Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco

by Judy Yung

  Although they preferred to live in modern apartments, young Chinese American couples generally tried to combine Chinese and Western customs in their home life. The Schulzes, for example, had Western food for breakfast and lunch but Chinese food for dinner. They celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas but also Chinese New Year and the Moon Festival. They spoke both Chinese and English at home with the children. They went to church, but every year at Ching Ming, Tye took the children to the Chinese cemetery to pay proper respect to her parents. Nor did Tye physically punish her children, as was the practice among Chinese parents then. Fred and Louise Schulze could not remember ever being spanked. "She was always very gentle. She never raised her voice," said Fred. 172

  Although Jade Snow Wong had spent her college years away from home and Chinatown, after her marriage she chose to live close to Chinatown so that her children might learn from their grandparents and come to appreciate their bicultural heritage. The children attended Chinese school and were introduced to Chinese foods, holidays, and the arts, but they were also raised on Christmas parties, Easter egg hunts, trips to museums and libraries, and vacations in Hawaii and Canada. Ultimately, Jade Snow instilled the same traditional values of honor, courage, honesty, personal conviction, and service to fellow humans in all her children that she had been taught by her parents. Representative of her generation, she had come full circle in her search for a new ethnic and gender identity conditioned by the discrimination she had experienced as a dutiful daughter at home and a young woman growing up in a prejudiced society. As she wrote in No Chinese Stranger, a work that compares socialist life in China with democratic life in America:

  Each Chinese-American like me has the opportunity to assess his talents, define his individual stature, and choose his personal balance of old and new, Chinese and Western ways, hopefully including the best of both. Father Wong's prize, more meaningful than gold, has also been the legacy he gave his children and grandchildren: he, and others like him, first gave us our cultural identity and then, by remaining in this country, permitted us the American freedom to attain individual self-images which ought to be constructive for the state but not subordinate to it. My own children may be potential revolutionaries who will throw their javelins earnestly and strongly; and I hope their targets will be the alleviation of mankind's miseries. When they drink water, as the old Chinese saying goes, I hope that they will think of its source, so that when they reach out to drop their aerial roots, their growth will bear the fruit of the banyan tree-wisdom.

  She concluded her second autobiography on an optimistic note:

  My future is in this land where Daddy and his progeny have sunk their roots around the rocks of prejudice, rather than closer to the shelter of the mother trunk. As I encourage my children's roots, I take heart from that "Foolish Old Man" in Ming Choy's lesson. With strong belief in our purpose, it may not be folly for the determined, with the hearts of children, to attack the high mountain of prejudice in our own way. When we die, our children and grandchildren will keep on working until, some day, the mountain will diminish. Then there will be no Chinese stranger.173

  By the time of the Great Depression, second-generation women under the influence of Chinese nationalism, Christianity, and acculturation had indeed taken the first steps toward challenging traditional gender roles and racial discrimination in the larger society. Compared to their mothers, they were better educated, more economically mobile, socially active, politically aware, and equal partners in marriage. Although they still had a difficult time assimilating into mainstream society, they had learned to accommodate racism and establish a new bicultural identity and lifestyle for themselves. As the Great Depression loomed before them, they would draw strength from the wellspring of their bicultural heritage to weather the storm ahead.

  Women in this community are keeping pace with the quick changes of the modern world. The shy Chinese maidens in bound feet are forevergone, making place for active and intelligent young women.

  Jane Kwong Lee Chinese Digest, June 1938

  We will fight our fight to the end, and hope to raise the living conditions not only for ourselves but for the other workers in Chinatown as well.... "The ILGWU is behind us. We shall not be moved."

  Chinese Ladies' Garment Workers' Union letter to the ILGWU membership, April 1938

  The prosperous years of the Roaring Twenties in America came to an abrupt halt on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, when the stock market crashed. By the end of that year, stock prices had dropped 5o percent. Investment funds dried up, factories closed, and workers lost their jobs. In the next three years, 40 percent of the nation's farms were mortgaged, industrial production was cut in half, thirteen million Americans-one-quarter of the work force-became unemployed, and over five thousand banks went out of business. With little savings and no government relief, many Americans across the country found themselves homeless, without any means of support. In Seattle, it was reported, families unable to pay for electricity spent their evenings by candlelight or in the dark. One couple in New York City lived in a cave in Central Park for half a year. Many others lived on the outskirts of towns in shacks made of tar paper, cardboard boxes, orange crates, or rusted car bodies-in settlements that became sardonically known as Hoovervilles. Starving families subsisted on stale bread, potatoes, and even dandelions. Farmers who lost their homes and crops in the dust storms packed their families into dilapidated cars and drove west, hoping to find work in the orange groves and lettuce fields of California. In desperation, one old man who found himself unemployed came home and turned on the gas. His widow sat alone for three days and then did the same.1

  The devastating impact of the Great Depression on the American population has been well documented in books, photographs, and films.2 More recent studies have explored its negative effects on the lives of the women and minority groups hardest hit by the economic crisis.' What is missing from this larger picture is a sense of how the depression affected Chinese American men and women in different parts of the country. Pertinent to the present investigation is a narrower question: What impact did race, class, gender, and nativity have on the economic survival of Chinese women in San Francisco, and how did their experiences differ from the experiences of other groups of Americans during this period?

  Although little has been written about how Chinese Americans weathered the depression, oral history interviews indicate that many faced the same hardships as the rest of America's population. By the time the depression was in full swing, the Chinese American work force had long since been driven out of the better-paying jobs in the Western states and was concentrated in either domestic and personal services or retail trade in urban areas of the country. Many Chinese families, eking out a living in small laundry, restaurant, and grocery businesses, were hard hit by the depression. Wong Wee Ying, the only Chinese woman in the steelmill town of Midland, Pennsylvania, recalled seeing people sleeping out in the streets and standing in line for government permits to sell apples or shoelaces. "If you can see no smoke from the factory chimneys, you know things are bad for everyone," she said.4 The bad economy affected her family laundry business: "We just had a few collars to wash. There was no work, so how can people afford to send out their laundry to wash? "5 Like many other resourceful American women, Wee Ying made clothes out of old rice sacks for her six children, reinforced their shoes with tin cans to make them last longer, and made a lot of thin soup out of rice or oatmeal and vegetables from their family garden.

  Helen Hong Wong, who in 1928 had just arrived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, as a young bride, also saw her husband's restaurant business decline because of the depression. "The restaurant used to make over two hundred dollars a day with the lunch meal alone," she said. "During the depression we were lucky to make two or three dollars a day. People had no jobs and of course no money. The department stores were all empty. You couldn't find a single person in there." When they couldn't pay the rent anymore, the Wongs closed their restaurant and moved to Chicag
o. Too intimidated to stand in the food lines, her husband finally went to the Chinatown gaming tables to borrow "lucky money" from the winners. The winter months were the hardest because the family couldn't afford heat. "A bushel of coal would have to last us a whole week. I would wrap my two daughters in blankets and heavy coats all the time and only burn the coals at night. But even at that, it was still down to forty degrees at night."6

  Americans across the country were hard hit by the Great Depression. The Chinese community in San Francisco, however, was not only spared some of the worst hardships, but in some ways, Chinese women came out ahead. 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. And for the first time in their history, Chinese Americans, who had always been marginalized, became beneficiaries of federal relief programs and were welcomed into the rank and file of the growing labor movement. Although hundreds of Chinese men lost their jobs as cooks, seasonal laborers, and laundrymen, most Chinese women continued to find employment in the female-dominated areas of sewing, domestic service, and sales and clerical work. Less affected by unemployment than their men and encouraged by the political conditions of the depression era, Chinese American women were able to improve their circumstances as well as to assume a larger share of responsibility for their families and community. Thus, the depression both required and allowed them to make long strides during a time of setbacks for most other Americans.

  Ironies of the Depression: San Francisco Chinatown

  The silver lining in the Great Depression for the Chinese in San Francisco should be viewed in its proper perspective; that is, given their low socioeconomic status, Chinese Americans had less to lose by the economic catastrophe and more to gain by government assistance than the average American. In a strange way, it might be said that the Chinese benefited from past discrimination. Even during the worst years of the Great Depression, before President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal went into effect, there were no breadlines or traces of Hoovervilles in Chinatown; nor were Chinese violently scapegoated by white workers as happened in the depression of the 18 70s. Overall, because their ethnic economy afforded them some protection against unemployment, the Chinese in San Francisco did not suffer as severely as Chinese, black, and Mexican Americans in other parts of the country. Almost all the Chinese in the city lived in Chinatown, which provided them with essential foods and services as well as jobs that relied primarily on trade with China. They were not in competition with white workers for work, nor were they greatly affected by plummeting agricultural prices or the closure of industrial plants. In contrast, blacks in San Francisco suffered the highest rate of unemployment among all groups throughout the depression because they were concentrated in those occupational areas-unskilled labor and the service sector-most vulnerable to unemployment.' Likewise, because few Chinese invested in stocks and bonds, were able to own property, or had accumulated much savings in banks, they were less affected by the stock market crash, property foreclosures, and bank runs than the rest of the country. Chinatown was also blessed with its own backup support of local district and family associations. In combination with churches and other charitable organizations, the kin network provided a stopgap resource for most Chinese in needs The unemployed could always count on their family or district associations to hoifan-provide dinner for a nickel-while families relied on the tradition of wan fan-the taking of leftovers from the dining tables of Chinatown businesses that provided meals to their workers. It was not unusual for six to eight single men to share one room and to chip in for food. Fong, a laborer, described how this worked in the documentary study Longtime Californ':

  Now during the Depression I was so broke, quite often I was with no money in my pocket.... You wonder how I lived? .... We got a room, there's five or six of us and sometimes we pay rent, sometimes we don't. We got a sack of rice for a coupla dollars and we all cook every day and we eat there. Sometimes one night you see forty or fifty guys come in and out, the old guys go to each's place, sit down, talk all night long before they go to sleep the next day.... So we got our food one way or the other, lots of vegetables real cheap at the time, and that's how I passed by.9

  As the depression deepened and the Chinese kin associations and community charities found themselves no longer able to handle the situation, the Chinese discovered a new source of relief in the local, state, and federal governments.

  Accustomed to solving the community's problems in their own autocratic and patriarchal way, the merchant elites that ruled Chinatown did not seek outside assistance. But as conditions for the Chinese working class deteriorated, the unemployed found a new political voice in the Huaren Shiyi Hui (Chinese Unemployed Alliance), a group formed by the Chinese Marxist left in January 1931 to organize the working class and aid the unemployed. Reflecting the rise in radical politics throughout the country, the Shiyi Hui joined with the Unemployed Council of the U.S.A. (organized by the U.S. Communist Party) to call for racial and class unity on unemployment issues and to demonstrate for relief aid from the U.S. government. In March 193 1, the Shiyi Hui reported that there were 3,000 to 3,500 unemployed Chinese in the city, is percent of whom were women and more than i,ooo of whom were heads of households with an average of three dependents. Those below the poverty level amounted to zo percent of the unemployed.'0 The alliance then organized several hundred unemployed Chinese workers to march on the Chinese Six Companies and demand immediate relief, thereby challenging the ruling merchant class. At the end of the march, a mass meeting was held, at which Eva Lowe, the only female member of the Shiyi Hui, presented the organization's demands for (1) shelter and food for the unemployed, (z) free hospital services for the unemployed, (3) free education for unemployed women, and (4) an employment office, to be administered by a board selected by the Shiyi Hui. Later, many participants also joined a massive demonstration of the unemployed in San Francisco's financial district, marking one of the earliest instances of Chinese involvement in a political event outside Chinatown.) i

  Response-albeit slow-came first from the city government. According to one analyst, compared to other cities San Francisco took better care of its unemployed citizens during the first two and a half years of the depression because of its sturdier economy, strong banks and credit rating, skillful budget balancing, effective relief programs, and generous citizens who not only gave to charities but also repeatedly voted for relief bonds.'2 In November 1930, the city and county of San Francisco made its first appropriation for relief in the amount of $zoo,ooo. Three months later, it passed a bond issue of $z.5 million for work relief (pri marily to construct the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges). In the four years from 19 z9 to 19 3 z, the public portion of contributions to Associated Charities, a humanitarian organization that provided for the poor, rose from 8.5 percent to 84 percent, and the city government distributed $3.8 million worth of aid in work or direct relief.

  It was not until mid- 119 3 z, however, that any attention was paid to the needs of the Chinese community. After the city passed another bond issue, funds were finally made available to open a Chinese-staffed office for family relief in Chinatown, enabling needy Chinese families to go on relief for the first time. It took another year before the city established a Chinese Single Men Registry in the building of the Chinese Six Companies so that Chinese bachelors, who were the hardest hit by unemployment, could also begin applying for relief. That same year, the Chinese Six Companies, working with the city government, opened a shelter with forty beds and a reading room for unemployed Chinese men. Free showers were provided at the Chinese YMCA, where Chinese cooks were hired to cook two free meals a day for two hundred needy persons, and Chinese Hospital began providing free medical care to the unem- ployed.13

  Just as the city's relief funds dried up, Congress passed the Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA), allocating $500 million for the unemployed. Word began to sprea
d in Chinatown about the benevolence of wongga (literally, "imperial family"; that is, the U.S. government), and the Chinese learned to swallow their pride and accept the concept of public assistance as an individual's right in America-at least for the duration of the depression. By 1935, approximately z,300, or 18 percent, of the Chinese population in San Francisco (as compared to zz percent of the total U.S. population) were on government assistance. This number included approximately 3 50 families, z 5 unmarried women, and 500 unmarried men. The relief initially took the form of groceries that were delivered by a local Chinese grocery store to the families. Then, beginning in 1934, the government issued a weekly check to each family for food, rent, utilities, and clothing, supplemented by free medical care at a local clinic.14 Lim P. Lee, who served as postmaster of San Francisco from 1966 to 1980, was a social worker during the depression; he recalled: "Where the Chinese Recreation Center is today used to be the Washington Grammar School. They had a backyard there, and on payday, when they came to get their relief checks, we had lines of four to six deep."15

  Both Lim P. Lee and Ethel Lum, also a social worker, emphasized that there was no discrimination in the distribution of unemployment relief to the Chinese in San Francisco. "Because of language difficulties and differences in habits and customs, the Chinese on relief have always received special consideration, and have been treated fairly and justly, wrote Ethel Lum in 193 5. "They receive identically the same allowances for food as do the white families; whereas in several counties in California, Chinese and other racial groups, Filipino, Mexican, etc., are accorded a lower food budget, a difference of from i o to zo per cent, on the belief that these racial groups have less expensive diets."" This egalitarian treatment may have been due to accusations that had circulated in the community a year before charging the authorities with providing Chinese families less relief because of their lower standard of living. In response, FERA officials had assigned a bilingual social worker to investigate and correct the matter.i" As it was, "the unemployment relief checks were hardly enough for bare existence for the single men," said Lim P. Lee. "The families had more allowance, but there were more mouths to feed."18 Monthly relief for the Chinese in San Francisco was averaging $16.43 per single person and $69.79 per family, far below the $3o a month needed to support one Chinese person or the $ i zo required to sustain an average-sized Chinese family of eight for a month.19