To Be An American. Bill Ong Hing

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СКАЧАТЬ concoction for acne. Occasionally we would drive to Phoenix (about sixty miles away) for Chinese wedding banquets or Ong Family Association get-togethers. (As a child I learned that my family surname is Ong, not Hing. When my father immigrated, he stated his name in customary Chinese fashion—last name first—as Ong Chun Hing. The clueless immigration official wrote down Hing as the family name.)

      Many of my high school classmates went to college. Others stayed in Superior and mined copper like their parents. Two of my nephews did not go to college, instead staying in Superior to run a large grocery store. The support of my parents (my father completed high school in China, my mother a few years of grammar school), my siblings, and our next-door neighbor Mr. Gonzales, motivated me to go to college. Mr. Gonzales was the most distinguished person I knew. He lived in Washington, D.C., where he worked for Senator Carl Hayden, but he came home a few times a year to visit his Mexican-born mother. When in Superior, he took the time to tell me about his work and encourage me to study hard and go to college.

      Superior was in many regards a typical close-knit small town. High school sports were a central focus. The American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Knights of Columbus, and Rotary Club all had active chapters. My father was the first president of the Superior Rotary Club and during World War II served as the town sheriff. There was an active union. We attended the predominantly Anglo Presbyterian Church (without my Buddhist mother), although most of our friends and customers were Catholic. In fact, two of my sisters were christened as Catholics. Superior had other churches as well: Baptist, Episcopalian, Spanish-service Presbyterian, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormon. At nineteen my brother Johnny married his high school sweetheart, a Mormon.

      Although I left Superior after graduating from high school to attend college at U.C. Berkeley, my early life in Superior has profoundly influenced my thinking on multicultural, multiracial, and multireligious communities, class distinctions, and social values. Although life was not without strife, my family was part of a larger community that respected our Chinese American identity and culture. We learned about and respected other cultures and languages. I learned values and approaches to life from people of all backgrounds, from my Catholic Mexican American playmates to my Jewish high school history teacher, from Navajo and German customers to the chief administrator of the local mine. In retrospect, the opportunity to hear different perspectives was clearly an advantage.

      My life after high school—at U.C. Berkeley, in law school, in Chinatown, at the Buddhist church, as a legal services attorney, immigration lawyer, academic, participant in community activities, spouse, and parent—has reinforced the values I began to develop in Superior. How could I not be influenced by my African American college roommate from Texas, the jazz band we formed, People’s Park, or the all-Asian American fraternity I initially spurned but ultimately joined? Or my experience as the president of a fledgling Asian American law student group in law school? Or the Chinese immigrant children to whom I taught American folks songs at the Chinatown YWCA? Or my wife’s five-generation Chinese American family and its eleven-year struggle to build a Buddhist church? Or the diverse group of clients I’ve represented beginning at a legal aid office?² Or the community activists I’ve met and worked with for over twenty-five years? My early life in Superior and all of these subsequent life experiences have created impressions—some would say biases—that lead to views about America and being an American that one might loosely call cultural pluralism. Since recognition of the potential biases created by one’s background is a necessary first step to wrestling with the challenge of a multiracial society, I continue to try to make sense of how that past affects my thinking today.

chapter 2 A Nation of Immigrants, a History of Nativism

      “We are a nation of immigrants.” How many times do we hear this phrase? Most of us encounter it in positive terms beginning in elementary school. Take my daughter’s Fifth Grade social studies textbook America Will Be.¹ Chapter 1 is entitled “A Nation of Many Peoples,” and the first paragraph contains this passage: “From the earliest time, America has been a land of many peoples. This rich mix of cultures has shaped every part of life in the United States today.” The authors continue, as a “pluralistic culture, life is exciting. People work, join together, struggle, learn, and grow.”

      Today the phrase—“we are a nation of immigrants”—is invoked on both sides of the immigration debate. On one side we are told, “We are a nation of immigrants, immigrants are our strength, they invigorate our economy, they stimulate our culture, they add to our society.” On the other, “We are a nation of immigrants, but times have changed; they take away jobs, they are costly, the non-English speakers make life complicated, new immigrants don’t have our values.”

      As early as 1751, Benjamin Franklin opposed the influx of German immigrants, warning that “Pennsylvania will in a few years become a German colony; instead of their learning our language, we must learn theirs, or live as in a foreign country.” A couple of years later, he expanded this thought:

      [T]hose who came hither are generally the most stupid of their own nation, and as ignorance is often attended with great credulity, when knavery would mislead it, and with suspicion when honesty would set it right; and few of the English understand the German language, and so cannot address them either from the press or pulpit, it is almost impossible to remove any prejudices they may entertain. … Not being used to liberty, they know not how to make modest use of it.

      Responding to dramatic increases in German and Irish immigration in the first half of the 1800s, the Kentucky Senator Garrett Davis spoke out against further immigration and proposed a twenty-one-year residency requirement for naturalization. In his view,

      [M]ost of those European immigrants, having been born and having lived in the ignorance and degradation of despotisms, without mental or moral culture, with but a vague consciousness of human rights, and no knowledge whatever of the principles of popular constitutional government, their interference in the political administration of our affairs, even when honestly intended, would be about as successful as that of the Indian in the arts and business of civilized private life. … The system inevitably and in the end will fatally depreciate, degrade, and demoralize the power which governs and rules our destinies.²

      THE UNDESIRABLE ASIAN

      These social and cultural exclusionist views were accompanied by economic concerns. For example, job and wage competition provided an early impetus for the anti-Chinese crusade of the mid-1800s. The Chinese worked for lower wages and seemed to make do with less; they were criticized for being thrifty—for spending little and saving most of their meager wages. At the Oregon constitutional convention in 1857, a proposal was made to exclude the Chinese because whites “could not compete” with Chinese working for $1.50 to $2.00 a day. The Chinese had frequently been politically exploited on labor issues. Mine owners threatened to let the Chinese take over the entire industry because white miners demanded $3 a day while Chinese workers asked only $1.50. During the construction of the transcontinental railroad, Chinese workers were paid two-thirds the rate for white workers.³

      The influence of economic nativism was quite apparent by 1870. Labor organizations—including plumbers, carpenters, and unemployed shoemakers—led a massive anti-Chinese demonstration in San Francisco that drew national attention. Labor groups held anti-Chinese rallies in Boston and New York as well.⁴

      The hostile reception given the Chinese was of course due to race as well as to economic competition. Some parallels between the treatment of СКАЧАТЬ