American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901-1949
336
American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901-1949
336eBook
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Overview
American Exodus is the first book to explore this extraordinary migration of Chinese Americans. Their exodus shaped Sino-American relations, the development of key economic sectors in China, the character of social life in its coastal cities, debates about the meaning of culture and “modernity” there, and the U.S. government’s approach to citizenship and expatriation in the interwar years. Spanning multiple fields, exploring numerous cities, and crisscrossing the Pacific Ocean, this book will appeal to anyone interested in Chinese history, international relations, immigration history, and Asian American studies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520972551 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 08/27/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 13 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
New Lives in the South
Chinese American Merchant and Student Immigrants
Ng Ah Tye was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1871, just as the anti-Chinese movement began to catch fire across the Pacific Coast. Entrepreneurial from a young age, he opened the "Japanese Bazaar" in central Oregon's Prineville when he was only eighteen. Although the store dealt mostly in dishes and trinkets from China, Ng likely chose its name both because of a contemporary vogue for Japanese product stores and because of the anti-Chinese fervor still powerful in the West. The business proved successful enough to enable Ng to marry San Francisco native Lee Ting in 1895, but six years and three children later, a rising anti-Japanese movement with roots in the old anti-Chinese campaigns threatened the family's prosperity. In 1901 the "Tyes," as they called themselves, boarded a ship for Hong Kong, where "N. A. Tye" built a successful confectionary importing business using his American knowledge and his Chinese connections. Except for a few visits, he and his family never returned to the United States.
This chapter explores the lives and choices of the thousands of Chinese American citizen merchants and students who, like the Tyes, relocated to China in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Rather than remaking China as the "modernizers" hoped to do, these immigrants relied on and planned for futures within the well-established professional, family, and native-place networks that bound south China to Chinese migrant communities around the world. Like Ng Ah Tye, many were entrepreneurs and merchants who sought greater economic opportunities and social mobility; others, such as the Tyes' children, hoped to study the Chinese language, gain cultural competency, and forge relationships with the children of other merchants, including the offspring of other Chinese living abroad. As this chapter demonstrates, their relationships with the political groups attempting to transform China into a nation-state eventually affected their business and educational plans and their evolving identities as Chinese and Americans.
While the merchants and students imagined that developing lives and successful careers would be far easier outside of the United States than within it, few ever fully rejected the land of their birth, despite the fact that US officials often cast them as members of a devious race loyal only to China. American authorities translated such attitudes into discriminatory policies: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese American citizen travelers had to seek a writ of habeas corpus to reenter the United States; after 1908 they needed to complete an "Application of Alleged American-born Chinese for Preinvestigation of Status," commonly known as a Form 430, before leaving the country for China and submit to interrogation upon their return. Ethnic Chinese were the only group of US citizens forced to undergo such an ordeal, but their willingness to do so reflected not just their recognition of the benefits of US citizenship but also their attachment to the land of their birth, despite the discrimination they faced there. However, nationalists and governments on both sides of the Pacific increasingly rejected this kind of transnationalism, especially by the 1910s. The citizen students' and merchants' sense of identity lacked the exclusivity that white, native-born, Protestant Americans demanded of immigrants and their children during this period. Similarly, the citizen merchants and students often felt little of the exclusive Chinese nationalism that their Western-educated "modernizer" peers commonly expressed and that political activists and officials in China eventually demanded. Instead, they frequently identified as culturally Chinese, were often just as culturally American, usually felt a deep sentimental attachment to the United States, and saw no contradiction in their overlapping affinities. Unlike the modernizers, most of the students and merchants were not committed statists or even conventional nationalists before they left for China. Except for a few fleeting moments, such as in 1919, their experiences in the south encouraged such ambivalence about central authority and monogamous identity.
However they saw themselves, most also remained acutely aware of the importance of their US citizenship to their mobility and opportunity; their relationships with Chinese migrants from other parts of the world had taught them that citizenship status could mean protection, access to economic opportunity, or particular vulnerability. But preserving the value of their citizenship became ever more difficult over time, as Chinese authorities attempted to exert authority over them, often with the help of a US government eager to ignore their rights as Americans.
HONG KONG, CAPITAL OF THE OVERSEAS CHINESE WORLD
The Chinese American citizen merchants' and students' initial and sometimes ultimate destination was Hong Kong, which China ceded to Britain in 1842 after losing the First Opium War. Hong Kong began to prosper in the second half of the nineteenth century, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants left Guangdong Province and Fujian to labor in countries and colonies around the world. The vast majority departed from Hong Kong, which became the central hub that connected them to their ancestral villages in south China. Emigrants, foodstuffs, opium, print media, and other goods flowed through the British colony to Chinese communities in the Americas, Australia, Africa, and East and Southeast Asia, while Hong Kong's firms also received and processed remittances and letters from Chinese abroad. As Hong Kong prospered, its population grew quickly, while Britain's conflicts with China increased the colony's territory: between 1860 and 1899, Britain obtained Kowloon by cession and the New Territories by lease, more than quintupling the colony's size. Urban Victoria on Hong Kong Island remained the colony's business and residential center, with colonnaded trading houses and shops lining its waterfront and the streets behind it; large, airy homes clustering in the Midlevels; and mansions dotting the exclusive, whites-only Peak.
The colony emerged as the capital of the far-flung overseas Chinese world in these years not just because it connected global trading and migrant networks but also because it offered unique social and economic opportunities for "returned merchants." Beginning in the 1880s, as Australia, South Africa, Canada, and the United States limited Chinese immigration, Hong Kong attracted Chinese returning from such places with capital to invest. Many settled permanently in the colony rather than in their old villages because of Hong Kong's greater stability, higher standard of living, and financial opportunities. Even better, as historian Elizabeth Sinn notes, "in the absence of the literati-gentry class that for centuries had dominated Chinese society, Chinese merchants in Hong Kong were able to play top dog in the local community and among Chinese abroad." According to historian John M. Carroll, by the turn of the century "the Hong Kong Chinese business elite had become a full-fledged bourgeoisie," even in the face of colonial racism.
Hong Kong's private schools enhanced the colony's attractiveness for successful Chinese merchants living not just in the colony itself but in other English-speaking countries and territories. Most wanted their sons, and, increasingly, their daughters, to receive both a Chinese- and an English-language education that included exposure to westernized subjects such as science and math. This kind of mixed education would enable their offspring to deal not just with other ethnic Chinese but with the South Asian merchants, Western traders, and colonial officials who also moved in Asian business circles. Mainland China's schools largely proved unequal to the task, since elite Chinese there continued to educate their sons (but not their daughters) to take the traditional civil service exams until the Qing court abolished the system in 1905. Until then, studying the Confucian classics for regurgitation on the exams remained a major route to wealth and power in Chinese society and the focus of most family academies, schools, and tutors. Missionary schools operated in many parts of Guangdong before the 1911 revolution, but they tended to focus on proselytizing as much if not more than on Western subjects. They also drew most of their students from poorer and more marginalized groups in Chinese society. Many prosperous overseas merchants thus preferred to place their offspring in Hong Kong's Western-style academies. Most of these schools, although church affiliated, had a very different social meaning than their mainland counterparts: they catered to the children of the colony's elite, and they not only trained students for a future in the overseas Chinese world but also reinforced their parents' social status.
Mainland China's instability added to Hong Kong's allure for Chinese merchants returning from abroad in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By then, the Qing dynasty was tottering as it struggled to deal with the Western and Japanese imperialism that compounded China's internal problems, from increasingly disobedient provincial officials, to famines, droughts, and floods, to multiple and often catastrophic peasant uprisings. In 1898 conservatives at the Qing court crushed attempts by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, Guangdong-born advisors to the Emperor Guangxu, to promote reform; two years later, the powerful Empress Dowager Cixi threw her support to the "Boxers," an anti-foreign sect that murdered hundreds of missionaries and Chinese Christians before laying siege to the foreign legation quarter in Beijing. After a combined Western and Japanese military force ended the siege and sacked the city, the Qing court negotiated a peace treaty, and Cixi finally launched economic, educational, and political reforms.
As part of this process, the cash-strapped imperial court sought to attract investment from Chinese abroad and improve the business climate for it, yet such attempts inadvertently demonstrated the hold of the hidebound bureaucracy and the growing anti-Qing sentiment in the south. Despite orders to embrace reform, imperial bureaucrats after 1901 made investment difficult at best with their red tape and corruption. Furthermore, overseas Chinese were becoming some of the most fervent opponents of Qing rule, and of Cixi in particular. By 1905 Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei, and their archrival, the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, had each traveled across the world raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for their causes from the Chinese abroad.
THE LURE OF HONG KONG
Like many returned merchants from Australia, South Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, second-generation Chinese American merchants who emigrated to Asia before 1911 flocked to Hong Kong rather than the Chinese mainland. They appreciated the colony's flexibility and its social and economic opportunities, for they possessed few if any of the educational credentials that meant status in late Qing China. Instead, many had some money as well as existing connections to Chinese businesspeople in the colony through professional, family, and ancestral village networks. When Louey Shuck arrived in Hong Kong, he relied on the Chui Cheong Loong company, a jinshanzhuang (literally, Gold Mountain firm) that exported Chinese goods to the United States and arranged remittances from overseas Chinese to the Pearl River Delta. Much of Chui Cheong Loong's Hong Kong staff consisted of Louey's relatives, while Louey Shuck himself had once been the San Francisco branch's bookkeeper. The firm was one of dozens of Hong Kong companies that served overseas Chinese in San Francisco, Honolulu, Sydney, and Melbourne and whose staff usually consisted of family members or men from the same village or district. Hundreds of similar companies in Hong Kong specialized in trade and remittances for overseas Chinese from other parts of the world, including Havana, Calcutta, Lima, Penang, Singapore, and South Africa.
The Chinese American population of Hong Kong grew quickly after the turn of the century, as scores of citizen merchants and students left the United States for greater opportunities in Asia. In 1901 the Hong Kong government's census counted only two Chinese Americans in the colony, but by mid-1911, that number had increased to 202. Relatively few of these Chinese American citizens bothered to register with the US consulate, but if the data it collected about those who did applied to their unregistered peers, as many as sixty or seventy of those listed in the Hong Kong government census were students, and perhaps ninety or more were merchants or entrepreneurs. Members of the latter group almost invariably possessed at least some money or a trade, although few were truly rich. Usually the children of merchants, they sought continued upward mobility by moving to Hong Kong; ordinary laborers earned far less in the colony than in the United States, so Chinese American citizen adults without money or skills generally stayed in America.
In Hong Kong, Chinese Americans with some education or capital could work in a wide variety of professions, unlike in the United States. A few rose to the lucrative position of comprador, including Louey Shuck, who represented a number of San Francisco firms in Hong Kong and became the comprador for the US shipping company Struthers and Dixon (later Struthers and Barry). Most Chinese Americans never became compradors, but the colony's importance as a port still pushed them into trade-related fields, where their language skills and cultural knowledge gave them a distinct advantage. Well-heeled brothers Dong Wing and Dong Toy represented San Francisco's Quong Lun Company in the colony, while a number of more middling Chinese American citizen immigrants clerked for the smaller trading houses that lined Queens, Des Voeux, and Connaught Roads in the Central District. Not all Chinese American citizens worked directly in trade. Though N.A. Tye founded an import-export business, he also opened a retail confectionary store that sold American soft drinks, gum, and candy on busy Pottinger Street. One San Francisco-born herbalist even set up a Chinese medicine shop among a number of similar practitioners on Wing Lock Street.
While seeking to tap into existing overseas networks, a number of Chinese American merchants and entrepreneurs also brought US business practices to Hong Kong and South China. They became particularly prominent in banking in the region, where before the 1911 revolution "native banks" with their own set of practices served Chinese customers, and foreign banks catered to white-run firms. In early 1912, brothers Look Tin Eli and Look Poong Shan, two American citizens prominent in San Francisco business circles, founded the first bank in Hong Kong underwritten solely with (overseas) Chinese capital but relying on what its chief accountant termed "strictly Western methods" for its "customs and usages." Leading Hong Kong businesspeople and the governor of Guangdong alike expressed their hopes that this new Bank of Canton would spread such practices throughout China and make overseas investment there easier. Highlighting the institution's strong overseas Chinese connections, Look brought in another American — Louey Shuck — to serve as the bank's auditor. Not to be outdone, in 1917 the Hawaiian-born Jun-ke Choy and several of his friends helped raise capital for yet another institution, the Industrial and Commercial Bank, Ltd.; the institution sought investors among overseas Chinese, especially in the US-controlled Philippines, and worked to encourage Chinese in Hong Kong to put their money in savings accounts. The next year, brothers and Quong Lun Company representatives Dong Toy and Dong Wing founded the Chinese Merchants Bank to take advantage of the growing market for Western-style banks. The three institutions channeled overseas Chinese investment into the colony and south China until the mid-1920s.
As they moved in the Chinese business networks that converged in Hong Kong, many Chinese American merchants also placed their children in the colony's schools, just as so many overseas Chinese did in these years. One of the first young Chinese Americans to attend a Hong Kong academy was the son of Liao Zhubao, the San Francisco agent for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. In 1894 Liao sent his American-born son Liao Zhongkai, later a leader of the Guomindang, back to the colony to enroll in Queen's College, the oldest public school in Hong Kong. Just a few years later, longtime US resident Hong Sling arrived in Hong Kong and placed his Chicago-born sons Willie and Harry Hong Sling at Queen's College, where they became standout athletes, playing an Anglo-American blend of sports that included cricket, lawn bowling, and baseball. Avoiding the colony's girls public school, which served a significant population of poor children, Hong Sling instead enrolled his daughter Jennie in the prestigious St. Stephen's Girls School, where she hobnobbed with young women from Hong Kong's most powerful Chinese families. Many returning merchants preferred this kind of church-sponsored education for their American-born children, who soon flocked to elite private academies such as the Diocesan Boys School, the Diocesan Girls School, and the Italian Convent School. After all, the right school conferred prestige on children and parents alike, and many of them craved that kind of recognition, so often denied them in America.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
IllustrationsAcknowledgments
Note on Sources, Names, Data, and Translations
Introduction
1. New Lives in the South: Chinese American Merchant and Student Immigrants
2. The Modernizers: US-Educated Chinese Americans in China
3. The Golden Age Ends: Chinese Americans and the Rise of Anti-imperialist Nationalism
4. The Nanjing Decade: Chinese American Immigrants and the Nationalist Regime
5. Agonizing Choices: The War against Japan, 1937–1945
Conclusion
Epilogue
Notes Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index