The Anthropology of Contemporary Issues

Taiwan Immigrants in Contemporary New York

Hsiang-Shui Chen

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501721373
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

By focusing on the social and cultural life of post-1965 Taiwan immigrants in Queens, New York, this book shifts Chinese American studies from ethnic enclaves to the diverse multiethnic neighborhoods of Flushing and Elmhurst. As Hsiang-shui Chen documents, the political dynamics of these settlements are entirely different from the traditional closed Chinese communities; the immigrants in Queens think of themselves as living in "worldtown, " not in a second Chinatown. Drawing on interviews with members of a hundred households, Chen brings out telling aspects of demography, immigration experience, family life, and gender roles, and then turns to vivid, humanistic portraits of three families. Chen also describes the organizational life of the Chinese in Queens with a lively account of the power struggles and social interactions that occur within religious, sports, social service, and business groups and with the outside world.

[I]

Chinese Immigration and Scholars’ Models

[1]

Patterns of Chinese Settlement in the United States

Most Americans have the impression that the Chinese in the United States live in Chinatowns, isolated from the broader community. Indeed, this stereotype was fairly accurate during the first hundred years of Chinese immigration, between 1850 and 1950, when most Chinese immigrants were single men who lived in Chinatowns under a hierarchical social structure. With Queens as its area of focus, this book aims to introduce a new type of Chinese community.

A brief survey of Chinese immigration and Chinese settlements in the United States and the interpretations scholars have developed about them will, I hope, give context to my observations of the Queens Chinese and my conclusions about this new pattern of settlement.

Many works dealing with Chinese in the United States show that the Chinese immigrated to the United States in three major waves. The first wave, before 1882, came mainly from Kwangtung Province in Southeast China, primarily because of unrest caused by the Taiping Rebellion in China and because labor was needed for mining and railroad construction in the United States (G. Barth 1964; Coolidge 1968; Kung 1962; Lee 1960; Lyman 1974; Sung 1967). At first these Chinese laborers were welcomed, even praised, and were considered almost indispensable by white Americans, especially the entrepreneurs involved in the economic development of California, where many Chinese also became agricultural workers (Barth 1964; Coolidge 1968; Liu 1976). Chinese workers were nonetheless exploited by their employers, who paid them the lowest wages possible. These mostly male “bachelor society” Chinese sent most of their earnings back to their home country instead of spending them in the United States.

The anti-Chinese movements that soon followed were due to economic factors but played on cultural differences. The economic depression in California in 1870 had created 50,000 to 100,000 jobless people and the drought in the winter of 1876 caused a heavy loss of wheat, fruit, and cattle farms. Thousands of Chinese and other farm laborers drifted into San Francisco to swell the ranks of these already unemployed. People who had invested in stocks had lost their savings and their jobs and were looking for a scapegoat. The Chinese, with their long black queues and loose black suits, were one of the most visible minorities (Chen 1980). White workers attacked them precisely because they accepted the wages forced on them.

Cultural distinctions reinforced the conflict. The whites justified violence with accusations: “Chinese do not wear our kind of clothes, . . . and when they die, their bones are taken back to their native country.” “Chinese are heathens and do not bring their wives and families.” “Chinese gamble, and smoke opium. They eat rice but not bread.” “Chinese do not want to be assimilated in our culture” (Liu 1976:491).

Physical violence directed against the Chinese had occurred even earlier in the mining areas. Before 1870, when campaigns became coordinated, there were spontaneous outbreaks of anti-Chinese violence, such as the Tuolumne riot in 1849. Politicians joined the anti-Chinese movement, even those who had earlier appreciated the Chinese contribution. The Democratic party passed its first official anti-Chinese resolution at its convention in Benicia in 1852. In 1876 they staged a special anti-Chinese rally that attracted a crowd of 25,000 people (J. Chen 1980:136). In 1879 the Henry Grimm play The Chinese Must Go was first performed in San Francisco. Finally, on May 6, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed into law the first of a series of Chinese exclusion acts (Fessler 1983:142, 145). The free immigration of Chinese laborers came to an end. Under this act, only merchants, teachers, students, and clergy were allowed to enter the United States.

Usually scholars treat the period between 1882 and 1943 as the second phase of Chinese immigration history, ending when the Chinese exclusion acts were repealed in 1943. After 1943 a quota of 105 Chinese were admitted to the United States annually. I prefer to extend this second period to 1964, one year before immigration policy was again amended, because this small quota was still discriminatory compared to quotas for western European countries. Under the Chinese exclusion acts not only did the number of the Chinese immigrants coining to the United States decline, but many Chinese in fact left America. Between 1908 and 1943, 90,199 Chinese left the United States versus 52,561 recorded as new arrivals. The total number of Chinese in the United States declined from 107,488 in 1890 to 74,954 in 1930. Only after 1950 did the number rise past 107,488, to 117,629.

During this period of decreasing numbers of Chinese Americans, there was also a change in their geographic distribution. In the early years, almost all the Chinese lived on the West Coast. The anti-Chinese movement pushed many either back home to China or to the central and eastern parts of the United States. In 1880, 96.8 percent of the Chinese population lived in the Mountain and Pacific states. By 1940 the share of the U.S. Chinese population in the New England and the Middle Atlantic states had risen from 1.6 percent in 1880 to 25.4 percent (Fessler 1983:187). The heterogeneity of the eastern cities afforded Chinese a safer place to live than did the more homogeneous West. The dense population in the eastern cities also provided job opportunities to these Chinese immigrants. A marked phenomenon after 1890 was the urban-oriented migration of Chinese in the United States, who left rural areas for the cities. In 1890, New York contained the largest Chinese population in the East with about 3,000 people. By 1940 over 90 percent of the Chinese in the United States were urban dwellers. This percentage was higher than that of the Japanese (54.9%), and even higher than that of the total American urban population (56.5%) (Fessler 1983:188).

When the Communist party came to power in mainland China in 1949, many Chinese, including government officials, businessmen, scholars, and scientists, fled to the United States to seek political asylum (Sung 1980). Today many of these highly educated immigrants teach in universities and work in public research institutes and private industry. During most of the 1882–1964 period, racism, reflected in laws, professional practice, and labor unions, barred the Chinese from many occupations in the civil service, teaching, medicine, dentistry, and manufacturing and from blue-collar employment (Chen 1980:196; Fessler 1983:187). Most educated and skilled workers were kept at menial work.

The Recent Chinese Immigrants

The third wave of immigration came after 1965, when the Naturalization and Immigration Act repealed the discriminatory quota of 105 Chinese per year and extended the ceiling to 20,000 for each independent country. The number of Chinese entering the United States increased rapidly. According to Betty Lee Sung (1980), there were 205,107 Chinese (from Taiwan and Hong Kong) immigrants admitted to the United States between 1966 and 1975; the smallest yearly number was 16,434 and the largest 23,427 (the figure is higher than 20,000 because U.S. citizens immigrant parents are not counted in the quota system). About 125,000 more Chinese (from Taiwan and Hong Kong) immigrants arrived between 1976 and 1980 (Fessler 1983:196).

The characteristics of this third wave of immigrants are especially important for my study.

First they had varied educational backgrounds. After the 1960s many college students came from Taiwan and Hong Kong for advanced studies in the United States and remained here. The well-publicized brain drain phenomenon, the exit of highly skilled persons, marked immigration from Taiwan at this time. Not until 1979 did the Taiwan government permit its people to apply for tourist passports, and people who could afford to could now leave; many changed their tourist visa statuses and stayed in the United States. Their educational level was lower than that of the earlier group.

After they became permanent residents or American citizens, Chinese immigrants could and did apply for immigrant status for their parents, spouses, children, and siblings. The “bachelor society” has been replaced by family life (Nee and Nee 1972, Sung 1983, Wong 1982). This group also lowered the average years of education for Taiwan immigrants. Some studies showed that 80 percent of Chinese immigrants came by kin-sponsored “chain migration” (Sung 1980:47).

By the end of the 1960s the American Chinese population in major urban communities had separated into two groups: the old immigrants, or Chinatown Chinese, who remained tied to the ethnic sub-economy and its institutions; and the “non-Chinatown Chinese,” who entered the professions, universities, and neighborhoods of white North America (Yang 1966:328), sometimes called “uptown Chinese” (Kwong 1987).

Today, many new Chinese immigrants do not live in Chinatown. For these, Chinatown is a place for occasional shopping, sightseeing, and movie going. New Chinese settlements today are in outer-city and suburban areas, such as Flushing and Elmhurst in New York, Monterey Park in Los Angeles, Sunset and Richmond in San Francisco, and Argyle in Chicago. This new phenomenon contradicts the persisting view that “foreign born Chinese tend to concentrate in the central sections of metropolitan areas where, historically, there have been Chinese communities organized into Chinatowns” (Fessler 1983:199).

In the earlier periods, most of the Chinese immigrants were male laborers. Before the end of free immigration in 1882, there were about 100,000 Chinese males but only 8,848 Chinese females in the United States. Many of these women returned to China or died here because they could not endure the harsh life in the strange environment. By 1890 there were only 3,868 Chinese women compared with 102,620 Chinese men in the United States. The female-to-male ratio was 1 to 18 in 1860, 1 to 21 in 1880, and 1 to 26 in 1890; it rose to 1 to 7 in 1920 and 1 to 1.9 in 1950 (Lyman 1974:88,96).

Many of the female Chinese immigrants toward the end of the second period were of childbearing age. Between 1947 and 1956 there were 9,498 Chinese women between age 15 and 29, and 6,880 between 30 and 34, admitted to the United States, and they accounted for 76 percent of the total female Chinese immigrant population (Sung 1980:42). An increase of the Chinese American birthrate followed. From 14.5 per 1,000 population in 1940, it increased to 25.2 in 1947, and jumped to 43.8 in 1948 (Tan 1973).

Until recently, male and female immigrants over age 50 made up about 10 percent and 20 percent respectively of the total number of immigrants every year. People of such mature age in China traditionally did not leave their homes. But today this pattern is changing. Even though the geographical distance between Taiwan and the United States is great, highly developed medical science makes them feel safer living outside their own homeland. Perhaps, too, the traditional concept of “dying at home” is fading away little by little. People also find it fairly easy to travel to Taiwan with today’s air transportation. Whatever the reasons, older immigrants in many households take care of their grandchildren so that both their adult children and their spouses can earn money outside the home.

In the first period, almost all Chinese immigrants were manual workers such as miners and railroad construction workers; some were even imported to southern plantations to replace slaves after emancipation (G. Barth 1964:143; L. Cohen 1984:82; Loewen 1971:22–26; Quan and Roebuck 1982:5). With the anti-Chinese movement, they were forced into undesirable, noncompetitive jobs, particularly in “personal services.” Haitung King and Frances Locke show the striking change in job distribution between 1870 and 1970. In 1870 personal services, mining, manufacture, and agriculture employed 40.9 percent, 36.9 percent, 8.2 percent, and 8 percent respectively, and included 94 percent of total Chinese employment. In 1970 the same four job categories employed only 7.1 percent, 0.2 percent, 17.3 percent, and 0.9 percent, or 25.5 percent of total Chinese employment. Manufacturing was the only category that had increased at all. The three leading occupations in 1970 were wholesale and retail trade (34.6%, including restaurants), professional services (21.2%), and manufacturing (17.3%) (1980:19).

This change was clearly related to the high education levels of the new immigrants and the easing of job discrimination. Between 1967 and 1975 professional, technical, and kindred workers were always the largest group among arriving new immigrants (Sung 1980). The decrease in discrimination since 1940 has permitted Chinese to seek better jobs, a change that especially benefits the educated second generation and the “brain drain” student immigrants.

New immigrants have seldom gone to rural areas first. San Francisco, New York City, and Los Angeles are the three main places the new Chinese immigrants chose (Sung 1980:43), perhaps because there were more job opportunities, both manual and professional, in these big cities. Numbers have declined in San Francisco, while they have increased in New York City. There were about 230 garment factories scattered around the fringe of New Yorks Chinatown in the 1970s (Sung 1976), and the number has since increased to more than 500. Another reason for urban settlement was probably the convenience of mass transportation, particularly in New York City. Many of my informants said that one did not have to know how to drive and own a car in New York City because it provided convenient subway and bus transportation.

Figure 1. Crissman’ segmentary model

Crissman and the Segmentary Structure of Overseas Chinese

In 1967, Lawrence Crissman, in an article about the traditional social organization of overseas Chinese in the cities of Southeast Asia and in North American Chinatowns, argued that this pattern of social organization did not originate outside China but was transplanted from mainland urban China (1967). According to his view, overseas Chinese communities were segmented and hierarchical social structures, with a Consolidated Chinese Benevolent Association (CCBA) on the top, district associations in the middle, and clan organizations at the bottom (see Figure 1). Many historical studies of Chinese Americans support Crissman’s model (Chen 1980; Kung 1962; Lee 1960). Here I examine this model more closely.

The importance in China of lineage organization, in which patrilineal descent ties are carefully recorded, has been pointed to by many scholars (Baker 1968; Chuang 1973; M. Cohen 1976; Freedman 1958, 1966; Pasternak 1972). This kind of kinship organization did not play an important role in early Chinese settlements, but more extensive clan, or shared surname, organizations did emerge as significant in these over...

Table of contents

• Tables, Figures, and Photographs
• Preface
• Part I. Chinese Immigration and Scholars’ Models
• Part II. Chinese Households of Three Classes
• Part III. Community Activities
• References
• Index