Pages 162–167 / 281 14. Jacobs, A Rage for Justice, 48; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xingguo dubangai” (Passing on Grant Avenue column), October 28, 1950, 5; San Francisco Chronicle, “Chinatown Maintenance Group Named,” February 10, 1956, 2; Lim Poon Lee, resume, pp. 1–2, c. 1966, file “San Francisco Postmaster Lim P. Lee,” carton 7, Philip Burton Papers. 15. Lim P. Lee, “Under Three Flags,” 20 (unpublished manuscript in possession of the author); “Federal Court Actions in Chinese Passport Matters,” pp. 2–3, March 13, 1956, file 1-C/3.1, box 6, Records of the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs, Lot file 62-D-146, Decimal Files, 1953–1960, Record Group 59, National Archives and Records II, College Park, Md. 16. Lim P. Lee, “Asian American Democratic Conference Honored Chinese Women,” Asian Week, February 25, 1982, file “San Francisco Postmaster Lim P. Lee,” carton 7, Phillip Burton Papers. 17. William J. King, “National Security Aspects of the Admission and Control of Chinese,” March 5, 1956, p. 1, file 56364/51.6; San Francisco Chronicle, “U.S. Warned of Passport Frauds, Possible Infiltration by Red Spies,” March 4, 1956, 12. 18. Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Jingxuan zatan: sheng xia yiyuan houxuanren bodun” (Rambling talk on the campaign: Assembly candidate Burton), Oct. 12, 1956, 15; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xiayiyuan sheli jingxuan” (Congressman Shelley’s campaign), May 4, 1956, 2; San Francisco Chronicle, “Decision Today on Chinese Family Lists,” March 5, 1956, 2. 19. Oliver J. Carter interview by James R. Fuchs, February 26, 1970, pp. 16, 33–35, Truman Library Institute, available at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/carteroj .htm (accessed October 5, 2010); Oliver J. Carter interview by Amelia Fry and Malca Chall, 1971, pp. 179–182, available at http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ kt467nb016/ (accessed October 5, 2010). 20. Tom Benet, “Subpoenas Defied in Alien Hearing,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 2, 1956, 1–6; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Lushi huona qingqiu faguan quxiao suoyou renhe tuanti zhi chuanpiao” (Attorney Faulkner requests that the judge throw out the subpoenas against any organization), March 9, 1956, 2; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Huona zhichu zui zhongyao zhi wenti shi huaren nengfou xiangshou tong deng quanli” (Faulkner points out that the most important question is if Chinese people enjoy equal rights), March 16, 1956, 1. 21. Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Jingxuan zatan,” 15. 22. Jacobs, A Rage for Justice, 51–52; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Jingxuan zatan,” 15. 23. Kimmis Hendrick, “Orientals Share California Politics,” Christian Science Monitor, July 24, 1956, 3; Emory Chow to Richard Nixon, December 31, 1959, file “Chow, Emory C.,” box 149, Richard M. Nixon Pre-Presidential Papers, Vice President, General Correspondence, Richard M. Nixon Library, Yorba Linda, Calif.; Monthly Bulletin for Los Angeles County Republican All-American Nationality Council Members, March 15, 1958, p. 1, file “Nationality Groups Organizations,” carton 132, William F. Knowland Papers, Bancroft Library; Rollins MacFadyen to Richard J. Nixon, March 10, 1956, 3, file “MacFadyen, Mr. Rollins,” box 469, Nixon Pre-Presidential Papers, Vice President, General Correspondence; Chinese Times, “Vote for Bill Knowland for Governor,” October 30, 1958, 4. 24. Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Jingxuan zatan,” 15; Chinese American Democratic Club, “Newsletter,” p. 1, c. 1960, file “PB 1960 Primary Campaign,” carton 17, Phillip Burton Papers. 25. Official Statement of Votes Cast at the General Election in the City and County of San

282 / Notes to Pages 167–172

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

Francisco, State of California, November 6, 1956, San Francisco Public Library. The number of identifiably Chinese-majority precincts climbed from four in 1956 to nine in 1958 and ten in 1960, fourteen in 1962, fifteen in 1964, and sixteen in 1968. Stevenson beat Eisenhower in the majority Chinese districts by 52% to 48%, a remarkable turnaround from 1952, when Eisenhower won 65% of the Chinese American vote. New York Times, “U.S. Inquiry Hurts Chinatown Trade,” March 17, 1956; D.E. Yarborough, “Report of Investigation,” January 27, 1956, p. 8, file 56364/51.6. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of Population, 1960, Subject Report: Nonwhite Population by Race (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1961), 249. Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York, “Zhonghua Gongsuo Jieshao” (An introduction to the CCBA-NY), available at http://www.ccbanyc.org/ chistorypresidents.html (accessed August 24, 2012). D.E. Yarborough, “Report of Investigation,” March 9, 1956, p. 6, file 56364/51.6. Yarborough, “Report of Investigation,” March 9, 1956, p. 6; “Re: Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York City,” April 30, 1956, p. 3, file 56364/ 51.6. “Re: Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York City,” p. 7; Shing Tai Liang to H. Alexander Smith, March 9, 1956, p. 1, file 56364/51.6; Liang to Warren G. Magnuson, March 9, 1956, p. 1, same file; Liang to Herbert Lehman, March 9, 1956, p. 1, same file; William S. White, “Senators Defer Formosa Action,” New York Times, February 2, 1955. Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Kelan zhongyiyuan” (Congressman Klein), March 19, 1956, 1; Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Kaihui huanying mei zhongyiyuan qilan” (Meeting to welcome U.S. Rep. Klein), November 4, 1956, 7; “Re: Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York City,” p. 11. Edward Ranzal, “Chinese Leader Is Indicted Here,” New York Times, May 4, 1956; Y.K. Chu, Meiguo Huaqiao Kaishi (History of the Chinese People in America) (New York: China Times, 1975), 150–151. William Yukon Chang, “Wagner Welcomes Chinese on Democratic Electoral Team,” Chinese-American Times, March 1956, 1; U.S. v. Sing Kee, 250 F.2d 236 (1957); Sing Kee v. U.S., 78 S. Ct. 538 (1958); New York Times, “Chinese Is Sentenced,” March 6, 1957. D.E. Yarbrough, “Report of Investigation,” May 4, 1956, p. 2, file 56364/51.6; Yarbrough, “Report of Investigation,” April 9, 1956, pp. 2, 4, same file; Yarbrough, “Report of Investigation,” May 21, 1956, p. 2, same file; James F. Greene, “George Lee,” April 19, 1956, p. 1, same file; Niuyue huaqiao shehui, 78, 91. Yarbrough, “Report of Investigation,” May 21, 1956, p. 2; Raymond P. Atwood, “Report of Investigation,” May 31, 1956, p. 2, file 56364/51.6; Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Niuyue huayi tuiwu junren hui zhongyao tonggao” (Important announcement from the New York veterans organization), March 17, 1956, 7. Yarbrough, “Report of Investigation,” April 9, 1956, p. 2; Statement of Wong Doo Hing, March 27, 1956, pp. 3–5, file 56364/51.6; San Francisco Chronicle, “Chinatown ‘Mayor’ Faces Big Tax Lien,” August 30, 1956, 34; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Zhou jinchao de chanye bei feng liu” (Albert Chow’s property sealed), August 31, 1956, 2; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Zhou jinchao bingtashang jie chuanpiao” (Albert Chow receives a subpoena on his sickbed), September 21, 1956, 1. “Re: Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York City,” p. 10; Ste-

Notes to Pages 173–178 / 283

39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

phen Fitzgerald, China and the Overseas Chinese: A Study of Peking’s Changing Policy, 1949–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 49–50. Yarbrough, “Report of Investigation,” March 16, 1956, p. 3; Yarbrough, “Report of Investigation,” March 9, 1956, p. 6; “Re: Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York City,” pp. 12–14; Mai Zhijing to editor, Chinese-American Weekly, July 19, 1956, 32. Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Huayi yong ai jingxuan chu kaimu xun” (Report on opening of Chinese Americans for Ike headquarters), October 31, 1956, 7; Tie Han to editor, Chinese-American Weekly, July 5, 1956, 32; Piao Yuan Jin to editor, Chinese-American Weekly, November 22, 1956, 33; D.E. Yarbrough, “Report of Investigation,” May 8, 1956, p. 2; Chinese Journal (New York), “Niuyue huaqiao relie huanying dong xianguang; zhonghua gongsuo yu qiaotuan shengyan zhaodai” (New York overseas Chinese enthusiastically welcome Hollington Tong; CCBA-NY and overseas groups hold grand banquet), June 28, 1956, 1; Chinese Journal, “Zhonghua gongsuo dengji nanmin huzhao shenqing” (CCBA-NY registers refugees’ passport applications), June 30, 1956, 7. Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Niuyue yiminju yuan zuo dao huabu chawen xiaoxi” (News about the New York immigration bureau official’s investigation in Chinatown yesterday), December 11, 1956, 7; China Daily News, “Yiminju yuan rao huabu; liang shengtai hui zao daibu” (Immigration agents harass Chinatown; Shing Tai Liang arrested), December 12, 1956, 5. Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, “Niuyue yiminju yuan zuo dao huabu chawen xiaoxi,” 7; Gilbert Woo, editorial, Chinese-Pacific Weekly, December 21, 1956, 9. The Chinese Journal, which Shing Tai Liang edited, would certainly have painted the arrest in the most flattering way possible. In addition, Gilbert Woo seems to have consulted the Chinese Journal account of the arrest before writing his far more critical account of it. Woo, editorial, December 21, 1956, 9. Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Zhou jinchao bingtashang jie chuanpiao,” 1; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Chuan xun huang renjun yu zhonghua huiguan wuguan” (Investigation of Doon Wong is unconnected to the CCBA), November 23, 1956, 1. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 219–221; John Edward Torok, “‘Chinese Investigations’: Immigration Policy Enforcement in Cold War New York Chinatown, 1946–1965” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2008), 229, 345. In addition, even those slated for deportation created a headache. The PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan generally refused to accept such people. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 219; Gilbert Woo, editorial, Chinese-Pacific Weekly, August 10, 1956, 4; Dorinda Ng email to author, June 14, 2010; Lim P. Lee naturalization certificate, U.S. Naturalization Record Indexes, 1791–1992, indexed in World Archives Project [database online] (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations). Woo, editorial, August 10, 1956, 4. Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Huayi tuijun ti chen yimin yijian” (Chinese American veterans raise Chen immigration opinion), September 7, 1956, 24. Torok, “‘Chinese Investigations,’” 225; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xingguo dubangai” (Passing on Grant Avenue column), January 3, 1958, 21; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xingguo dubangai” (Passing on Grant Avenue column), September 17, 1959, 1; ChinesePacific Weekly, “Weishenme tanpai hou reng shou xingfa kongsu” (Why are people still being charged with crimes after confession), November 22, 1957, 1; Zhao, Remak-

284 / Notes to Pages 178–183

50.

51.

52.

53. 54.

55.

56.

57. 58.

59.

60.

ing Chinese America, 183–184; Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 220–223; Ngai, “Legacies of Exclusion,” 20–21, 24. Mae Ngai cites an interview with Shing Tai Liang as evidence for the CCBA’s importance in the Confession Program’s legitimation. As my discussions of Liang make clear, I am dubious of his claims. Him Mark Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics, ed. by Madeline Y. Hsu (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 31; “Re: Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association,” p. 4. Lai likely based his assessment on Pei Chi Liu’s account of the organization’s origins, but Liu seems to have tried years after the group’s founding to recast its origins to justify its eventual direction. However, some of the NCWC’s local branches paid much greater attention than the national office did to Chinese American welfare issues, as opposed to ROC concerns. See, for example, Wang Renshang to editor, Chinese-Pacific Weekly, April 6, 1956, 15; “Wield the whip” to editor, Chinese-Pacific Weekly, August 10, 1956, 5; Gilbert Woo, editorial, Chinese-Pacific Weekly, November 16, 1956, 11; Dai-ming Lee, “Problems of the Chinese in America,” Chinese World, English section, February 28, 1957, 1; Tie Han to editor, 32; “Distrustful” to editor, Chinese-American Weekly, August 16, 1956, 32. Liu et al., Hu Jingnan Wenji, 489; Dai-ming Lee, “Chinese in U.S. Schedule Nationwide Conference,” Chinese World, English section, February 15, 1957, 1; “A Chinese alien” to editor, Chinese World, March 5, 1957, 5. Liu et al., Hu Jingnan Wenji, 489; Dai-ming Lee, “The Chinese Conference in Washington,” Chinese World, English section, March 7, 1957, 1. Dai-ming Lee, “Responsibilities of Conference Delegates,” Chinese World, English section, March 4, 1957, 1; “National Conference of Chinese Communities in America,” Willard Hotel, March 5–6–7, 1957, pp. 43–44, file 26, carton 2, S.K. Wong Papers, Asian American Studies Library. Chinese World, “Zancheng quanqiaohui butan zhengzhi” (Approval that the all-overseas meeting didn’t discuss politics), March 9, 1957, 6; Chinese World, English section, “Chinese Conference Backs Shelley Bill; Urges Increased Quotas,” March 8, 1957, 1; “National Conference of Chinese Communities in America,” p. 15. Gilbert Woo, editorial, Chinese-Pacific Weekly, November 15, 1957, 5; E. Youde to A.L. Mayall, May 20, 1957, pp. 1–3, file 371/127454, British Foreign Office Files for China 1949–1956 (Archives Direct database); Chinese Times (Vancouver), “Zheng lai xi fan liang zhi wen gao” (Cheng came in order to oppose Liang’s statement), May 18, 1957, 1. Youde to Mayall, pp. 1–3. Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Guanyu fulihuiyi jige wenti 1” (Some questions about the NCWC meeting, part 1), November 22, 1957, 2; Y.K. Chu, “Fuli zonghui de wenti” (Questions about the National Chinese Welfare Association), Chinese World New York Edition, February 12, 1958, 1, box 1958, Chinese World New York collection, Asian American Studies Library. Woo, editorial, November 15, 1957, 5; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Guanyu fulihuiyi jige wenti 2” (Some questions about the NCWC meeting, part 2), November 29, 1957, 2. Woo, editorial, November 15, 1957, 5; Y.K. Chu, “Zhonghua dalou de wenti” (Questions about the China building), Chinese World New York, February 10, 1958, 1, box 1958, Chinese World New York collection; Y.K. Chu, “Jijian shiqing de zonglun” (A preface to several issues), Chinese World New York Edition, February 24, 1958, 1, same box; Y.K. Chu, “Zai lun zhonghua xuanju” (More discussion of the CCBA election), Chinese World New York Edition, February 5, 1958, 1, same box.

Notes to Pages 184–188 / 285 61. Y.K. Chu, “Liang shingtai fahuo dongnu” (Shing-tai Liang loses his temper), Chinese World New York Edition, February 25, 1958, 1, box 1958, Chinese World New York collection. 62. Dai-ming Lee, “Shijie ribao weishenme yao ban niuyue ban, 1” (Why the Chinese World is going to publish a New York edition, part 1), Chinese World, February 28, 1958, 5; Y.K. Chu, “Wo lai wei huaqiao shuo hua” (I’ve come to speak to the overseas Chinese), Chinese World New York Edition, February 1, 1958, 1, box 1958, Chinese World New York collection; Sing Foo Wong to editor, Chinese-American Times (New York), March 1958, 3; “Profit and Loss,” Chinese-American Times, March 1958, 3. 63. Chu, “Zai lun zhonghua xuanju,” 1; Y.K. Chu, “Susong shengbai lun: chen zhonghai dui zhonghua gongsuo” (A discussion of the success or failure of a lawsuit: Woodrow Chan versus the CCBA), Chinese World New York Edition, March 3, 1958, 1, box 1958, Chinese World New York collection; Y.K. Chu, “Chen Zhonghai keyi xiuyi” (Enough with the Woodrow Chan affair), Chinese World New York Edition, April 12, 1958, 1, same box; Chu, “Zhonghua Dalou de wenti,” 1. 64. Chu, “Jijian shiqing de zonglun,” 1; Chu, “Liang shingtai fahuo dongnu,” 1; Y.K. Chu, “Lao qiaoling yao chu zhaopai” (An old overseas Chinese leader wants to eliminate the sign), Chinese World New York Edition, March 15, 1958, 1, box 1958, Chinese World New York collection. 65. Mai Zhijing to editor, 32; Chin-Fu Woo, “‘Dangtuan huodong’ yu huaqiao shehui” (“Party activity” and overseas Chinese society), Chinese-American Weekly, August 25, 1960, 6. 66. United Daily News (Taipei), “Jiujinshan qiaoling zhou jinchao bingshi; zheng yanfen deng zhi yan” (San Francisco overseas leader Albert Chow dies of illness; Cheng Yen-fen and others send condolences), October 19, 1957. 67. US House of Representatives, Committee of the Judiciary Subcommittee, “Hearings before the President’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization,” August 29, 1964, 844; Jacobs, A Rage for Justice, 64–67. Torok, “Chinese Investigations,” 188, claims that Albert Chow died in Hong Kong after fleeing the Justice Department and INS investigation. Torok cites an interview with scholar L. Ling-chi Wang as evidence for this claim. However, none of the newspapers I have consulted in Chinese or in English substantiate this, and Chow’s Social Security death record does not indicate death abroad. Perhaps Wang misremembered a rumor about Chow, whom I believe died in San Francisco. 68. Gayle B. Montgomery and James W. Johnson, One Step from the White House: The Rise and Fall of Senator William F. Knowland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 231–243; Ethan Rarick, California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 98–100. 69. California Campaign Committee, Pat Brown for Governor, “Background Material (for members of the working press only),” October 14, 1958, p. 11, file “Campaign and Publicity Material,” box 2, San Francisco Brown for Governor Campaign Committee Correspondence and Papers, Bancroft Library; Robert F. Agnew to Earl Adams, March 24, 1958, p. 1, folder “Nationality Groups Organization,” carton 132, William F. Knowland Papers; Lim P. Lee to Harold C. Brown and Arthur W. Belcher, November 17, 1958, p. 1, file “1960 Contains 1956 Matter,” box 17, Phillip Burton Papers. 70. Y.C. Hong and David T. Chow to “Friend,” May 21, 1958, p. 1, file “Chinese,” box 132, William F. Knowland Papers; Los Angeles Times, “Chinese Here Celebrate 42nd Independence Day,” October 11, 1953, A13.

286 / Notes to Pages 189–195 71. Gladwin Hill, “Trail of Mistakes Beset Knowland,” New York Times, November 3, 1958, 9; Hale Champion, “Knowland, Brown Argue Dope Issue,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 28, 1958, 1–12; San Francisco Chronicle, “The Chronicle Recommends,” October 30, 1958, 1; San Francisco Chronicle, “The Campaign Was Hysterical,” November 7, 1958, 30. 72. Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Sifa tingzhang houxuanren moshi” (Attorney general candidate Mosk), May 30, 1958, 13; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Jiasheng shenji tingzhang houxuanren” (California comptroller candidate), September 4, 1958, 22; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Engao qiren qishi” (Engel: the man and his deeds), October 16, 1958, 22; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Bulang fangwen huabu” (Brown visits Chinatown), September 25, 1958, 22; Gilbert Woo, “Hu zhuji ren yichuanshui gujia guan” (Jackson K. Hu appointed estate tax appraiser), Chinese-Pacific Weekly, March 5, 1959, 3; Judge Harry Low email to the author, February 15, 2009. 73. Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Bulang fangwen huabu,” 22; Gladwin Hill, “Democrats Form New Coast Group,” New York Times, March 29, 1959, 49. 74. Chinese Times, “Huayi minzhudang xiehui chengli” (Chinese American Democratic Club established), September 9, 1958, 4. 75. Chinese American Democratic Club, “Articles of Incorporation,” November 19, 1958, p. 2, collection of Wayne Hu (copy in possession of the author); S.K. Wong to Jimmy Carter, c. 1979, pp. 1–2, file 3, carton 2, S.K. Wong Papers. 76. CADC, “Articles of Incorporation,” p. 2. 77. Gilbert Woo, editorial, Chinese-Pacific Weekly, November 13, 1958, 6; Lim P. Lee to Harold C. Brown and Arthur W. Belcher, November 17, 1958, p. 1, file “1960 Contains 1956 Matter,” box 17, Phillip Burton Papers; “Bulang fangwen huabu,” 22; CADC ad, November 3, 1958, file “1958 Campaign,” box 16, Phillip Burton Papers; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Huabu jingxuan de zhongzhong” (All kinds of Chinatown campaigning), October 23, 1958, 2. 78. Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Sifa tingzhang houxuanren moshi,” 13; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Andesun qiren qishi” (Anderson: the man and his deeds), October 23, 1958, 12. 79. Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Huabu jingxuan de zhongzhong,” 2; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Bulang fangwen huabu,” 22. 80. Lim P. Lee to Harold C. Brown and Arthur W. Belcher, November 17, 1958, p. 1, file “1960 Contains 1958 Material,” carton 17, Phillip Burton Papers; Montgomery and Johnson, One Step from the White House, 211; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Bulang fangwen huabu,” 22. 81. Fred H. Huie to William Knowland, October 10, 1958, p. 1, file “Correspondence,” carton 103, William F. Knowland Papers; T. Kong Lee to Stewart Hinckley, October 31, 1958, p. 1, same file; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Huabu jingxuan de zhongzhong,” 2; Chinese Times, “Vote for Bill Knowland for Governor,” 4; Chinese Times, “Knowland for Governor,” November 3, 1958, 9; Liu et al., Hu Jingnan Wenji, 545. 82. Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Bulang yu naolun zai huabu da ge pingshou” (Brown and Knowland tied in Chinatown), November 6, 1958; Lim P. Lee to Harold C. Brown and Arthur W. Belcher, November 17, 1958, file “1960 Contains 1956 Material,” carton 17, Phillip Burton Papers; Gilbert Woo, editorial, Chinese-Pacific Weekly, November 13, 1958, 6. The Chinese-Pacific Weekly reported the initial election numbers on November 6, 1958, but the final count showed a Brown victory in Chinatown. 83. Low email to author.

Notes to Pages 198–202 / 287 CHAPTER SIX

1.

Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 30–56, 182–186; Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 308–327; Joshua B. Freeman, WorkingClass New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2001), 179–182. 2. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of Population, 1950, Special Report: Nonwhite Population by Race (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1953), 3B-80; Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of Population, 1960, Subject Report: Nonwhite Population by Race (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1961), 249. 3. Chinese-American Times, “What Gives with the Abacus?” April 1962, 1. 4. Gilbert Woo, “Hu zhuji ren yichuanshui gujia guan” (Jackson K. Hu appointed estate tax appraiser), Chinese-Pacific Weekly, March 5, 1959, 3; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Hu zhuji rongren sheng yichanshui gujia guan” (Jackson K. Hu is honored with an appointment to be a state tax appraiser), March 5, 1959, 1. 5. “Burton Praises Appointment of Lim P. Lee by Governor Brown,” c. 1960, file “California Assembly,” carton 16, Phillip Burton Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Lim P. Lee, “Asian American Democratic Conference Honored Chinese Women,” Asian Week, February 25, 1982, 6, file “San Francisco Postmaster Lim P. Lee,” carton 7, Phillip Burton Papers. 6. Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 159, 164–165; Kimmis Hendrick, “California Issues Emerge,” Christian Science Monitor, May 9, 1958, 7; Yuzun Liu, Dehua Zheng, and Larry Lam, eds., Hu Jingnan Wenji (The collected works of Gilbert Woo) (Hong Kong: Xiangjiang, 1991), 569. 7. Woo, “Hu zhuji ren yichuanshui gujia guan,” 5. 8. Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Lei longxin ying wei huaqiao ‘nanmin’ qing ming” (Earl Sun Louie agrees to plead on behalf of overseas Chinese “refugees”), May 14, 1959, 1; Richard M. Nixon to “Charlie,” May 23, 1959, p. 1, file “Louie, Mr. and Mrs. Earl Sun,” box 462, Richard M. Nixon Pre-Presidential Papers, Vice President, General Correspondence, Richard M. Nixon Library, Yorba Linda, Calif. 9. George Ong to Joseph Wyatt, December 10, 1958, p. 1, file 8, box 3, Joseph L. Wyatt Collection of California Democratic Council Records, Special Collections Library, University of California, Los Angeles; Thomas N. Saunders to Joseph Wyatt, January 29, 1959, p. 1, file 6, box 4, Wyatt collection; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xingguo dubangai” (Passing on Grant Avenue column), March 19, 1959, 2. 10. Dana Adams Schmidt, “China Policy: Seen in Washington,” New York Times, September 14, 1958, E5; Hazel Gaudet Erskine, “The Cold War: Report from the Polls,” Public Opinion Quarterly 25:2 (1961), 312; Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, The China Threat: Memories, Myths, and Realities in the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 137–157; E.W. Kenworthy, “Taiwan in Effect Accepts Two-China Policy,” New York Times, October 26, 1958, E6; Warren I. Cohen, America’s Response to China: A History of Sino-American Relations, 4th ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 187; Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, 1945– 1992: Uncertain Friendships (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994), 42. 11. Tucker, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, 1945–1992, 47; Austin C. Wehrwein, “Eisenhower Called ‘Bayonet Happy,’” New York Times, September 14, 1958, 75; New York Times, “Transcript of the Second Nixon-Kennedy Debate on Nationwide

288 / Notes to Pages 203–206

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

Television,” October 8, 1960, 10; W.H. Lawrence, “Nixon Scores Foe on Quemoy Issue,” New York Times, October 12, 1960, 1; Cabell Phillips, “Issues: Foreign Policy Is Now the Focal Point as Both Candidates Hammer at Quemoy Argument,” New York Times, October 16, 1960, E3; New York Times, “Taiwan Dismayed by Kennedy View,” October 12, 1960, 31. Chinese Journal, “Zongtong jingxuan xianshi zhi pouxi” (An analysis of the presidential election), November 2, 1960, 2; Chin-fu Woo, “Meiji huaren yu meiguo daxuan” (Chinese American citizens and the US general election), Chinese-American Weekly, November 3, 1960, 7; Dai-ming Lee, “Kennedy for President,” Chinese World, English section, November 2, 1960, 1. Lee published his endorsement in the Chinese section the same day; its emphasis was slightly different but not materially so. Chinese-American Times, “We’re Sitting This One Out,” November 1960, 2. Chinese Journal, “Zongtong jingxuan xianshi zhi pouxi,” 2; Woo, “Meiji huaren yu meiguo daxuan,” 7; Chinese Journal, “Yu huan yu minzhudang” (Yu Huan implores Democrats), November 8, 1960, 7; Chinese Journal, “Jiannidi lai benshi jingxuan, yong ni huaren yu qing toupiao” (Kennedy comes to the city to campaign, Chinese Nixon supporters call for votes), November 7, 1960, 7. Chinese Times, Nixon advertisement, October 31, 1960, 4; Nong, “Meiguo kongqian qiangsheng” (America’s unprecedented prosperity), Chinese Times, October 30, 1960, 2. CQ Fact Sheet, “Parties Vie for Vote of ‘Ethnic American,’” November 4, 1960, pp. 1839–1846, file “Nationality Group,” box 9, Presidential Papers, White House Staff Files, Timothy Reardon Jr., Subject Files, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass.; Chicago Defender, “Veep Nixon May Split with Ike,” September 6, 1958, 1; Michel Cieplinski, “Suggestions for Getting Additional Votes and Volunteer Workers from New Citizens and Nationality Groups,” c. 1960, pp. 2–3, file “Nationalities Division,” Drexel Sprecher Papers, Subject file, box 11, John F. Kennedy Library; G. Mennen Williams to Gung-Hsing Wang, September 15, 1960, p. 1, file 7, box 191, Collection #100 (Miscellaneous Manuscripts), Special Collection Library, UCLA; “Meiguo minzhengdang zhi zheng nei yu waijiao zhengci cuoyao” (Synopsis of the US Democratic Party’s domestic and foreign policy platform,” c. 1960, file “Nationalities 8/20/60–10/28/60,” Robert F. Kennedy Pre-Administration Political Files, 1960 Campaign Transition, General Subject, 1959–1960, John F. Kennedy Library; Marla Donato, “Gung-hsing Wang, 90, Civic Leader,” Chicago Tribune, March 30, 1999. The City Record, “Official Canvas of the Votes Cast in New York, Bronx, Kings, Queens, and Richmond,” November 8, 1960, 2; The City Record List of Registered Voters for the Year 1960, October 24, 1960, 24–27; Annual Report of the Board of Elections in the City of New York for the Year 1960 (New York: Commissioners of Elections, 1960), 46. Official Statement of Votes Cast at the General Election in the City and County of San Francisco, State of California, November 8, 1960, San Francisco Public Library; Senator John F. Kennedy for President Press Office, press release, August 6, 1960, p. 1, file 7, box 191, Collection #100; Democratic National Committee Nationalities Division, “Kennedy Asks Reuniting of Chinese Families Stranded in Hong Kong,” October 15, 1960, p. 1, same file; CADC Newsletter, c. 1960, p. 1, file “PB 1960 Primary Campaign,” carton 17, Phillip Burton Papers; Judge Harry Low email to author, February 15, 2009. New York Times, “Taiwan Dismayed by Kennedy View,” October 12, 1960, 31; New York Times, “Kennedy’s Stand Outrages Taiwan,” October 15, 1960, 30; Ellen D. Wu,

Notes to Pages 206–210 / 289

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 114; Lim P. Lee to Harold C. Brown and Arthur W. Belcher, November 17, 1958, p. 1, file “1960 Contains 1956 Matter,” Box 17, Phillip Burton Papers. Francis S. Barry, The Scandal of Reform: Grand Failures of New York’s Political Crusaders and the Death of Nonpartisanship (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 91–92; Walter Zachariasiewicz to Julius C.C. Edelstein, January 31, 1964, p. 1, file 10, box 60237, Julius C.C. Edelstein Series, Subject Files I Sub Series, Robert F. Wagner Papers, LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, LaGuardia Community College, Long Island City, N.Y.; Chinese-American Times, “Sandler, Farbstein Feted by Group; Backed for Reelection,” November 1960, 1; Christian Science Monitor, “‘I Like Ike’ Gets Oriental Twist,” October 19, 1956, 1; Chinese-American Times, “Gets Town Post,” December 1961, 3; Cindy Gim interview with the author, January 9, 2012. Gilbert Woo, editorial, Chinese-Pacific Weekly, October 1, 1959, 3; Alice Myers Winther, “Chinese Wins in Seattle,” Christian Science Monitor, April 7, 1962, 18; ChineseAmerican Times, “Democratic Club Moves toward Political Action,” September 1962, 1; Chinese-American Times, “Time to Register,” October 1962, 2; Gabrielle Morris interview with March Fong Eu, May 18, 1976, pp. 37–38, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library; Chinese-American Times, “Elected Councilman,” July 1962, 1. Ethan Rarick, California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 238–243; Tom Miller, “Tricky Dick,” New Yorker, August 30, 2004. Actually, Tuck’s anonymous Chinese source got the words slightly wrong, and the signs thus read, “Ask about the huge loan.” Regardless, they made the desired impression. Herb Caen, “And How Was Your Weekend?” Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1962, A5; Patricia Yollin, “Hu’s Who of New Year Parade,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 16, 2003; T. Kong Lee to Richard M. Nixon, March 2, 1962, p. 1, file “Lee, T. Kong,” box 444, Richard M. Nixon Pre-Presidential Papers, General Correspondence, Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, Calif.; Lee to Nixon, February 9, 1962, p. 1, same file; Chinese Times, “Yuqing huayi xuanmin xuanju nixun” (Urge Chinese American voters to vote for Nixon), November 1, 1962, 4. Official Statement of Votes Cast at the General Election in the City and County of San Francisco, State of California, November 6, 1962, San Francisco Public Library. Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 82–83. Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 14, 20, 30–62 (emphasis mine); Daryl Joji Maeda, Rethinking the Asian American Movement (New York: Routledge, 2011), 15; William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 1; Peter Kwong, Chinatown, New York: Labor and Politics, 1930–1950 (New York: New Press, 2001), 146; Him Mark Lai, “To Bring Forth a New China, to Build a Better America: The Chinese Marxist Left in America to the 1960s,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives 6 (1992), 54. See, for example, Richard Kim, The Quest for Statehood: Korean Immigrant Nationalism and US Sovereignty, 1905–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 120, 136; Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 38–40; Life History of Mr. Hong, p. 2, minor document 416, box 37, Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif.; Life History of J. Lim, pp. 2–4, major document

290 / Notes to Pages 211–213

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

270a, box 29, Survey of Race Relations; Adelaide Kim, “The Place of the Korean in the Industrial Life of Los Angeles,” minor document 417, box 37, pp. 2–3,Survey of Race Relations; Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885–1924 (New York: Free Press, 1988), 191; New World-Sun Daily (San Francisco), “Chinatown Veers toward Wang,” October 12, 1939, 1; Gilbert Woo, “Hanjian zai benbu huodong” (Collaborators with the Japanese Aggressors Are Active in San Francisco), Chinese Times, October 16, 1939; photo in Judy Yung, Unbound Voices: A Documentary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 445; Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco: A Trans-Pacific Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 246; H.K. Wong, “H.K.’s Column,” Chinese Press, December 19, 1941, 4. Wu, The Color of Success,136; Chinese American Pictorial, masthead, May 17, 1952, 6; Him Mark Lai, “A Voice of Reason: The Life and Times of Gilbert Woo, Chinese American Journalist,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives 6 (1992), 105; Thomas W. Chinn, Bridging the Pacific: San Francisco Chinatown and Its People (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1989), 150–151; Chinese American Pictorial, “JACL Selects ‘Miss San Francisco,’” May 10, 1952, 8; Chinese American Pictorial, photo, May 24, 1952, 4; The Pictorial, “Japanese American Citizens to Hold 12 Biennial National Convention,” June 14, 1952, 4; The Pictorial, “President Truman Sends Message to Nisei Meet,” June 28, 1952, 4; Charles Leong to Harry Honda, March 3, 1953, p. 1, file 31, carton 3, Charles Leong Papers, Asian American Studies Library; Chinese News, “New-Style Ambassadors,” April 10, 1954, 10; Chinese News, “Behind the News,” April 10, 1954, 10; Charlotte Brooks, “Sing Sheng vs. Southwood: Residential Integration in Cold War California,” Pacific Historical Review 73:3 (2004), 485; Gilbert Woo, Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Yuandongren baojie de zhoumo luxing” (Far Eastern journalists’ group trip), October 21, 1955, 22; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, photo, October 1, 1959, 1. Tong stopped publishing the Chinese American Pictorial after the May 17, 1952 edition, but Victor K. Wong seems to have remained the supplement’s editor (his father bought space on the front page of the May 24 edition, issued under the new name The Pictorial). Victor K. Wong later became a beatnik, broadcast journalist, and well-known character actor. Gretchen Heefner, “‘A Symbol of the New Frontier’: Hawaiian Statehood, AntiColonialism, and Winning the Cold War,” Pacific Historical Review (2005), 545–549, 551, 560–563; Time, “The Big Change,” August 10, 1959, 14. Pacific Citizen, “First California assemblyman (Song) of Oriental descent hails from Hawaii,” February 22, 1963, 1; Rafu Shimpo, “Knowland Lauds GOP Unity in Meeting Groups,” December 2, 1955, 1; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Jiasheng yuandong ren de xuanpiao” (The ballots of California’s Orientals), September 21, 1956, 21. Judge Harry Low to author, February 15, 2009; Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, 28–29, 213, 228; Chinese Times, Kashu Realty ad, February 15, 1964, 4; Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity, 25–30; Robert Lee, “The Case of Sammy Lee,” New Leader, September 5, 1955, 16. Lim P. Lee, “Under Three Flags,” c. 1994, p. 4 (unpublished manuscript in the possession of the author); John Jacobs, A Rage for Justice; The Passion and Politics of Phillip Burton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 68; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, photo, November 15, 1957, 1; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Minzhudang qingnian tuan daibiaodahui” (Young Democrats meeting), November 15, 1957, 2. Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 25; Taylor Branch,

Notes to Pages 213–217 / 291

34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 761–763. See, for example, Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008). Xinyang Wang, Surviving the City: The Chinese Immigrant Experience in New York City, 1890–1970 (Lanham, Md.: Rowan and Littlefield, 2001), 68–73; Y.K. Chu, Meiguo Huaqiao Kaishi (History of the Chinese People in America) (New York: China Times, 1975), 129–131. Xinyang Wang, Surviving the City, 68–73; Bureau of the Census, 1950 Census of Population: New York, NY Census Tracts (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1950), 34–140; Bureau of the Census, 1960 Census of Population and Housing: Census Tracts—New York Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1962), 54–181; Wendell E. Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 79, 108–111; Jonathan M. Soffer, Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 109; Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, 204–213, 229. See, for example, Jackie Reems, “Cite Bias at Chinese Spot in Local Area,” New York Amsterdam News, January 28, 1950, 17–29; Bai Hong, “Mantan qishi” (A discussion about discrimination), Chinese Times, December 5, 1944, 5; Harold R. Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds: American Images of China and India (New York: John Day, 1958), 87; Thelma Thurston Gorham, “Negroes and Japanese Evacuees,” The Crisis, November 1945, 330; “Denies Negroes Apartment, Calif. Chinese Pays $500,” Jet 19:8 (December 1960), 17; Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, 192, 225; George Streator, “Union Plan Aiding Laundry Workers,” New York Times, May 1, 1949, 59; Chu, Meiguo Huaqiao Kaishi, 129–131; Chen Fang to editor, ChineseAmerican Weekly, November 27, 1947, 44; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xingguo dubangai” (Passing on Grant Avenue column), November 27, 1958, 1. Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Xingguo dubangai” (Passing on Grant Avenue column), February 5, 1959, 20; Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, 226. Minutes, Commission of the Housing Authority of the City and County of San Francisco, May 2, 1963, pp. 2–3, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, Calif.; San Francisco Sun-Reporter, “Housing Body in Heated Meeting,” June 15, 1963, 10. Nong, “Heiren fan geli yundong yu ping yuan” (The black campaign in opposition to segregation, and Ping Yuen), Chinese Times, June 10, 1963, 2. Liu et al., Hu Jingnan Wenji, 569, 572, 581; hearing transcript, p. 5, 1951, file “San Francisco Citizens Committee for Equal Employment,” box 45, Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People–West Coast Branch, Bancroft Library; Hokubei Mainichi, “Local Chinese Start Help NAACP Fund Drive,” June 27, 1963, 1. Lim P. Lee, “Report to the Board of Directors, Greater Chinatown Community Service Association,” p. 1, June 6, 1963, collection of Dorinda Ng (in possession of the author). Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed, 264. For more about Chinese Americans and the emergence of the “model minority” myth, see Wu, The Color of Success, 181–209. John Jacobs, A Rage for Justice: The Passion and Politics of Phillip Burton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 118–130.

292 / Notes to Pages 218–223 46. Jacobs, A Rage for Justice, 118–130; Gilbert Woo, editorial, Chinese-Pacific Weekly, March 5, 1964, p. 1, trans. by Liang Hsu, file “1966 State Senate and Other Races,” carton 7, Phillip Burton Papers. 47. New York Times, “New Man in the House Promises Silence,” February 23, 1964, 50; Woo editorial, Chinese-Pacific Weekly, March 5, 1964, p. 1; Lim P. Lee to Phillip Burton, June 4, 1964, p. 1, file “S.F. Postmaster Lim P. Lee,” Phillip Burton Papers. 48. Statement of Votes, Special Primary Election, 5th Congressional District, San Francisco, California, February 18, 1964, San Francisco Public Library. 49. Woo, editorial, March 5, 1964, p. 2. 50. “I who dare speak” to editor, Chinese-American Weekly, April 23, 1964, 31; Hu Yongsheng to editor, Chinese-American Weekly, February 27, 1964, 30. 51. Lianhe Bao (Taipei), “Zhong qiao zheng dangxuan niuyue gongsuo zhuxi” (Overseas gather to elect CCBA-NY chairman), February 28, 1964; U.S. Census of Population, 1960, Subject Report: Nonwhite Population by Race, 217, 232, 249; Chinese-American Times, “Wake Up and Fight Back,” April 1960, 2. Fortunately, diners discovered that canned chow mein is disgusting. 52. Anonymous reader to Chinese-American Weekly, May 28, 1964, 30. 53. Frank Hom to editor, Chinese-American Times, October 1963, 2; Chinese-American Times, “Get Out the Vote,” April 1964, 2; Chin-fu Woo to reader, Chinese-American Weekly, May 28, 1964, 30; Peter M. Stanford to editor, Chinese-American Times, October 1963, 2; Chinese-American Times, “D-Club Meets, Will Aid in Registration and Vote,” October 1962, 1. 54. Del Rosso belonged to Manhattan’s Douglas MacArthur Republican Club, which provided a forum for right-wing groups like the Young Americans for Freedom and a source of volunteers for the Goldwater campaign. 55. Henry E. Del Rosso to Dean Burch, November 28, 1964, p. 1, file 19, box 3, Dean Burch Papers, Arizona Historical Foundation, Phoenix, Az.; New York Times, “Goldwater’s Running Mate: William Edward Miller,” July 17, 1964, 11; Warren Weaver Jr., “Keating and Javits Backed in Letters on Decision Not to Support Goldwater,” New York Times, July 27, 1964, 15; Chinese Journal, “Gonghedang zhize minzhudang hui jingchu mai zhongguo cu hua xuanmin xuan gonghedang” (Republican Party accuses the Democrats of selling out China and urges Chinese voters to vote Republican), October 29, 1964, 7. 56 Young China, English section, “N.Y. Chinatown Democratic Club Grand Opening Slated,” October 3, 1964, 7. 57. Zachariasiewicz to Edelstein, p. 1. 58. Zachariasiewicz to Edelstein, p. 1; Robert F. Wagner to George Chintong, c. 1964, p. 1, file 10, box 60237, Julius C.C. Edelstein Series, Subject Files I Sub Series, Robert F. Wagner Papers; Chinese-American Times, “Form Another Demo Club,” June 1964, 1; Glenn Fowler, “Andrew Lee, Insurer, Dies at 70,” New York Times, June 9, 1989, D17; Martin Tolchin, “Chinatown Faces a Youth Problem,” New York Times, July 11, 1965, 43; Chinese Journal, “Minzhudang xuanju huaren bu han cu huaren zhichi zhan sen” (Democratic Party Chinese campaign division letter urges Chinese people to support Johnson), October 30, 1964, 7. The New York Chinese-American Democratic Club’s reform orientation was reflected in the guests its leaders invited to speak in front of its members, including Assemblyman Albert Blumenthal (who supported John Lindsay in 1965) and leaders of the reform Democratic New Chelsea Club. 59. Chinese-American Times, “To Assist Judge,” February 1965, 1; Chinese-American Times, “Chinatown Pitched Well,” November 1965, 1.

Notes to Pages 223–227 / 293 60. Warren Weaver Jr., “This Tuesday’s Winner—and Loser,” New York Times Magazine, October 31, 1965, 46. 61. Dan Gong to editor, Chinese-American Times, December 1965, 2; Chinese-American Times, “Chinatown Pitched Well,” 1; James Typond to editor, Chinese-American Times, November 1965, 2. 62. Karen Tani, “The House That ‘Equality’ Built: The Asian American Movement and the Legacy of Community Action,” in Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirijian, eds., The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964–1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 416. Tani incorrectly maintains that Virginia and Herbert Kee “lacked relationships with the residents” of the area; Herbert Kee was local hero Sing Kee’s son and had grown up in Chinatown. 63. Joshua M. Zeitz, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 181; ChineseAmerican Times, photo, September 1965, 1; Douglas Robinson, “Marchi Says City Neglects Chinese,” New York Times, October 24, 1969, 30; New York State Bar Association, “Norman Lau Kee and Glenn Lau-Kee Honored by New York State Bar Association,” April 28, 2010, available online at http://www.nysba.org/AM/Template .cfm?Section=News_Center&ContentID=53414&template=/CM/ContentDisplay .cfm (accessed June 21, 2013); Tani, “The House That ‘Equality’ Built,” 416–420. 64. Paul Hofmann, “New Wave of Immigrants Floods Chinatown, Bringing Challenge and Change,” New York Times, June 28, 1967, 91; Chinese-American Times, “Chinatown Pitched Well,” 1; Irving Spiegel, “Chinese in Assembly Race Says He Hasn’t Chinaman’s Chance,” New York Times, October 15, 1965, 47; Chinese-American Times, “Hong for Assemblyman,” September 1965, 2. The first successful Chinese American assembly candidate was Jimmy Meng. John Liu became the first successful Chinese American candidate for City Council in 2001, just three years before Meng won his election. 65. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven, 308; Time, “Proposition 14,” September 25, 1964, 23; Raymond E. Wolfinger and Fred I. Greenstein, “The Repeal of Fair Housing in California: An Analysis of Referendum Voting,” American Political Science Review 62:3 (September 1968), 759. 66. Young China, “Qing qiaobao fandui shisihao ti’an” (Ask overseas compatriots to oppose Prop. 14), October 17, 1964, 4; Young China, English section, “Proposition 14 to Be Discussed at Chinese YMCA,” October 3, 1964, 7; Young China, English section, “Chinese Realtors to Vote ‘No’ on Proposition 14,” October 8, 1964, 7. 67. Young China, “Liu bochang li songguang kangkai chenci ze benshi yezhu reng duo cun qishi” (Harry Low and T. Kong Lee fervently present their views about the duty of this city’s businesspeople and how much discrimination still exists), October 16, 1964, 11; Chinese Times, “Qing tou fandui ti’an shisihao!” (Please cast your ballot against Prop. 14!), October 31, 1964, 2; Young China, “Qing tongbao fandui shisihao ti’an” (Urge overseas compatriots to vote against Prop. 14), October 17, 1964, 4. 68. Jack Jones, “City Problems Creep Up on Oriental Communities,” Los Angeles Times, November 7, 1967, A6; Young China, English section, “Orientals to Hear Governor Brown on Prop. 14,” October 7, 1964, 7; Young China, “Zhong ri fei han fandui qishi an” (Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and Koreans oppose discriminatory measure), October 24, 1964, 3; Young China, English section, “United ‘No’ on Proposition No. 14,” November 3, 1964, 7. 69. Young China, “Zhong ri fei han fandui qishi an,” 3; Chinese Times, “Wulun tongyuanhui dui xuanju jueding” (Oakland CACA election endorsements), October 28, 1964, 3;

294 / Notes to Pages 228–233

70.

71.

72.

73.

74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

Totton J. Anderson and Eugene C. Lee, “The 1964 Election in California,” Western Political Quarterly 18:2 (1965), 466, 471. The CACA’s San Francisco leadership remained heavily Republican despite the community’s Democratic shift, and the vast majority of Republican leaders and candidates in California either supported or refused to take a public stand on Prop. 14, tacitly courting the large pro-14 vote across California. CADC Newsletter, c. October 1960, p. 1, file “PB 1960 Primary Campaign,” carton 17, Phillip Burton Papers; Harry Low email to the author, February 15, 2009. Dorinda Ng remembers that someone approached her father, Lim P. Lee, about running for supervisor, but she, her mother, and her siblings did not want him to take that step. He complied with their wishes. John Burton to the author, September 2010; Lim P. Lee to Phillip Burton, p. 1; James Richardson, Willie Brown: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 95; Richard Bergholz, “U.S. Urged to Recognize Red China,” New York Times, September 8, 1963, 10. John Jacobs contends that the Chows resented Phil Burton’s refusal to follow Jack Shelley’s old practice of submitting private bills to the House to enable the naturalization of specific immigrants—a practice that would have benefited the firm Chow and Sing, which long earned commissions from wealthy Chinese who essentially paid the Chows for access to Shelley. Jacobs, A Rage for Justice, 144. Lim P. Lee to Phillip Burton, p. 1; Young China, English section, “Earl Louie Charges Burton with ‘Irresponsible’ Act,” Oct 21, 1964, 7; Dorothy Ray Healey and Maurice Isserman, American Red: A Life in the American Communist Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 185–186; Young China, English section, ad for Earl Sun Louie, November 3, 1964, 7. McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 125–139; Young China, English section, “Mrs. Edna Beard Is Hunter’s Point Chairman for Louie,” October 13, 1964, 7; Young China, English section, “20th Dist. Candidate Earl Louie Attacks Housing Problems,” October 23, 1964, 7; Young China, English section, “Spanish, Japanese Back Earl Louie for Assembly Seat,” October 27, 1964, 7; Young China, English section, “1500 Attend Goldwater Rally in S.F. Chinatown,” October 27, 1964, 6; Young China, ad for John Burton, November 2, 1964, 4; Young China, ad for Earl Sun Louie, November 2, 1964, 12. Doon Wong was a founding member of the CADC, although never a presence in the organization, and he had been Albert Chow’s business partner for years before Chow’s 1957 death. Anderson and Lee, “The 1964 Election in California,” 452–453, 467, 471; McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 125–129. Richardson, Willie Brown, 95–102; Official Statement of Votes Cast at the General Election in the City and County of San Francisco, State of California, November 3, 1964, San Francisco Public Library. Official Statement of Votes Cast at the General Election in the City and County of San Francisco, State of California, November 3, 1964; Lee to Burton, p. 1. Lee to Burton, p. 1. Rarick, California Rising, 332–338; McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 204–205. Totton J. Anderson and Eugene Lee, “The 1966 Election in California,” Western Political Quarterly 20:2 (1967), 536–537, 541, 547–550. Chinese Times, ad for Ronald Reagan, November 1, 1966, 4; Chinese Times, “Leigen dao huabu yanjiang shengkuang kongqian” (Reagan’s speech in Chinatown an unprecedented spectacular event), November 7, 1966, 4.

Notes to Pages 234–240 / 295 81. Richard Bergholz, “Reagan Opposes Homeowner Curb,” Los Angeles Times, October 31, 1966, 3; Lawrence E. Davies, “Reagan Cheered at Realty Convention,” New York Times, October 7, 1966, 22; New York Times, “‘White Backlash’ Becomes a Major Coast Issue,” September 28, 1966, 28; Chinese Times, “Leigen dao huabu yanjiang shengkuang kongqian,” 4; Liu et al., Hu Jingnan Wenji, 594; Official Statement of Votes Cast at the General Election in the City and County of San Francisco, State of California, November 8, 1966, San Francisco Public Library. 82. Jacobs, A Rage for Justice, 144–145; Lim P. Lee, “Under Three Flags,” 2; Doug Chan, Lim P. Lee: Standard-Bearer for Our Times (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 2010), 8–9; Liu et al., Hu Jingnan Wenji, 588. 83. Lim P. Lee, “Under Three Flags,” 4; Lim P. Lee, “Address by Lim P. Lee on Occasion of His Being Sworn in as Acting Postmaster of San Francisco,” January 24, 1966, p. 1, file “San Francisco Postmaster Lim P. Lee,” carton 7, Phillip Burton Papers; San Francisco Sun-Reporter, “A Chinese Postmaster,” n.d., n.p., same file; San Francisco Sun-Reporter, “Our Dedicated Chinese Friends,” same file; Patsy T. Mink to Lawrence O’Brien, January 27, 1966, p. 1, same file. 84. Lim P. Lee, “Under Three Flags,” 11–12; Judith Robinson, You’re in Your Mother’s Arms: The Life and Legacy of Congressman Phil Burton (San Francisco: Mary Judith Robinson, 1994), 72; New York Times, “Chinese-Americans Stage Protest against F.B.I. Here,” November 22, 1969, 24; Liu et al., Hu Jingnan Wenji, 589; “Memorandum to Mr. Gale,” January 21, 1966, pp. 1–2, Lim P. Lee FBI file, in possession of the author; “Lim Poon Lee,” August 18, 1967, pp. 11–32, same file. 85. Jacobs, A Rage for Justice, 174–175; Daryl E. Lembke, “Supervisor to Seek Mayor’s Post in S.F.,” Los Angeles Times, September 13, 1967, C14; Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed, 238; Ken Wong, “Neighborhoods Speak Out on Bussing Students, Loud ‘No!’” East/West, January 31, 1968, 1. 86. David M. Reimers, Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 26, 64–92. The KMT-backed National Chinese Welfare Council appeared at the 1965 Congressional hearings on immigration. 87. Ken Wong, “Chinatown Fights Back,” East/West, September 11, 1967, 1; Anne Marie Ferraris, “EOC Appoints Another Community Organizer,” East/West, November 11, 1967, 1; Ken Wong, “New Year Festivities Marred by Violence in the Streets,” East/ West, February 14, 1968, 1; Wei, The Asian American Movement, 17–18; Murray Schumach, “Neighborhoods: Chinatown Is Troubled by New Influx,” New York Times, June 16, 1970, 49. 88. Wei, The Asian American Movement, 12–15; Maeda, Rethinking the Asian American Movement, 16–17; East/West, “Hwa Ching, Mayor Alioto Pow Wow,” May 22, 1968, 1; Francis X. Clines, “Chinatown Panel Asks Poverty Aid,” New York Times, October 15, 1969, 26. 89. Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity, 43; Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California, 2006), 134–138; Wei, The Asian American Movement, 206–207; Kenneth LaMott, “The Awakening of Chinatown,” Los Angeles Times, January 4, 1970, N6–13. 90. Dorinda Ng email to the author, April 6, 2013; Wayne Hu email to the author, April 13, 2013. 91. Wei, The Asian American Movement, 13; Michael Liu, Kim Geron, and Tracy Lai, The Snake Dance of Asian American Activism: Community, Vision, and Power (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2008), 48, 60–70.

296 / Notes to Pages 240–245 92. East/West, “Shape of Things to Come,” March 27, 1968, 2; Liu, Geron, and Lai, The Snake Dance of Asian American Activism, 29, 48; Clines, “Chinatown Panel Asks Poverty Aid,” 26. 93. Lim P. Lee, “Under Three Flags,” 9; Wayne Hu email to the author, April 13, 2013; Chinese Times, Kennedy ad, June 1, 1968, 4; Chinese-Pacific Weekly, “Jiasheng yuandong ren de xuanpiao,” 21; Lee, “Address by Lim P. Lee on Occasion of His Being Sworn in as Acting Postmaster of San Francisco,” p. 1. 94. The Chinese American Democratic Club (San Francisco: Chinese American Democratic Club, 1983), 2; Harry Low interview; Christopher Heredia, “S.F.’s First Elected Asian American Supervisor Dies,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 20, 1998; Tani, “The House That ‘Equality’ Built,” 422–423. Mayor Joseph Alioto appointed George Chinn to the Board of Supervisors in 1973 to fill a vacancy, but Chinn lost the post during the next election. Lau was also a mayoral appointee, but he successfully defended his seat in the next election. EPILOGUE

1.

2.

3. 4.

See, for example, Amy L. Friedman, Political Participation and Ethnic Minorities: Chinese Overseas in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the United States (New York: Routledge, 2001), 123, 129–131; Janelle S. Wong, Democracy’s Promise: Immigrants and American Civic Institutions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 35–37, 47–49; Thomas P. Kim, The Racial Logic of Politics: Asian Americans and Party Competition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006),116–121; Pei-te Lien, The Making of Asian America through Political Participation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 83; Claire Jean Kim and Taeku Lee, “Interracial Politics: Asian Americans and Other Communities of Color,” PS: Political Science and Politics 34:3 (2001), 631. Pew Research Center, “The Rise of Asian Americans,” April 4, 2013, 153, available at http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2013/04/Asian-Americans-new-full-report -04-2013.pdf (accessed June 7, 2013); Gerry Shih, “Mayor Lee Leads Growing Asian American Clout,” New York Times, January 15, 2011; New York City Department of City Planning, The Newest New Yorkers: Characteristics of the City’s Foreign-Born Population, 2010 (available online at http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/census/nny .shtml), 2. Of course, electoral gains are not the only route to political influence. For instance, Chinese American women garment workers enjoyed some success in New York labor organizing in the 1970s and early 1980s, although economic shifts have undercut such gains. Thomas P. O’Neill and William Novak, Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill (New York: Random House, 1987), 6. Charles Leong, “Inside Mr. Postmaster,” Asian Week (San Francisco), June 6, 1980, file “San Francisco Postmaster Lim P. Lee,” carton 7, Phillip Burton Papers.

WHO’S WHO

Woodrow Chan (陳中海). 1909–1985(?). KMT activist educated in the party’s National Sun Yat-Sen University training school, emigrated from China in 1928. Delegate to the 1948 ROC National Assembly. Two-time chairman of the CCBA-NY (1946–1948, 1950–1952). Convicted of welfare fraud in 1966.

William Yukon Chang (

玉安). b. 1916. Editor and publisher of the English-

language Chinese-American Times from 1955 until 1975.

Yung Fen Chao (趙蓉芬). 1918–2002. Emigrated from China in 1947. Wife of Shing Tai Liang. Studied at Columbia and worked at the ROC’s United Nations office in New York City in the 1950s.

Chen Lifu (陳立夫). 1900–2001. Leading member of the CC Clique faction of the KMT. Emigrated from China in 1950. Purchased the New York China Tribune with his business partners.

Arthur B. Chinn (陳炳春). 1913–1997. Cofounder of the Chinese American Democratic Party organization in Chinatown in 1938; early CADC member.

George Chinn (嚴泮欣). 1920–1995. First secretary of the CADC. In 1973, Mayor Joseph Alioto appointed him to the Board of Supervisors, making him its first Chinese American member. Ran for reelection but lost.

George Chintong (陳樹棠). 1894–1967. Wrote for the Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York in the 1930s and served as English-language secretary of the CCBA-NY between 1932 and 1934. Led the organization’s attacks on the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance. Headed the Tammany Hall–affiliated Chinese American Democratic organization in New York from about 1933 to the early 1960s.

Albert K. Chow (周錦朝). 1904–1957. Served as an immigration interpreter for attorney Stephen White and became active in Democratic Party politics in the mid1920s. Led the Chinatown Democrats from 1928 until his death. First notary public of Chinese ancestry in California. First American-born president of the CCBA (1940)

298 / Who’s Who and first Chinese American alternate delegate to the Democratic National Committee (1944). Friend of President Harry S. Truman.

Florence Chow (蔡鳳有). 1920–2004. Wife of Albert K. Chow. Elected to the 1948 ROC National Assembly as an overseas Chinese representative from the Western United States.

William Jack Chow (周植榮). 1909–1988. Younger brother of Albert K. Chow. Graduate of UC Berkeley and Hastings College of Law. Cofounder of the Chinese American Democratic party organization in Chinatown in 1938. First Chinese American assistant district attorney in San Francisco (1942). Immigration attorney in the firm of Chow and Sing. Founding member of the CADC and active Democrat for many years. Civil service commissioner under Mayor Joseph Alioto and first president of the Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Bay Area.

J.K. Choy (蔡增基). 1892–1981. Former official of the ROC. Third Force advocate and editor of the Chinese World English section in the early 1950s. Founding member of the CADC and founder of the Chinese Cultural Center of San Francisco.

Chu Ting-wing (趙鼎榮). ?–?. KMT journalist who worked at San Francisco’s Young China and the Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York. CCBA-NY chairman, 1944–1946.

Y.K. Chu (朱耀渠). 1906–?. Pen name Zhu Xia (朱夏). Emigrated from China in 1927 to attend Haverford College. Editor of the New York Chinese Journal of Commerce (Shangbao), 1932–1944. Editor and publisher of the New York China Post (大華旬刊), 1944–1960s. Guest columnist for the Chinese World New York Edition, 1958. Author, as Leong Gor Yun, of Chinatown Inside Out (1936) and as Zhu Xia of Huaqiao Yimin Ruji Zhinan (The overseas Chinese guide to immigration and naturalization, 1950) and Meiguo Huaqiao Kaishi (History of the Chinese People in America, 1975).

March Fong Eu (江月桂). b. 1922. Elected to the California State Assembly from Oakland, 1966. Elected California Secretary of State in 1974, the first Asian American woman to hold a state constitutional office. Served until 1994.

Benjamin Gim (余永壽). 1922–2010. Served as a New York State assistant attorney general in the early 1950s. Longtime immigration attorney and first Asian American lawyer to argue a case before the Supreme Court. Active in Democratic Party politics. Co-chair of the Chinese American Committee for Johnson-Humphrey (1964). Founding board member of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Edward Hong (湯鴻業). 1920–1979. Emigrated to the United States in 1923. Immigration attorney and Republican Party activist in New York. Co-chair of the Chinese American Committee for Goldwater-Miller (1964). Ran unsuccessfully for a New York State Assembly seat in 1964 and 1965.

Ngai Ho Hong (湯毅豪). 1914–1996. Immigration attorney in San Francisco Chinatown. CADC founding member and co-chair of the Chinese American KennedyJohnson Committee in San Francisco (1960).

Who’s Who / 299

Jackson K. Hu (胡竹基). 1912–1982. San Francisco businessman and organizer of the 1952 Chinese Americans for Kefauver committee. Chinese American campaign head for Stanley Mosk in 1958. Became the first Chinese American to serve as a state income tax appraiser when appointed in 1959. Founding member of the CADC and longtime Democratic activist. Chaired the Chinese American committee for Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.

Charles Jung (張祖光). 1907–1985. San Francisco attorney, CACA member, and active Republican. First Chinese American to serve on the San Francisco Housing Authority board.

Kan Chieh-hou (甘介侯). 1897–1984. Traveled to the United States in 1920 to attend the University of Wisconsin. Received his Ph.D. from Harvard and served in the ROC government. Top advisor to Li Zongren in 1949 and 1950. Taught at New Jersey State College until 1973.

Benjamin Kimlau (劉國梁). 1893?–1973. New York City mortician. Father of Benjamin Ralph Kimlau, who was killed in World War Two and after whom the American Legion Chinatown post in New York City is named. Co-chair of the Chinese American Committee for Goldwater-Miller (1964).

Gordon Lau (劉貴明). 1941–1998. Community activist appointed to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors by Mayor George Moscone in 1977. Won a full term in the next election, the first Chinese American to do so.

Lau Ying-cho (劉恩初). ?–?. CCBA-NY chairman from 1942–1944. Later joined the Chinese Hongmen Party.

Norman Lau Kee (劉德光). b. 1927. New York immigration attorney and son of Sing Kee Low. Longtime Democratic activist, member of the Chinatown Democratic Club in the 1960s, and co-chair of the Chinese American Committee for JohnsonHumphrey (1964). Appointed to the New York City Human Rights Commission by Mayor John V. Lindsay in 1969. Served as chairman of the Federal Advisory Commission to the INS during the Carter Administration.

Catherine Joe Lee (周坤瑜). b. 1920. Participated in anti-Japanese activism before World War Two. Married Lim P. Lee in 1941. Active Democrat who organized Chinese American women to support Phil Burton during his 1956 Assembly race and subsequently. First Asian American woman to serve on the California Democratic Party State Central Committee. Only female founding member of the CADC.

Dai-ming Lee (李大明). 1904–1961. Chinese Democratic Constitutionalist Party member and journalist who spent much of the prewar period in China. Editor of the CDCP Chinese World from 1945 until 1961. Longtime opponent of the KMT and the CCP. Author of Zhu Gang Mei Zonglingshi Baogaoshu De Piping (A criticism of the American consul general in Hong Kong’s report, 1956) and other books.

James Waye “Shavey” Lee (李振輝). 1902–1955. Flamboyant New York insurance broker, restaurateur, and business partner of James Typond in the Typond-Lee Agency.

300 / Who’s Who Member of the On Leong Merchants Association and the Democratic Party. Known in the 1940s and 1950s as the New York “Mayor of Chinatown.”

Kock Gee Lee (李覺之). ?–1975. KMT activist and journalist who emigrated from China in the late 1920s. Longtime board member of the New York Chinese Journal and two-time chairman of the CCBA-NY (1954–1956 and 1958–1960). Also active in New England’s CCBA and the Ning Yung Association.

Lim P. Lee (李泮林). 1911–2002. San Francisco social worker and juvenile court officer. Longtime activist in Democratic Party politics and former protégé of Albert K. Chow. Founding member of the CADC and influential supporter of Phil Burton. Served as Burton’s district manager from 1964–1966. Appointed first Chinese American postmaster of San Francisco, 1966.

Thomas H. Lee (李鴻輝). 1904–1980. New York immigration attorney and brother of “Shavey” Lee. Leading force in New York’s Chinatown Democrats for many years. First Chinese American to serve as an Assistant US Attorney in New York (1951– 1953).

T. Kong Lee (李松光). 1905–1994. Emigrated from China to Canada in 1917 but later settled in San Francisco. Naturalized in 1953. Businessman, president of the Chinese Times, and longtime Republican Party activist. Served on the Chinese American committees of numerous Republican candidates, including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Member in the early 1960s of the board of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Cofounder of California’s Chinese American Republican Association.

William D. Lee (李松輝). ?–?. Cousin of Thomas and Shavey Lee. Restaurant manager and founder of the first Chinese American Democratic organization in New York’s Chinatown (1932).

Charles Leong (梁普禮). 1911–1984. Journalist and public relations professional who founded the Chinese Press and the Chinese News, edited the English section of the Young China in the 1960s, and later wrote for Asianweek. Longtime Democratic Party activist and protégé of his uncle by marriage, Albert K. Chow.

Shing Tai Liang (梁聲泰). 1916–2001. KMT official who emigrated from China in 1947. Board member of the Chinese Journal, chairman of the Lin Sing Association, and two-time chairman of the CCBA-NY (1952–1954 and 1956–1958). Founder and early leader of the National Chinese Welfare Council.

Paul F. Linn (練天然). ?–?. CCBA-NY chairman, 1936–1938. Pei Chi Liu (劉伯驥). 1908–1983. Kuomintang journalist who emigrated from China in 1940 to work on the Chinese Nationalist Daily of America. Political advisor to Doon Wong and scholar of Chinese history. Author of many books, including the two-part Meiguo huaqiao shi (History of the American Overseas Chinese).

Harry Low (劉百昌). b. 1931. San Francisco attorney active in Democratic Party politics. Appointed a California deputy attorney general in 1954. Early member of the CADC and co-chair of the Chinese American Kennedy-Johnson Committee in San

Who’s Who / 301 Francisco (1960). Appointed to be a judge of the San Francisco Municipal Court (1966), the Superior Court (1974), and the California First District Court of Appeal (1982). Chaired the San Francisco Human Rights Commission from 1989 to 1990. Became the first Asian American to serve as state insurance commissioner when appointed after the resignation of the incumbent.

Sing Kee Low (劉成基). 1896–1967. Also known as Sing Kee and Sing Kee Lau. New York businessman, immigration broker, community leader, and onetime interpreter for the Immigration Service. Won the Distinguished Service Cross while in the US Army during World War One. Member of the On Leong Merchants Association and supporter of the Democratic Party. Convicted of conspiracy to bring Chinese nationals into the United States unlawfully and served two years in prison.

Earl Sun Louie (雷龍信). 1906–1973. San Francisco businessman and longtime Republican Party activist. Served in the California Republican Assembly and on the San Francisco Republican Party County Committee in the 1940s and 1950s. President of the San Francisco CCBA in the 1950s and a San Francisco delegate to the National Conference of Chinese Communities in America (1957). Delegate to the 1959 White House Conference on Refugees. Unsuccessfully ran against John Burton for the California State Assembly (1964).

Louis Fong (雷芳). 1877–?. Former interpreter for the Immigration Service. Second American-born man to serve as CCBA-NY chairman (1934–1936). Enthusiastic participant in anti-Japanese activism.

Kalfred Dip Lum (林䬓). 1899–1979. Political science professor at the University of Hawaii. KMT central administrative committee member who helped mediate between various party factions, including in San Francisco, in the 1930s.

Ernest K. Moy (梅其駒) 1895–1957. KMT member and journalist who worked in China before World War Two. Helped found ARCI. Ardent Republican and associate of China Lobby member Alfred Kohlberg. Committed suicide on Taiwan.

George Ong (鄧華鑾). 1914–1992. Founding president of the CADC. Wilbur Wnee H. Pyn (倪卓屏). 1901–1960. Led the Chinese American Republicans in New York City between the 1930s and 1950s. Chaired various Chinese American committees for Thomas Dewey and served on the national Chinese American committee for Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Joseph S. Quan (關助世). 1905–1993. KMT member who emigrated to the United States in 1935. Served in World War Two and became an American citizen afterwards. San Francisco travel agent, businessman, and active participant in Democratic Party politics. Founding member of the CADC.

Emily Lee Shek (李英輝). 1908–1993. Sister of Shavey and Thomas H. Lee. Served in the Women’s Army Corps and worked for the Office of Strategic Services during World War Two. Set up a WAC recruitment station and served on Draft Board 1 in New York Chinatown during the war.

302 / Who’s Who

Jack Wong Sing (黃松壽). 1921–2005. San Francisco immigration attorney who practiced with William Jack Chow in the firm of Chow and Sing. Active in Democratic Party politics and served on the San Francisco Democratic Party County Committee in the 1950s. Officer in the National Chinese Welfare Council in the 1960s.

Perry Tu (杜不朽). ?–?. KMT member who briefly headed the CCBA-NY during the chairmanship election deadlock of 1940.

James Yip Typond (葉榮進). 1903–1988. New York insurance broker, community leader, and business partner of Shavey Lee in the Typond-Lee Agency. Active in Democratic Party politics in both Manhattan and Brooklyn from the 1930s to the 1970s. Chartered the Chinatown Democratic Club in 1956.

Gung-hsing Wang (王恭行). 1909–1999. ROC diplomat who came to the United States in 1934 and naturalized in 1953. Chicago businessman and onetime publisher of the Sanmin Morning Paper. Democratic National Committee Chinese American division chairman from 1960 to 1963.

Alan Wong (黃作述). b. ?. Community activist in San Francisco and CADC member in the 1960s. Helped create the Chinatown–North Beach Economic Opportunity Council in 1965.

Delbert Wong (黃錦紹). 1920–2006. Los Angeles lawyer, Democrat, and civil rights advocate. First Asian American to serve as deputy legislative counsel to the California State Legislature. Later served as deputy state attorney general. Appointed to the Municipal Court of Los Angeles in 1959, becoming the first Chinese American to serve as a judge outside of Hawaii. Became a Superior Court judge in 1961.

Doon Wong (黃仁俊). 1896–1991. Also known as Wong F. Doon, Yin Doon Wong, and Y.F. Doon. San Francisco importer and business partner of Albert K. Chow. Head of the Bing Kung Tong and leader in the local CCBA and KMT. Elected to the 1948 ROC National Assembly as an overseas Chinese representative from the Western United States. Founded the Chinese Six Companies Anti-Communist League in 1950. Founding member of the CADC but played no role in it. Honorary advisor to the ROC government.

Franklin Wong (黃劍農). 1897–1983. First KMT member to serve as CCBA-NY chairman (1938–40).

S.K. Wong (黃社經). 1901–1986. Emigrated from China before World War One. Board member of the Young China and longtime KMT leader in San Francisco. Founding member of the CADC.

Chin-fu Woo (吳敬敷). 1910–2003. Emigrated from China around 1930 as a student. Worked as an editor at the Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York until forced out in 1942. Founded the independent Chinese-American Weekly magazine the same year and the United Daily News in 1952.

Gilbert Woo (胡景南). 1911–1979. Emigrated from China as a derivative citizen in 1932. Columnist for San Francisco’s Chinese Times until 1944 and for the Chinese

Who’s Who / 303 Nationalist Daily of America between 1944 and 1947. Broadcaster for San Francisco’s Golden Star Radio “Chinese Hour” from 1943 to 1948. Began publishing the ChinesePacific Weekly in 1946. Member of Americans for Democratic Action and the NAACP. Active Democrat and founding member of the CADC.

Peter Fok-leung Woo (伍覺良). 1917–?. Chinese immigrant who naturalized after serving in the military during World War Two. Member of the On Leong Merchants Association. Leader of the Kimlau American Legion Post and the Chinatown Democrats after the war. President of the Chinatown Democratic Club in the early 1960s and board member of the New York Chinese American committee for JohnsonHumphrey. Pleaded guilty to heroin trafficking in 1989.

William T.S. Wu (伍天生). 1899–1959. Emigrated from China in 1912. KMT party affairs worker, leader of New York’s San Min Chu I Youth Corps, and a member of the Eastern US KMT executive board. Elected to the 1948 ROC National Assembly as an overseas Chinese representative from the Eastern United States. Naturalized in 1946. Participated in Republican Party politics in the 1950s. Served on the New York Chinese American committee for Eisenhower-Nixon in 1952.

Frank T.F. Young (楊天孚). ?–?. KMT member and CCBA-NY chairman from 1940 to 1942.

John Young (容兆珍). 1916–1992. San Francisco businessman active in Republican Party politics. Served on the Chinese American committees of numerous candidates in the 1950s and 1960s.

Moon Yuen (袁文慶). 1922–1991. San Francisco engineer and partner in the ChinesePacific Weekly. Active in Democratic Party politics.

INDEX

Acheson, Dean, 97–98, 102, 103 affirmative action, 197, 224 African Americans, 224; and Chinese Americans, 20, 58, 197, 213–17, 230–31, 236; civil rights activism, 68, 158, 217, 233; housing, 212–14; leftists, 128–29; migration, 31, 198; military service, 52; opposition to colonialism, 2; politics and voting, 31, 49, 159, 199, 217–19, 228, 230–31, 237, 241 Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals (ARCI), 115, 134, 152 Aiso, John, 226 Alioto, Joseph, 236, 296n94 All-Chinatown Anti-Japanese Salvation Association (New York), 47 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 74–75 American Federation of Labor, 14 American Labor Party, 36, 46, 135, 256n72 American Legion, 70, 75, 130, 164; Cathay Post (San Francisco), 73–74, 106, 162, 176–77; Kimlau Post (New York), 74, 81, 94, 101, 129, 169, 171, 206 American Women’s Voluntary Services, 56 AMVETS (American Veterans), 162 Anderson, Glenn, 189, 192, 208 anti-Chinese movement, 13–15, 20, 31, 64, 70 Anti-Communist Committee for Free China (New York), 106, 109–10, 136 anti-imperialist movements, 239 Anti-Japanese Society (New York), 46–47 anti-Semitism, 188

Archdiocese of San Francisco, 228 Arizona State Assembly, 207 Asian American movement, 238–42, 245 Asian American Press Club, 211, 226 Asian Americans, 164, 209, 216–17, 225; changing views of, 52, 141; housing, 212–14; journalists, 210; lack of panAsian solidarity, 93–94, 209–10; panAsian political solidarity, 11, 209–13, 217; public image, 3, 158; US immigration policy toward, 124–26, 210, 258n4; voting, 211, 241 Asian Student, The, 152 Asia-Pacific Triangle, 124 Asiatic Barred Zone, 124 Bank of China, 53, 58 Baohuanghui (Chinese Empire Reform Association), 19. See also Chinese Democratic Constitutionalist Party Barber, Bruce, 176–77 Barnett, A. Doak, 90–91, 266n4 Bay Area Advisory Committee on Discrimination, 65 Beame, Abraham, 223–24 Besig, Ernest, 75 Bethlehem Steel, 57 Bing Kung Tong (San Francisco), 98, 114, 175 Bipartisan Chinese American Citizens for Good Government (San Francisco), 208 Birmingham, Alabama, movement, 213, 215–16 Black Panther Party, 239

306 / Index Bridges, Styles, 122 Brilliant, Mark, 216 brokers, Chinese American, 24–25, 33–36, 54, 72, 129, 136, 152, 167; targets of 1956 immigration investigation, 154, 157, 168, 171–72, 175, 194, 199 Brown, Edmund G. “Pat”: California Attorney General, 138–39; California Governor, 11, 197–98, 200–201, 225–28, 232; campaigns, 65, 187–94, 207–9, 219, 230, 233–34 Brown, Willie, Jr., 230–31, 235 Brownsville, Brooklyn, 213 Bullitt, William, 122 Burke, Lloyd, 164 Burma (Myanmar), 122, 147 Burton, Arnold Phillip “Phil”: 1956 campaign, 154, 159–67; in State Assembly, 186–87, 189–92, 199, 212, 215–16; in US Congress, 217–19, 227, 230–32, 234–37, 294n71 Burton, John, 190, 227–32, 235, 236 Burton, Sala, 165 busing, 197, 236 Cable Act, 258n4 Cai Tingkai, 47 California: constitution and initiative process, 141, 153; politics, 27, 142–43, 159, 164–65; public spending, 197–98 California Citizens Committee on Constitutional Rights, 200 California Democratic Council (CDC), 153–54, 159, 163, 165, 201, 229 California Department of Social Welfare Advisory Committee on Optometry, 200 California Gold Rush, 15 California Governor’s Committee of One Hundred on Problems of the Aging, 200 California Oriental Championship (basketball), 210 California Real Estate Association, 225 California Republican Assembly, 165–66, 229–30 California State Assembly, 159, 186–87, 217, 227–31 California State Board of Architectural Examiners, 200 California State Legislature, 142, 197, 200, 211–12

California State Relief Administration, 28, 34 California Veterans Welfare Board, 200 California World Trade Center Authority, 200 Carter, Oliver J., 164–65, 167, 170, 172, 175, 191 Case, Francis, 143 Catholics, 14 C.C. Clique (Kuomintang faction), 114, 127 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 101, 112 Central News Agency (Republic of China), 59 Chan, Man Wah, 134 Chan, Woodrow, 297; as Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York chairman, 78, 94, 99, 116; 1958 lawsuit, 184–85; politics and factionalism, 54–55, 63, 80, 127, 130–32, 134, 264n58, 273n15, 274n25, 275n31 Chang, Carsun (Zhang Junmai), 77, 112, 150–51 Chang, P.H., 130, 274n24 Chang, William Yukon, 111, 173, 203, 220, 225, 270n49, 297 Chao, Yung Fen, 51, 55, 297 Chee Kung Tong (Zhigongtang), 47, 115. See also China Tribune; Chinese Hongmen Party Chen Cheng, 127 Chen Chih-mai, 127 Cheng Tianfang, 79 Cheng Yen-fen, 145, 182 Chen Lifu, 114–15, 127, 261n23, 294 Chen Qingyun, 79–80 Chew Lun Association (New York), 174 Chiang Ching-kuo, 114 Chiang Kai-shek, 139, 148–49, 187, 202, 219; attempts to preserve Kuomintang rule in China, 78; image in United States, 81; meeting with Mao Zedong, 76; and overseas Chinese, 105, 118, 133, 145, 151; and party factions, 62, 80, 104, 114, 126, 130; pledge to retake mainland, 149–50, 182; policy towards Taiwan’s offshore islands, 157–58, 201–2; relationship with Chinese Communist Party, 46–48, 56; relationship with Harry Truman, 53, 102; relatives,

Index / 307 82, 101–2, 114, 118, 127; resignation and retreat to Taiwan, 89, 90–93, 96, 98, 100, 118; resumption of Republic of China presidency, 103–4, 113, 131; and US Kuomintang, 10, 54, 87, 111, 134, 137; World War Two, 35, 59, 63, 72 Chiang Kai-shek, Madame (Soong Meiling), 134; visits to United States, 1, 69–70; 79, 101, 114, 132–33, 275n28 Chicago, Illinois, Chinese American politics, 204–5 Chin, George, 172 Chin, John Yehall, 65, 68, 180, 190, 228 Chin, Minchi Wu, 134 Chin, Stanley, 222 China: political parties, 2, 18; politics of, 10, 18, 35, 119, 126, 133, 202, 219 China, People’s Republic of (PRC), 10, 86, 97–99, 148, 233, 245, 283n45; conflict with Republic of China over Taiwan, 122, 157–58, 201, 219; Korean War, 1, 10, 87, 90, 105–6, 107, 109, 111–12, 117, 121, 131, 144; land reform policies, 90, 107–9, 111, 118, 145, 148; overseas Chinese, policies and treatment of, 4, 107, 118, 121–22, 145–48, 247n4, 272n3; relationship with United States, 100, 106, 201; relationship with USSR, 102, 130; support for racial equality, 2, 123; United Nations, 122, 201 China, Republic of (ROC), 50, 101, 115, 132, 162, 170, 188, 191–93, 283n45; air force, 112–13; consuls and embassies, 41, 48, 60–61, 96, 98, 100–101, 127, 130, 162, 169, 173, 182; corruption, 53, 87, 91, 117; establishment of, 19; Japanese encroachment and invasion, 4, 13, 29, 46–48, 50, 55–56, 63–64; loss of civil war and retreat to Taiwan, 4, 87, 89–90, 98, 100, 147; manipulation of exchange rates, 78, 91; overseas Chinese, policies and treatment of, 54, 121–22, 130, 145–48, 172, 247n4, 272n3; prioritizes New York City, 77–78, 115, 167–68, 244; relationship with Chinese Americans before 1945, 3–4, 5–6, 10, 51–56, 58–64, 68; relationship with Chinese Americans between 1946 and 1950, 78, 80–81, 87, 90, 114–17; relationship with Chinese Americans

after 1950, 121, 126–36, 146, 169, 172, 175–76, 178–85, 191, 194, 203–6, 218–19, 240, 244, 261n24; relationship with United States, 9, 50, 53, 64, 81, 85–86, 89, 99, 131, 205, 237–40; relationship with World War Two allies, 59 China Daily News (New York), 115, 118, 174, 203; persecution of, 107, 109–10; politics, 61, 79, 84, 92, 98–99, 129 China Institute (New York), 130 China Lobby, 89–90, 173–74, 202; members, 92, 108–9, 115, 122, 134, 169 China News Service (Republic of China), 55, 58 China Post (New York), 62, 92, 115, 184 Chinatown (New York City), 20, 58, 72, 129; image, 36; population, 22–23, 238; voting, 21–23, 36, 49–50, 135, 205, 207, 221, 276n32 Chinatown (San Francisco): campaigning in, 1, 143–44, 192–93, 208, 233–34; Chinese New Year celebrations, 186–87, 192, 208; economy, 57, 153–54, 208–9; housing conditions, 32, 67–68; political disputes, 13, 35; population, 22–23, 33, 238; power structure, 17–19, 33–35, 64, 67–68, 74, 239; tourism, 28; voting, 30–31, 49, 85, 119, 166–67, 193–94, 208–9, 218–19, 231–32, 234, 252n34, 281n25, 286n82 Chinatown Democratic Club (New York City), 207, 221–24 Chinatown Democrats (San Francisco). See Chinese American Democrats (San Francisco) Chinatown Improvement Association (San Francisco), 67 Chinatown-North Beach Economic Opportunity Council, 240 Chinatown Planning Committee (San Francisco), 162 Chinatown Planning Council (New York), 224, 240 Chinatown Wallace for President Committee (New York), 84–85 Chinatown Youth Council (San Francisco), 239 China Tribune (New York), 61, 76, 92, 115, 127, 261n23 China Village (New York), 129–32, 274n24

308 / Index China Weekly (San Francisco), 99–100 China White Paper, 87, 98, 266n75 Chinese Advisory Committee of the San Francisco Housing Authority, 68 Chinese Alien Wives of American Citizens Act, 71–73, 93–94 Chinese American Citizens Alliance (CACA): activities, 23, 26, 27, 56, 67, 69, 72–73, 95, 106, 124–26, 137, 141, 252n28; elections, 139, 141–44, 166, 226, 294n69; endorsements, 28, 65, 153, 193, 208, 218, 227, 229, 262n41; origins, 18–20 Chinese American Citizens Alliance Hall incident (1949), 98–99, 100 Chinese American Committee for William F. Knowland, 188 Chinese-American Democratic Club (New York), 222–23 Chinese American Democratic Club of San Francisco (CADC), 33; founding, 189–95; multiethnic and multiracial alliances, 198, 212, 215–19, 232, 235–36, 241; politics and influence, 200–202, 205, 207, 227–28, 242–43 Chinese American Democratic Youth League (Min Qing), 107 Chinese American Democrats (Los Angeles), 226 Chinese American Democrats (New York), 36, 40, 43–45, 199, 206, 222; 1936 Roosevelt for President Committee, 45; 1948 election, 82; 1952 Chinese American Stevenson Committee, 134–35 Chinese American Democrats (San Francisco), 159, 201; 1932 election, 27; 1936 election, 28; 1938 election, 30–31; 1948 election, 85; 1952 election, 133, 137–41; 1956 election, 162–63; 1956 liberal revolt, 137–38, 152–55; 1958 election, 186–88 Chinese American families, 7, 17, 71, 129, 167, 213 Chinese American leftists, 3, 8, 91–92, 98–99, 130, 134, 240; Cold War investigation and persecution, 86, 107, 109–11, 115–16, 177; Depression-era, 23–24, 129; in Progressive Party, 84, 272n62; World War Two era, 56, 60 Chinese American Pictorial (San Francisco), 290n28

Chinese American Republican Assembly (Los Angeles), 211 Chinese American Republican Association (California), 243 Chinese American Republicans (New York), 46, 199, 206, 221–22, 224–25; presidential committees, 132, 135, 203 Chinese American Republicans (San Francisco), 109, 198, 232; 1940 campaign, 66–67; 1948 campaign, 82, 86; 1952 campaign, 133, 140–41, 143; 1956 campaign, 165–66; 1958 campaign, 193–94; 1962 campaign, 204, 208 Chinese American Restaurant Association (New York), 45 Chinese Americans: and African Americans, 20, 58, 197, 213–17, 230–31, 236; ambivalence toward Chinese Communist Party and Kuomintang, 4, 82, 90, 109–12, 117–19, 139, 173, 219, 245; anti-communism of, 106, 109–11, 117–18, 152, 228–29, 233, 237–40; anti-Vietnam War activism, 242; Asian American movement, 224, 238–42; China-born population, 10, 15, 50, 64–65, 72, 194, 199, 220–21, 243; civic organizations, 53–54, 67–68, 225; defense industry, 52, 57, 64; demographics in New York and San Francisco compared, 22–23, 36, 50, 116, 194, 271n60; discrimination against, 4, 57, 119, 141, 153–54, 160, 198; ethnic identity, 5, 56, 195, 197, 203, 212, 219, 240; feelings about Kuomintang regime, 78–79, 86, 98–99, 105, 111, 118–19, 172, 175–76, 185; image and loyalty to United States, 69, 106, 117, 119, 121, 126, 146–48, 210, 236, 244–45; improved civil rights, 4–5, 52, 70, 87, 148, 160, 198; Korean War, 105–10, 117, 119, 124, 126, 131, 141–42, 176, 187, 209–10; laborers, 7; mainstream US political parties, 10, 65–66, 72, 119, 121, 133, 149, 168, 195, 220; military service, 52, 69, 116, 176; native-born population, 7, 10, 13–15, 18, 22, 24–25, 29, 33, 47, 50, 54, 64, 72, 129, 136–38, 140, 157, 180, 194, 209–39, 238; networks, 6, 11, 34, 136, 158–59, 162–63, 167, 169–70, 172, 194, 244;

Index / 309 political and civil rights activism, 51, 61, 68, 71–72, 124–26, 136–44, 151–55, 158–59, 162–63, 165–68, 168, 172, 175, 178–95, 198–242; political culture, 2, 8, 17, 62, 68, 123, 136, 197, 208, 237–40, 244; political diversity, 3, 9, 177, 186, 190–91; political influence, 243–45, 296n2; politics in New York and San Francisco compared, 8, 11, 13–14, 20, 23, 49, 94, 119, 123, 127, 133, 136, 154–55, 168–70, 173, 186, 194–95, 199, 202–6, 243–45; population, 5, 251n23; sex imbalance, 8, 17, 71; traditional organizations and elites, 15, 18, 32, 34, 53, 55, 62–63, 66–68, 71–72, 74, 76, 80, 100, 106, 125, 133, 157, 167–68, 188, 209, 218–20, 238–41; travel to China, 4, 75, 107, 119; unlawful immigration, 7, 22, 70, 106, 154–55, 157–65, 170, 176 Chinese-American Times (New York), 111, 203, 220 Chinese American transnationalism, 152, 158, 162, 172, 178, 186 Chinese-American Voting League (New York), 36, 39, 40 Chinese American Wallace for President organization (San Francisco), 84–85 Chinese-American Weekly (New York), 61, 78, 115, 117–18, 128, 169, 202–3, 219–20 Chinese Chamber of Commerce (San Francisco), 30, 67, 208, 240; founding and early activities, 18, 26; lobbying and political activism, 95, 109, 225–26 Chinese Civil War, 1, 4, 50, 51, 89–93, 100–101; divides Chinese Americans, 10, 77–79, 86, 89–93, 98, 107, 133 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 48, 77, 86, 91, 99, 118, 122, 148, 257n85; alliance with Kuomintang, 48, 56, 114, 257n77; Chinese American attitudes toward, 53, 60, 91–92, 98, 100, 236, 266n5; Chinese Civil War, 1, 10, 51, 87, 89–91, 97–98, 100–101, 117, 145; conflict with Kuomintang, 46, 78–79, 82, 104 Chinese Community Club (New York), 136, 171 Chinese Confession Program, 176–78, 220, 283n49

Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of Los Angeles, 226 Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York (CCBA-NY), 15, 16–17, 108, 125, 194–95, 224, 239; Chinese Community Center building, 130–32, 183, 199; elections for officers, 40, 63, 184, 261n24; Korean War, 106; leadership, 55, 60, 62, 72, 91–92, 94, 99, 106, 116, 127–28, 134, 179–80, 183–85, 198, 219–20, 223, 255n62; 1933 laundry ordinance, 41–43; 1956 immigration investigation, 157, 159, 162–63, 168–75, 194–95; priorities, 71, 78, 116, 128–32; World War Two, 45–50, 56, 64 Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of San Francisco (CCBA), 23, 25, 29, 48, 56, 68, 106, 108–9, 125, 179–80, 182, 240–41; as community representative, 35, 71, 95; Kuomintang and, 55, 62, 68, 98, 100; leadership, 18–19, 32, 55, 62, 64–65, 91, 137, 152, 208, 250n7; 1956 immigration investigation, 159, 162–63, 194; origin and functions, 16–17 Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Associations (CCBAs), 16, 146, 158–59 Chinese Democratic Alliance, 150 Chinese Democratic Constitutionalist Party, 19, 76–77, 112–14, 134, 148–52, 166. See also Baohuanghui Chinese Digest (San Francisco), 34 Chinese Empire Reform Association. See Baohuanghui Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 52, 59; impact on Chinese American communities, 7; passage, 15 Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act of 1943, 4, 10, 52, 69–70, 135, 148, 169, 217 Chinese Fighting League for Freedom and Democracy, 112 Chinese for Affirmative Action, 239 Chinese Freemasons. See Chee Kung Tong Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York, 107, 115, 129; and Chinese Civil War, 92, 98–99; founding and early activism, 42–43, 45–48, 257n85; supports Progressive Party, 84; World War Two, 60

310 / Index Chinese Hongmen Party, 61–62, 78, 92, 106, 150, 223, 261n23 Chinese Improvement Club (San Francisco), 26 Chinese Journal (New York), 180, 182; editorial board, 51, 80, 115, 184, 273n16; 1956 immigration crisis, 168–69, 172–74; politics of, 62, 79, 86, 111, 203, 267n15 Chinese Journal of Commerce (New York). See Shangbao Chinese Junior Chamber of Commerce (San Francisco), 67 Chinese Nationalist Daily of America (San Francisco), 111, 114 Chinese Nationalist Daily of New York, 39–40, 42, 60–61, 79, 81, 94, 96, 111, 134, 203 Chinese News (San Francisco, 1940–1942), 259n9 Chinese News (San Francisco, 1953–1954), 110–11, 152, 210 Chinese Overseas Travel Service (New York), 170 Chinese Overseas United National Salvation Association, 145 Chinese-Pacific Weekly (San Francisco), 78, 85, 141, 148, 161, 192, 210, 286n82 Chinese Press (San Francisco), 65, 110, 259n9 Chinese Salvation Times (New York), 61 Chinese Six Companies. See Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of San Francisco Chinese Six Companies Anti-Communist League (San Francisco), 106, 113–14, 146, 152, 175 Chinese Times (San Francisco), 65–67, 95, 141, 189, 215–16, 227 Chinese Unemployed Alliance (San Francisco), 23 Chinese Vanguard (New York), 46, 49, 61, 129, 256n68 Chinese War Relief Association, 29 Chinese War Veterans Association, 95 Chinese Workers Mutual Aid Association (San Francisco), 107 Chinese World (New York edition), 184–85, 202 Chinese World (San Francisco edition), 76,

108–9, 111, 113–14, 118, 134, 149, 151, 179, 182, 271n54 Chinese Youth Club (New York), 60, 98–99, 107, 260n19 Chinese Youth Council (New York), 239 Chinn, Arthur B., 30, 228, 234, 297 Chinn, George, 242, 296n94, 297 Chintong, George, 39–46, 49, 81, 134–35, 169, 204, 206, 222 Chin Wing Chuen Benevolent Association (New York), 172 Chou, Put, 223 Chow, Albert K., 57, 74, 92–93, 95–97, 114, 171, 175, 191, 201, 228, 267n15, 279n67, 285n67, 294n71, 297–98; community leader, 28–31, 32–35, 64, 72, 73, 106, 216; early life and politics, 24–27; political activism, 65–66, 82, 85–86, 100–104, 126–27, 132, 136–39, 152, 154, 161–63, 186 Chow, Emory, 166, 188 Chow, Florence, 80, 82, 171, 228, 298 Chow, Hon, 25 Chow, Lit Sing, 164 Chow, Mon, 161 Chow, William Jack, 25, 161–63, 191, 298; career, 65, 189, 294n71; political activism and lobbying, 28, 30, 97, 102, 104, 138–40, 152–54, 186, 230 Choy, Howard, 232 Choy, Jun-ke “J.K.,” 298; Democratic Party activism, 166, 191, 200, 226, 235, 237; Third Force activism, 77, 81, 149–52 Christopher, George, 208 Chu, Ting-wing, 71–72, 94, 298 Chu, Y.K., 170, 298; columnist for Chinese World New York Edition, 128, 184–85; editor of China Post, 62, 75–76, 92; editor of Shangbao, 40–43, 45, 48–49, 61, 256n70 Chung, Sue Fawn, 18 Chung Sai Yat Po (San Francisco), 79, 99–100, 107, 110 Cieplinski, Michel, 204 Citizens Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion, 70, 73 civic unity groups, 69–70, 73 Civil Rights Act of 1957, 193 civil rights laws, 70, 128, 186–87, 195, 197, 200, 233, 236

Index / 311 Civil Rights Movement in United States, 128–29, 158, 197–98; international opinion, 2; multiracial coalitions and organizations, 68–69, 198, 212, 216–19, 230, 232, 241; of 1960s, 11, 213–17; World War Two, 50, 52 Clark, Tom, 74, 85, 110 Cohen, Warren I., 81 Cohn, Roy, 170–71 Cold War: liberalism, 123, 195; origins, 81; political climate in United States, 3, 205; red-baiting, 83, 117, 141, 160, 187–88, 194, 205–7, 219, 236 colonialism, 2, 148 Committee for a Free Asia, 111, 113, 152–53 Committee for the Revival of the Kuomintang, 150 Communist Party of the United States, 3, 6, 23, 86, 257n85 Community Service Society (New York), 136 conservatism, 8, 188–89, 198, 225–27, 230–34, 236 containment, 81, 123, 237 Council of Oriental Organizations (Los Angeles), 226 Cranston, Alan, 138, 189, 192, 208 Crusade for a Free Democratic China (San Francisco), 151 Cultural Revolution (China), 239 defense industry, 52, 57, 64 Del Rosso, Henry, 221, 292n54 Delury, John Francis, 228 Democratic National Committee, 45; Nationalities Committee, 204 Democratic National Conventions: 1942, 66; 1948, 82, 164; 1952, 132; 1956, 165; 1968, 237 Democratic Party, 222, 236–37; African Americans and, 31, 143; California, 11, 34, 152–53, 164, 189, 233; California State Central Committee, 200; Chinese Americans and, 32, 49, 192; labor unions, 20, 188, 193; New York, 45, 49, 222; 1948 split, 82; San Francisco, 14, 20, 30–31, 50, 66, 162; San Francisco County Central Committee, 139–40, 154, 161; white supremacists in, 20

Democratic Socialist Party of China, 77, 112 derivative citizens, 22, 70, 124 DeSapio, Carmine, 135 Dewey, Thomas, 46, 69, 81, 85–86, 92, 133–34, 221 Dickstein, Samuel, 72–73 Disabled American Veterans (DAV), 75 “Dixiecrats.” See States’ Rights Party Do Fook, Louie, 21, 251n19 Doon, Y.F. See Wong, Doon Douglas, Helen Gahagan, 72–74, 126, 262n41 Douglas MacArthur Republican Club (New York), 292n54 Dow, Harry Hom, 171 Downey, Sheridan, 30, 74, 97, 125–26, 139 Downtown Tammany Club, 21 Drumright, Everett, 124, 157–58, 164 Drumright report, 157–58 Dulles, John Foster, 158, 201–2 East/West (San Francisco), 240 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 152, 169, 193, 200–203; Asia policy, 121–22, 147, 149, 158; campaigns, 133, 135, 140, 141–44, 166, 174, 281n25 elections: 1928, 20; 1932, 14, 26–27, 43; 1933, 43; 1934, 27, 37; 1936, 28–29; 1938, 30–32; 1942, 65; 1943, 65; 1946, 74; 1948, 81–86, 89; 1952, 126, 134–44; 1954, 152–53; 1956, 159–63, 165–67, 281n25; 1958, 187–95, 200, 205, 208, 219, 286n82; 1960, 202–6, 208, 219; 1962, 207–9; 1964, 207, 217–23, 225–32; 1965, 223–24; 1966, 233–34; 1967, 236; 1968, 236–37; 1969, 224, 242; 1977, 242 Emmet, Christopher T., 115 End Poverty in California (EPIC), 14 Eng, James, 206 Eng, Raymond, 200, 207 Engle, Clair, 189, 192 Eng Suey Sun Association (New York), 64 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 228 Espiritu, Yen Le, 209, 239 ethnic voters and politics, 188, 204, 232 Eu, March Fong. See Fong, March

312 / Index European Recovery Program. See Marshall Plan Fair Employment Practices Committee (California), 187, 200 fair housing laws, 197–98 Fang Chen-wu, 29 Faulkner, Harold, 163 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 60, 236; 1956 immigration probe, 175–76; surveillance in Chinese American communities, 99–100, 105–8, 113, 115, 136, 146 Ferguson, Homer, 143 Filipino Americans, 73, 209, 211, 226 First United Front, 84, 114, 257n77 Fitzgerald, Stephen, 54, 172 Fixa, John, 234 Flushing, Queens, 225 Foley, Thomas F., 21 Foley, Thomas F. Association, 21 Fon, Lee Chuck, 222 Fong, B.S., 29 Fong, Hiram, 206–7, 235, 236 Fong, Lester W., 206, 223 Fong, March, 207, 232 Forest Hills, Queens, 213 Fort Mason (San Francisco), 57 Free China Political Organizations (FCPO), 150 French Indochina, 122, 146–47 Fujian Association (New York), 174 Fung, Kenneth, 65, 67, 73 gambling, 16, 21, 44–45 garment industry, 238, 296n2 Garver, John W., 93 Gee Tuck Sam Tuck Association (New York), 134 Gee Tuck Sam Tuck Association (San Francisco), 164 G.I. Bill, 52 Gim, Benjamin, 169, 177, 206, 298 Golden Star Chinese Hour (San Francisco), 105, 210 Goldwater, Barry, 221, 225, 229–30, 292n54 Goodlet, Carlton, 235 Great Britain, 59, 145 Great Depression, 13, 23, 24

Greater Chinatown Community Service Association, 216 Greater Chinatown Improvement Committee, 226 Great Migration, 31 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. See Cultural Revolution Guangdong Province, 7, 84, 97, 257n77 Gum Moon women’s residence hall (San Francisco), 34 Hainan Island, 101, 102–3, 104 Hall, Bruce, 108 Hang, Ting-Yung, 55 Harrah’s Casino (Reno, Nevada), 210–11 Havenner, Franck, 27–29, 30, 72–74, 85, 126, 141 Hawaii, statehood of, 211 Hickenlooper, Bourke, 143 Hill, Gladwin, 188–89 Hip Sing Tong (New York), 15, 21, 36, 40, 99, 255n62 Hip Sing Tong (San Francisco), 98 Ho, David, 240 Ho, Grace, 223 Ho Chi Minh, 122, 146, 239 Hok Shan Society, 37 Holland, 59 Hom, Frank, 220 Hong, Edward, 75, 94, 169, 206, 221, 225, 298 Hong, Josephine Moy, 69 Hong, Louis F.S., 55, 62–63, 69 Hong, Ngai Ho, 65, 141, 163, 166, 205, 298 Hong, You-chung “Y.C.,” 95 Hong Kong, 101, 108, 224, 283n45 Hoover, Herbert, 20, 22, 27 Hoover, J. Edgar, 235–36 Hoover, Lou Henry, 20 Hop Wo Association, 65 House Un-American Activities Committee. See US House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities Housing Act of 1937, 32 Housing Authority of the City and County of San Francisco. See San Francisco Housing Authority Hoy, William, 68 Hsu, Kai-yu “K.Y.,” 114

Index / 313 Hu, Gladys, 190, 234, 237 Hu, Jackson K., 154, 190, 234, 299; appointed state inheritance tax appraiser, 199–200, 208; 1952 campaign, 137–38, 141; 1956 campaign, 166; 1958 campaign, 189; 1964 campaign, 226; 1968 campaign, 237 Hughes, Howard, 207 Hu Hanmin, 13, 47, 79 Hui, Paul, 161, 166 Huie, Park, 161 Humphrey, Hubert H., 237 Hunters Point (San Francisco), 228, 230, 233 Hu Shih, 102 Hu Yongsheng, 219–20 Immigration Act of 1952. See McCarranWalter Act Immigration Act of 1965, 224, 243 India, 123 Indonesia, 122, 147 Intercollegiate Chinese for Social Action, 239 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 154, 171 isolationism, 29, 32 Italian Federation of California, 229 I Wor Kuen (New York), 239 Jacobs, John, 161, 294n71 Japan: attack on Pearl Harbor, 56, 122–23; defeat in World War Two, 76; encroachment in China, 13, 46–48; invasion of China, 4, 29, 48, 50, 55, 63; relationship with United States, 32; wartime propaganda, 52 Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), 73–74, 93–94, 96–97, 125–26, 210, 212 Japanese American Republican Assembly (Los Angeles), 211 Japanese Americans, 84, 159, 209–12, 226, 230, 235; discrimination against, 28, 64, 210; immigration and naturalization, 73; military service, 52; wartime incarceration, 56, 69, 105, 122, 158, 164 Javits, Jacob, 221 Jew, Edward, 261n30 Jews, 14, 49, 214 Jinmen. See Quemoy

Joe Yuey (Zhou Rui), 99 John Birch Society, 230 Johnson, Hiram, 20, 27 Johnson, Lyndon B., 205, 222, 224, 225, 230–31 Judd, Walter, 74, 93–94, 96, 123, 181, 267n15 Judd bill, 74, 93–97, 123, 267n15 Jung, Charles, 65, 67, 299 Kahn, Florence Prag, 28–29 Kaiser Shipyard, 57 Kan Chieh-hou, 102–3, 149, 299 Kang Youwei, 19 Kashu Realty Company (Los Angeles), 212 Keating, Kenneth, 221 Kee, Herbert, 224, 293n62 Kee, Virginia, 224, 293n62 Kefauver, Estes, 137–38, 152, 154, 189 Kennedy, John F., 202–6, 208, 216, 219, 238 Kennedy, Robert F., 222–23, 237 Kenny, Robert, 65 Kenworthy, E.W., 202 Kimlau, Benjamin, 206, 221, 299 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 213 Klein, Arthur G., 170 Knight, Goodwin, 153, 187–89, 192–93 Knowland, William F., 108–9, 125–26, 143–44, 165; 1958 election, 187–94, 205–6, 208, 219; support for ROC, 103, 122, 139, 153, 169, 237 Kohlberg, Alfred, 115, 122 Kong, Mo-arm, 78 Koo, V.K. Wellington, 101–3, 162, 258n1 Korean Americans, 73, 209–12, 226 Koreans, 123 Korean War, 4, 90, 105–9, 117, 124, 131, 141, 144, 146, 148–49, 176, 202, 209–10; PRC involvement, 1, 10, 87, 90, 107–10, 117, 121, 148; US Kuomintang and, 11 Kuang Yaopu, 79 Kung, David L.K., 127 Kung, H.H., 102, 112, 114, 127–28, 132 Kung Yu Club (San Francisco), 23 Kuomintang (United States): activities and organization, 6, 54, 55, 62, 71, 82, 133, 139; collaboration with US officials, 117, 146, 148, 158–59, 160; factions,

314 / Index Kuomintang (United States) (continued) 10–11, 47, 54–55, 61–62, 79–82, 86–87, 89, 91–92, 94–98, 100–104, 106–7, 114–16, 123, 126–28, 130–36, 175, 202–3, 219–20, 240, 259n9; influence, 9, 99, 106, 114, 117, 219–20; leadership, 4, 53, 109, 178–85, 238; membership, 54, 115, 204; New York City, 12, 44, 68–69, 78, 81, 182, 198, 203; San Francisco, 26, 30, 35, 55, 68, 81, 115, 127, 132, 218, 221; suppression of press, 76, 79, 106–7, 109–10, 185; Third Force and, 112–14; unity, 11, 104, 106, 111, 117, 127, 133; violence, 98–99, 100, 113–14 Kuomintang government. See China, Republic of Kuomintang of China, 77; affiliated exiles in America, 90, 112, 114–15, 127, 140, 165–66, 167–68; alliance with Chinese Communist Party, 48, 56, 114, 257n77; factions, 35, 46–47, 62, 79, 114, 126–28, 182; origins, 19; party reform, 118; relationship with Chinese Communist Party, 46, 76 Kuo Wah Café (San Francisco), 192 Kwok, Anne, 139 Kwok, Fanny, 139 Kwok, George, 228 Kwong, Peter, 48, 257n85 labor unions, 13, 20, 159, 187, 193, 218, 236, 280n9 LaGuardia, Fiorello, 8, 14–15, 36–37, 43–47, 49, 68, 221 Lai, Him Mark, 23, 60, 86, 128, 178 land reform: in People’s Republic of China, 90, 107–9, 111, 118, 145, 148; in Republic of China, 126 Latinos, 197, 230, 241 Lau, Gordon, 242, 243, 296n94, 299 Lau, Sing Kee. See Low, Sing Kee Lau Kee, Norman, 206, 222, 224, 298 laundries, Chinese American, 41–43, 46–47, 57–58, 129, 167, 220 Lau Ying-cho, 62, 223, 299 Lee, Catherine Joe, 165, 189, 200, 235, 237, 299 Lee, Chingwah, 32 Lee, Dai-ming, 299; editor of Chinese World, 111, 113–14, 147–52, 179, 182–83,

202–3; Third Force activism before 1950, 76–77, 79, 81 Lee, Erika, 25 Lee, George, 171, 173 Lee, Henry H., 222–23 Lee, James Waye “Shavey,” 37–39, 68, 81, 106, 135, 167, 206, 254n56, 255n57, 299–300 Lee, Jenny, 223 Lee, Kem, 190, 234, 237 Lee, Kenneth F., 109 Lee, Kock Gee, 300; Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York chairmanship, 168; Kuomintang activities, 55, 63, 80, 116, 127, 172–73, 273n16; president of Chinese Journal, 60, 63, 101, 183–85, 203 Lee, Lawrence, 85 Lee, Lim P., 57, 141, 176–77, 206, 218, 242, 294n70, 300; early life and politics, 30, 32, 33–35, 66; liberal activism, 161–64, 189–90, 194, 200, 216, 227–28, 231–32, 238; military service, 73, 68; San Francisco postmaster, 234–36, 241 Lee, Robert, 212 Lee, Ruth, 38 Lee, Sammy, 212 Lee, Samuel D., 32, 57 Lee, Shee Gong, 180, 182–83 Lee, Theodore, 32 Lee, Thomas H., 135–36, 169, 180, 206, 255n57, 300 Lee, T. Kong, 243, 300; 1952 campaign, 141; 1958 campaign, 188, 193; 1960 campaign, 204, 208; 1966 campaign, 233; political views, 67, 215, 218, 227 Lee, Tom, 21, 36 Lee, William D., 36–37, 38, 43, 45, 254n55, 255n57, 300 Lee Du, 45 Lee Family Association, 37, 63 leftist groups, 15, 23–24, 46, 50, 84, 86, 107, 252n27. See also Chinese American Democratic Youth League; Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York; Chinese Unemployed Alliance; Chinese Workers Mutual Aid Association; Chinese Youth Club; Communist Party of the United States Lehman, Herbert, 8, 37, 169 Lem, Henry, 95

Index / 315 Leong, Alfred, 180 Leong, Charles, 52, 65–66, 68, 152–53, 186, 210–11, 245, 259n9, 279n67, 300 Leong, Francis, 85 Leong Bik Ha, 75, 85 Leong Thick Hing, 85 Lew, F.J., 188 Lew, Kam Wah, 161 Leways (San Francisco), 241 Lewis, Marvin, 163, 164, 180 Li, Jack Non, 101 Li, K.C., 59 Liang, Shing Tai, 51, 53, 55, 116, 199, 219, 258n1, 273n16, 300; Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New York chairmanship, 127–28, 131–32, 168–69, 172–75, 194–95, 283n42, 284n49; National Chinese Welfare Council founder, 178–85 Liang Qichao, 19 liberalism, 5, 195, 197, 216–17, 232, 236 Liberal Party (New York), 135, 223 Life (New York), 115 Li Huang, 112 Li Jiemin, 42 Lindsay, John V., 223–25 Ling Young Chai (Lin Yangqi), murder of, 59–61 Linn, Paul F., 300 Lin Sing Association (New York), 17, 47, 63, 185 Little Geneva talks, 147–48 Liu, Arthur, 171 Liu, John, 243–44, 293n64 Liu, Pei Chi, 55, 98–99, 146, 230, 275n31, 284n50, 300 Liu Chieh, 104 Li Zongren: Acting President of ROC, 89, 90–91, 112–13, 116–17, 127, 130–31, 134; Third Force activities, 149–50; Vice President of Republic of China, 80–81, 86 Long Island, 57, 213 Loo, James H., 55, 59, 180 Loo, Koon Lai, 78, 92, 94, 99, 106–7, 116 Los Angeles, California, Chinese American politics, 188 Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, 70 Louie, Bessie Chin, 67 Louie, Earl Sun, 301; Chinese Six Com-

panies Anti-Communist League, 106; early political involvement, 67; 1964 campaign for State Assembly, 227–32; Republican Party activism, 140–41, 144, 166, 180, 188, 208, 218; White House Conference on Refugees, 200 Louis Fong (Lei Feng), 47–48, 257n80, 301 Louis Wing, 43, 45 Low, Harry, 189, 195, 205, 216, 226–27, 232, 300–301 Low, Sing Kee, 39, 68, 81, 167–68, 170–73, 175, 206, 301 Lower East Side Rutgers Democratic Club (New York), 220 loyalty oaths, 160 Luce, Claire Boothe, 115 Luce, Henry, 115 Luke, Wing, 207, 232 Lum, Kalfred Dip, 55, 62, 68, 301 MacFadyen, Rollins, 165–66 Magnuson, Warren, 169 Mahon, Dennis J., 41 Maillard, William, 85 Malaya, 122, 145–47 Maloney, Tommy, 142, 159–60, 162, 164–66, 218 Manchuria, 46, 97 Mao Zedong, 76, 97, 122, 150, 219, 239–40 Marcantonio, Vito, 8 Marchi, John, 224 Mare Island Shipyard, 57 Marshall, George, 77 Marshall Plan, 81 Masaoka, Mike, 73–74, 93–94, 96–97, 125–26 Matsu (Republic of China), 122, 150, 157–58, 193, 202–5 McAdoo, William Gibbs, 30 McAteer, Gene, 228 McCarran-Walter Act, 121, 123–26, 136–37, 192, 204, 210, 217, 273n6 McCarthy, Joseph, 117, 122, 170–71 McCarthyism, 118, 160, 188 McGirr, Lisa, 232 McKeown, Adam, 23 Meizhou Ribao. See Chinese Journal Meng, Chih, 130 Meng, Jimmy, 293n64 merchants, Chinese American, 17, 32, 70

316 / Index Merriam, Frank, 27 Miller, George P., 72–74 Miller, William P., 221 Mink, Patsy Takemoto, 212, 235 Min Qing. See Chinese American Democratic Youth League Miss Chinatown pageant (San Francisco), 218 “model minorities,” 197, 217 Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, 158 Moore Dry Dock, 57 Moran, Edward S., Jr., 37 Moscone, George, 234 Moses, Robert, 129–31 Mosk, Stanley, 138, 189–90, 192, 194, 235 Mott Street (New York), 130–31 Moy, Ernest K., 115, 134, 152, 169, 172, 301 Moy, Gilbert, 173 Moy, James, 274n25 Murphy, George, 225, 230 National Assembly of the Republic of China, 80, 82, 94, 133–34, 150, 152 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 164, 212, 215–16 National Chinese Welfare Council (NCWC), 178–83, 185–86, 190, 194, 284n50 National Conference of Chinese Communities in America, 178–81 National Oriental Championship (basketball), 210 National Recovery Administration (NRA), 43, 45 National Sun Yat-sen University, 54, 55 Native Sons of the Golden State. See Chinese American Citizens Alliance Native Sons of the Golden West, 18, 64 naturalization, 70, 135, 258n4 New China Daily Press (Honolulu), 76, 151 New Deal, 43, 49, 138–39, 164; impact on African Americans, 31, 253n44; impact on Chinese Americans, 10, 14–15, 31–32, 45, 48–49, 50 New Left, 228 New Life Movement, 69, 134 newspapers, Chinese American, 142, 205, 233, 240; Chinese-language, 9, 75, 82, 108, 117, 129, 191, 203; English-

language, 109–10, 117, 149; independent press, 53, 61, 78–79, 106–7, 111, 149, 184; Kuomintang press, 6, 61, 79, 115, 118, 148, 168, 174, 190 New York, New York: Chinese American economic activities, 57–58, 64, 118, 167, 220, 238; Chinese American leadership, 72, 130, 168, 170–75, 194, 199, 239, 244; Chinese American politics, 10, 12, 14, 21–22, 36–37, 39, 42–45, 46, 50, 62, 67–68, 81, 114–16, 123, 135, 170–71, 198–99, 202–3, 220–25, 238–42, 245; Chinese American population, 5–6, 116, 127, 167, 220, 243, 251n23; civil rights movement, 128–29, 213–14; deindustrialization, 116, 198; demographics, 209, 213; importance to Chinese Americans, 5; politics and political culture, 8, 13–14, 43, 46, 49–50, 114, 129, 205, 223–24, 244, 265n69; Republic of China priority, 6, 53, 77–78, 119, 167–68, 244; World War Two, 57 New York Chinese School, 183 New York City government: Board of Aldermen, 41–42; Board of Elections, 135; City Council, 244; Draft Board 1, 68, 170; Human Rights Commission, 224; licensing boards, 36 New York Overseas Chinese Association to Raise Military Funds for Resisting Japan and National Salvation, 48 New York State Assembly, 225 New York State Housing Division, 129, 131 New York Times, 188, 202 Ng, Dorinda, 294n70 Ngai, Mae, 176 Ng Bak Tueng, 75 Ngo Dinh Diem, 122, 158 Nineteenth Amendment, 17 Ning Yung Association (New York), 16–17, 47, 63 Nipp, Frank, 139, 276n39 Nisei. See Japanese Americans Nixon, Donald, 207 Nixon, Richard M.: 1950 campaign, 262n41; 1952 campaign, 140; 1956 campaign, 166; 1960 campaign, 202–6; 1962 campaign, 207–9, 219, 234; 1968 election, 237; relationship with Chinese Americans, 200; in US Senate, 125–26

Index / 317 Nob Hill (San Francisco), 159, 214 North Korea, 105 Oakland (California) Army Supply Base, 57 Oakland (California) City Council, 200, 207 O’Brien, John P., 37, 43 O’Brien, Lawrence, 235 Olson, Culbert L., 30, 65, 69, 164 O’Neill, Thomas P. “Tip,” 244 Ong, George, 200, 201, 205, 301 Ong, Wing F., 207 On Leong Merchants Association (New York), 15, 39–40, 45–48, 99, 101, 130–31, 136, 170, 222, 254n56, 255n62; rivalry with Hip Sing Tong, 36; Tammany Hall and, 21, 36–37, 44, 68, 72, 81, 169 Orange County, California, 230 “Oriental” identity, 196, 209–13, 217, 226, 241 Oriental Journalists Association. See Asian American Press Club overseas Chinese, 108, 206, 247n4; attitude toward People’s Republic of China and Republic of China, 145–46; in Southeast Asia, 147, 158 Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission (Republic of China), 63, 79, 145, 151, 182 Owyang, Edwin, 27, 189 Oxnard (California) City Council, 207 Pacific Citizen, 210, 212 Pai Chung-hsi (Bai Chongxi), 102 Pan, Stephen C.Y., 128, 146, 169 paper son system, 7, 22, 70, 107, 116, 135, 167–68, 170, 176–78, 194 Parker, William, 232 Parkhurst, Charles, 21 patronage, 31–32, 65, 68, 135, 195, 198, 225, 227, 234, 261n29 Patterson, Ellis, 65 Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, 56, 210 Pearl River Delta (Guangdong Province), 7, 91, 107 People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 86, 89, 90, 98, 101, 105 Perkins, Troy, 112 Philippines, 122, 123, 147 Ping Yuen housing project (San Francisco),

214, 236; planning and construction, 32, 84, 129; voters, 208–9, 218–19, 231 Political Consultative Conference (China), 76, 78 political machines, 13, 31; Brooklyn, 37; Philadelphia, 41. See also Tammany Hall Political Science Clique (Kuomintang faction), 127 Popular Front, 49 Powell, Adam Clayton, 2 Progressive Era, 153 Progressive Party (1948), 82–85, 272n62 Proposition 14 (1952), 141–44, 160 Proposition 14 (1964), 198, 225–27, 230–31, 233–35, 236, 241, 293n69 Proposition 18 (1958), 187, 193 public housing, 32, 129–32. See also Ping Yuen housing project Puerto Ricans, 198, 224 Pyn, Margaret, 251n20 Pyn, Wilbur Wnee H., 22, 46, 69, 81, 134, 168, 221, 251n20, 301 Qing dynasty, 16, 19 Quan, Joseph S. “Joe,” 163, 166, 180, 189–90, 200, 232, 234, 301 Quemoy (Republic of China), 122, 150, 157–58, 193, 201, 202–5 rationing, wartime, 56, 69 Readers Digest, 96 Reagan, Ronald, 198, 233–34 “Red Blackmail,” 108–10, 111, 118, 270n43 Red Guard Party (San Francisco), 239, 241 refugee parole program (1961), 216, 238 Regan, Bruce, 208 remittances, 53, 54, 91, 108–10, 145, 151 Republican National Convention of 1952, 132 Republican Party, 23, 81, 103; African Americans and, 31; California, 20, 139, 200, 229–30, 233; internationalist wing, 74; isolationist wing, 77; New York, 36, 45, 221; San Francisco County Central Committee, 139 restaurants, Chinese American, 41, 57–58, 220 Richards, Richard, 163 Right to Work initiative. See Proposition 18 riots, 52, 69, 233 Rockefeller, Nelson A., 221, 229–30

318 / Index Roosevelt, Eleanor, 32 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 59, 67, 70, 81; China policy, 29, 31–32, 92, 221–22; 1932 campaign, 26–27; presidency, 8, 138–39; relationship with Chinese Americans, 32 Rossi, Angelo, 30, 32, 65, 67 Rumford, William Byron, 225 Rumford Fair Housing Act (California), 225, 233–34 Rutheiser, Paul, 130–31 sailors: Chinese employed on foreign ships, 59–60, 63; unlawful Chinese immigrants, 6, 8, 22 Salinger, Pierre, 225, 230–31 Samish, Arthur, 137 Sam Yup Association (San Francisco), 65 San Francisco, California: African Americans, 143; Chinese American economic activities, 57, 238; Chinese American politics, 10, 66–67, 123, 140–44, 157, 198, 230–32, 237–42, 245; Chinese American population, 6, 251n23; general strike in 1934, 14; importance to Chinese Americans, 5, 78; multiracial coalitions, 198, 212, 215–19, 232, 235–36, 241; politics and political culture, 8, 13–14, 28, 30–31, 50, 230–32, 241–42 San Francisco Board of Supervisors, 70, 141, 242, 243 San Francisco Chronicle, 64, 74, 115, 182, 188 San Francisco Council for Civic Unity, 73, 228 San Francisco Fair Employment Practices Commission, 141 San Francisco Housing Authority, 68, 214–15 San Francisco Housing Commission, 215 San Francisco Junior Chamber of Commerce, 67 San Francisco Police Department, 114 San Francisco State College strike (1969), 241 San Francisco Sun Reporter, 235 San Min Chu I Youth Corps (Three People’s Principles Youth Corps), 55, 60, 63–64, 78, 80, 127, 130, 260n19, 273n15, 275n31

San Min Morning Paper (Chicago), 204 schools, Chinese-language, 118, 183 Schrecker, Ellen, 257n85 Seabury, Samuel, 43 Seabury Commission (New York), 43 Seattle (Washington) City Council, 206 Second Red Scare, 4, 9, 86–87, 89, 122, 126, 129, 160, 178, 194 Second United Front, 48, 56 Seeto Metong, 45, 47, 72, 81, 131, 145 segregation, residential, 23, 28, 213–14, 225–27, 237 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944. See G.I. Bill Shangbao (New York), 41, 42–43, 61, 63, 115, 256n70 Shanghai, China, 56 Shanghai Bazaar (San Francisco), 67 Shek, Emily Lee, 68, 69, 262n34, 301 Shelley, John F. “Jack,” 30, 31, 141, 163–64, 180, 208, 217, 280n11, 294n71 Sinclair, Upton, 14 Sing, Jack Wong, 139–40, 141, 152, 162, 180, 186, 276n40, 302 Singapore, 145–47 Sing Kee. See Low, Sing Kee Skinner, G. William, 148 Smith, Alfred E., 21, 26 Smith, H. Alexander, 103, 169 Smoot-Hawley tariff (1930), 20 Snyder, Peter, 73 socialism, 13, 14 social welfare programs, 198, 224 Song, Alfred, 211–12, 226 SooHoo, William, 207, 232 Soong, T.V., 59, 79, 114, 127–28 Soong May-ling (Song Meiling). See Chiang Kai-shek, Madame Soo Yuen Association (New York), 63 Southeast Asia, 122, 158 South Korea, 105, 141 States’ Rights Party, 82 Stevenson, Adlai, 1, 134–39, 140, 143–44, 166, 281n25 Stichman, Herbert, 129–31 Stim, Menahim, 170–71 St. Mary’s Chinese School, 65 student protests, 233 students, Chinese, 6, 70, 147–48 suburbs and suburbanization, 198, 225 Suey Sing Association (San Francisco), 99

Index / 319 Sun Fo, 80 Sun Yat-sen, 19, 54, 84, 118 Taam, Rev. Tso Tin “T.T.,” 65 Tammany Hall (Manhattan Democratic Party organization): Chinese Americans and, 14, 21–22, 36–37, 39, 42–45, 50, 64, 68, 72, 129, 130–31, 134–36, 168, 170, 180, 204; demise, 198, 199, 206, 222–23; loss of influence, 8, 47; New York politics, 20–21, 35, 37, 49, 244 Tang Enbo, 270n49 Tea Forum (San Francisco), 149 Tea That Burns, 108 Thailand, 122, 147 Third Force movement, 10, 76–78, 84, 112–14, 148–52, 191 Third World political movement, 241 Three People’s Principles, 54 Thurmond, Strom, 82 Time (New York), 115, 225 Toisan (Taishan), Guangdong, 17, 34, 107 Tong, Hollington, 174, 179, 181 Tong, Thomas, 210, 290n28 Tongmenghui, 19. See also Kuomintang of China tongs, 16, 44, 250n18. See also Bing Kung Tong; Hip Sing Tong; On Leong Merchants Association (New York) Toy, Harry H., 134 Treaty of Versailles (1919), 20 Truman, Bess, 82 Truman, Harry S., 73, 125, 202, 221–22; Albert Chow and, 24, 66, 92–93, 96, 126, 136–38, 191; containment of communism, 122; Korean War, 105–6; Li Zongren and, 100–104; 1948 election, 81–87; relationship with Chiang regime, 53, 87, 90, 98–100, 121, 130, 143 Truman Doctrine, 81 Tsoi, Henry, 99 Tu, Perry, 62, 302 Tuck, Richard “Dick,” 207–8, 289n22 Tucker, Nancy Bernkopf, 97 Tung-Sai Restaurant (“Shavey Lee’s,” New York), 37–39 tusheng. See Chinese Americans: nativeborn population Typond, James Yip, 37–39, 81, 167–68, 206–7, 221, 224, 302 Typond-Lee Agency, 37

Umbach, Greg, 130 Unemployed Councils, 23, 46 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 118, 123, 130; relationship with United States, 81, 87; support for racial equality, 2, 123 United Democrats (San Francisco), 154 United Journal (New York), 111, 169, 202 United Nations, 51, 53, 77, 106; People’s Republic of China, 122, 160; Republic of China, 6, 78 United States: Cold War racial policies, 123, 128, 158; enters World War Two, 56, 210; relationship with People’s Republic of China, 100, 110, 122, 145, 158, 201–2, 218, 228; relationship with Republic of China before 1941, 29; relationship with Republic of China between 1941 and 1950, 50, 53, 64, 81, 86, 89, 93, 99, 101–4, 130–31; relationship with Republic of China during Korean War, 9, 107, 113, 117, 136, 141, 143; relationship with Republic of China after 1953, 121–22, 149–50, 158–59, 182, 201–2, 205, 237–40; relationship with USSR, 81, 91; war preparedness, 57 Unruh, Jesse, 228 Urban League, 212 US Civil Service Commission, 235–36 US Congress Joint Subcommittee Hearings on Immigration, 125 US Department of Justice: investigation of Chinese American leftists, 109, 117, 146; 1956 investigation of Chinese immigration, 6–7, 121, 154–55, 157–59, 162–78, 189–94, 198–99, 203, 211, 228, 279n1 US Department of State, 74, 77, 90, 104, 112–13, 132, 149; consuls and embassies, 74, 124, 151, 157 US Department of the Treasury, 108–10, 160 US Employment Service, 57 US House of Representatives Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, 72 US House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), 160, 257n85 US House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee, 137

320 / Index US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS): Chinese American employees, 24–25, 47, 252n28; Chinese American leftists, 99–100, 107; investigations of Chinese immigrants, 6–7, 11, 113, 136, 146, 157–59, 169–76, 279n1; mistreatment of Chinese Americans, 10, 74–75, 85, 107, 119, 125, 158 US Joint Chiefs of Staff, 98, 103 US Navy, 105 US Postal Inspection Committee, 235–36 US Senate Judiciary Committee, 96–97 US Supreme Court, 45, 110, 113, 171 Valentine, Lewis, 44 Verreos, Nick, 218–19, 231 veterans, Chinese American, 101, 117, 124, 135, 176–77; political activism, 10, 53–54, 71, 73–75, 94, 125–26, 129–32, 137 Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), 75, 162 Viet Minh, 122, 146–47 Vietnam, Republic of, 122, 147, 158 Vietnam War, 11, 197, 228, 233, 237–38, 239, 241–42 Vincent, John Carter, 77, 264n53 Wagner, Robert F., Jr., 170–71, 173, 222 Walker, Jimmy, 43 Wallace, Henry A., 82–83, 85, 265n69, 272n62 Walter, Francis, 216 Wang, C.T., 20 Wang, Gung-hsing, 204–5, 302 Wang, L. Ling-chi, 239, 285n67 Wang, Lucy, 222–23 Wang, Wensan (Huang Wenshan), 55 Wang, Xinyang, 118 Wang Jingwei, 13, 47, 79, 259n11 War Brides Act (1945), 52, 71 War on Poverty, 224 Warren, Earl, 65, 85, 139, 144, 266n71 Watts Riot (Los Angeles), 233 W.E.B. DuBois Club (San Francisco), 228 Wen Fu, 99 Western Addition (San Francisco), 230 White, Edward, 26 White, Stephen M., 25–26 White and White (San Francisco), 26 White flight, 198 White House Conference on Aging, 200

White House Conference on Refugees, 200 Williams, Paul W., 167, 170–72, 175 Wilson, Woodrow, 20 Wishnoff, Dave, 130 Wo Kee Company, 151 women, Chinese American: community organizations, 29; employment, 57, 165; immigration, 74–75, 129, 167, 213, 238; political activism, 165, 200, 241; war brides, 10, 52; wartime activities, 56 Women’s Army Corps, 68, 69 women’s rights, 232 Wong, Alan, 215, 302 Wong, Clifford, 37 Wong, Delbert, 199, 302 Wong, Dolores, 226 Wong, Doon, 73–74, 95–97, 175–76, 218, 230, 302; Bing Kung Tong leader, 98, 114; Chinese Six Companies Anti-Communist League, 106, 152; Democratic Party involvement, 83, 191; Kuomintang leader, 80, 86, 127, 146, 275n31 Wong, Franklin, 62, 302 Wong, Henry Kwok “H.K.,” 65, 189 Wong, Larry Jack, 215, 232 Wong, Mason, 239 Wong, Philip, 161 Wong, S.K., 106, 166, 180, 189–91, 228, 237, 302 Wong, Thomas C., 177 Wong, Victor K., 210, 290n28 Wong, Way, 28, 30 Wong, Worley K., 199–200 Wong Kim Ark v. United States (1898), 17 Wong Loy, 75, 85 Wong Sing, Jack. See Sing, Jack Wong Woo, Chin-fu, 302; Chinese-American Weekly editor, 79, 128, 132–33, 168–69, 185, 202–3, 220–21; founds United Journal, 111; Kuomintang journalist, 61 Woo, George, 239 Woo, Gilbert, 13, 34, 35, 85, 113, 125–26, 140, 302–3; Chinese-Pacific Weekly editor, 78, 99, 137–38, 141, 146, 148, 160–61, 164, 175–77, 179, 183, 192, 201, 219, 233, 235–36; Chinese Times columnist, 59–60, 66; liberal activism, 32, 144, 166, 189, 200, 214–16, 226; promotion of pan-Asian unity, 210–12, 241 Woo, Norbert, 99

Index / 321 Woo, Peter Fok-Leung, 82, 169, 171–72, 206, 222–23, 303 Workingmen’s Party of California, 15 Works Progress Administration, 28, 32, 35, 45 World War Two, 139, 176; impact on Chinese Americans, 4, 10, 50; internal migration in United States, 8, 52; military draft in United States, 56, 58–59, 60, 63, 68; US entry, 56; wartime fundraising, 56, 69 Wu, Ellen D., 205–6 Wu, Elsie, 133 Wu, K.C., 40–42, 47 Wu, Thomas H., 139–40, 141, 208 Wu, William T.S., 55, 63, 80, 133–34, 264n58, 303 Wu Doshim, John, 171 Wu Tiecheng, 127, 273n16 Wu Xiuquan, 106 Wu Yangcheng, 21 Xinhai Revolution (1911), 19, 98 Yeung Wo Association (San Francisco), 26, 30, 32, 33, 64

Ying On Association (San Francisco), 99 Yorty, Samuel, 163, 232, 280n11 Young, Frank T.F., 62, 261n23, 303 Young, John, 109, 140, 188, 208, 303 Young Americans for Freedom, 292n54 Young China (San Francisco), 71, 111, 113–14, 166, 190, 210, 271n54 Young China Party (China), 112 Young Democrats, 160, 163, 165, 212, 228 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 57, 162 Yu, James Tsuen-chi, 104 Yu, Renqiu, 42, 48, 92, 257n85 Yu, Yun Shan, 61, 92 Yuen, Moon, 143–44, 303 Yu Huan, 134, 203 Yung, Judy, 24, 29 Yu-pin, Archbishop Paul, 128, 181 Zhao, Xiaojian, 71 Zhigongtang. See Chee Kung Tong Zhongshan, Guangdong, 107 Zhou Enlai, 147 Zhu Xia. See Chu, Y.K. Zia, Helen, 209