Last Boat Out of Shanghai

by Helen Zia

  The targeting of Chinese in America continued in spite of McCarthy’s fall. Powerful FBI director J. Edgar Hoover remained convinced that Chinese Americans were a fifth column of the enemy, Communist infiltrators on U.S. soil. In America’s Chinatowns, federal agents mounted systematic raids on Chinese American organizations, especially pro-labor or “left-leaning” ones that dared oppose the racist inquisitions. The U.S. Department of Defense funded the noted anthropologist Margaret Mead to conduct an extensive ethnographic study of the stranded Chinese exiles in New York City. Throughout the latter part of the 1950s, Mead’s research partner Rhoda Métraux studied over a hundred of these educated and newly displaced Chinese. Mead’s team of anthropologists, psychiatrists, internists, and others collected data through extensive interviews and medical and psychographic tests to create a profile of Chinese political character—and the “Chinese mind.”

  It is no coincidence that so many Shanghainese found their way to New York City, where the number of Shanghai exiles grew. They were drawn by the inexorable pull of a city so like their lost home in its electrifying energy, cosmopolitan diversity, and endless possibilities for the enterprising. Not even London or Paris could offer Shanghai migrants a comparable familiarity.

  Beyond New York, Shanghainese went wherever they could make a living—university towns like Champaign, Illinois, or other large cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco. As they married and had children, many of the displaced Shanghainese followed the American middle-class movement to the suburbs.

  Nor is it surprising that, after their escape from war and revolution, the refugees would want to fit in, to rebuild their lives in an oasis of calm. In that way, the Chinese exiles mirrored the conformity of Americans in the 1950s. Some educated Shanghainese felt compelled to differentiate themselves from members of earlier Chinese migrations to America, bristling when every conversation with Americans seemed to begin with the same question: “What restaurant do you work at?” The Shanghainese did not know of the struggles that earlier Chinese waged to be able to live in America. Instead, this new wave sought to establish that they were not proletarian waiters and laundry workers but rather were exceptional Chinese who could become model Americans. Indeed, in 1966 a New York Times Magazine article invented the notion of the “model minority” to praise Asian Americans in pointed contrast to African Americans amid racial tensions and calls for equality. Unfamiliar with the history of discrimination in the United States and unaware that the newly created stereotype pitted Asian Americans against other minorities, some of the Shanghai exiles welcomed the chance to be seen as the “good minority” instead of as enemy intruders.

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  YET FOR MOST EMIGRANTS from Shanghai, America’s restrictive immigration policies toward Asians made it an unreachable haven. The vast majority of Shanghainese first headed to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and other more accessible ports. No one knows how many fled as the revolutionary tide swept their country, though it’s clear that millions from all parts of China crossed its vast, porous borders. Even today, the Communist Party neglects to acknowledge two truths: first, that this mass exodus did, in fact, take place and, second, that China suffered immense losses of economic, social, and intellectual capital from Shanghai.

  But some countries never accepted these new arrivals, and within a few years, many Shanghainese exiles would have to flee again, from anti-Chinese pogroms in Malaysia and Indonesia, for example. In Hong Kong, they clustered together in large enclaves, setting up their own schools, shops, and so many services that many could get by speaking only Shanghainese, without bothering to learn one word of the local Cantonese dialect. In Taiwan, the Shanghai exiles opened eating and drinking establishments, social clubs and mah-jongg halls, to ease their homesick yearnings, just as the European refugees in Shanghai had done with their cafés, boucheries, and bakeries.

  While refugees, then and now, are often labeled in their places of refuge as freeloaders and parasites by hostile nativists, the experience of the Shanghai migrants provides a contrary vision. For example, the students and scholars who were stranded outside of China after the Communist revolution were among the best and the brightest of their generation, not unlike the German intelligentsia who fled Berlin as Hitler ascended to power and whose ranks included Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Walter Gropius. For China, the exodus caused a significant brain drain that Premier Zhou Enlai himself tried to stanch. Those refugees were not merely China’s loss; they became a tremendous boon to their new countries, contributing their knowledge, skills, and talents wherever they found themselves. Two future Nobel Laureates, Chen-Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee, were among the stranded Chinese students and professionals in the United States, while the influx of Shanghai’s engineering talent to Taiwan helped to fuel the electronics revolution there—Morris Chang, for example, founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest silicon producer.

  It would be one-sided to highlight the achievements of highly successful Shanghai exiles while ignoring the tribulations of many others, particularly when the Shanghainese themselves tend to showcase their achievements and downplay their setbacks and losses. Yet Shanghai’s international outlook and fluid coexistence of different cultures were high-value assets for less privileged Shanghainese as well—aiding the cooks, tailors, teachers, war brides, sailors, merchants, and others as they navigated new and alien environments. Some, such as documentary film producer Mi Ling Tsui’s parents, came to the United States as servants to the wealthiest of the displaced; her mother, as the personal maid of T. V. Soong’s mistress, and her father as her personal tailor, eventually landed in New York’s Chinatown. Financially strapped members of the Shanghai diaspora found ways to set up small businesses in storefronts that doubled as their homes or to work as shop clerks, librarians, tailors, garment workers, and, yes, waiters—whatever jobs they could find at a time when Chinese Americans were limited to restaurants and laundries.

  Even among Shanghai’s elite social set, everyone knew of others who had fallen from grace, without the money, prestige, or influence they’d once had. For example, when the Nationalist embassy in Washington stopped paying salaries to its staff, Hsien Hsien Chow, a diplomat and China’s star athlete, and his wife, Bae Pao Lu, tried to support themselves and their three young daughters by opening a small corner market in the district, with living quarters above the store. The former socialites learned to cut up raw chickens and stock shelves, but the venture failed because the soft-hearted soccer champion gave away his goods to customers who couldn’t pay. In New York City, Richard King’s father had to moonlight as a waiter at Betty’s Peking House Restaurant even though both his grandfathers had been founders of the Bank of China. His family had lost so much money in the course of fleeing to Hong Kong and New York that his mother took in piecework from a sewing factory—“just for fun,” as she told her circle of White Chinese émigrés.

  Shanghai migrants who failed to regain their former status in brave new worlds could look to their children to recoup what had been lost. Some of those children were born in China and left when they were quite young, while the majority became the first generation to be born outside of Shanghai. Either way, their displaced parents, like immigrants from every shore, sought to imbue their offspring with their proud sensibilities of home. Indeed, the children of the Shanghai diaspora include many high achievers, though some scholars of immigration maintain that the academic attainments of Chinese American children are more due to their status as striving immigrants than to their cultural origins. To name just a few, the better known include:

  Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa; U.S. Cabinet members Elaine Chao and Nobelist Steven Chu; Ambassadors Julia Chang Bloch and Linda Tsao Yang; government executives Christopher P. Lu, Henry Ying-yen Tang, Christina M. Tchen; architect Maya Lin; Tony award winners David Henry Hwang and Ming Cho Lee; filmmakers Ang Lee and Ja
net Yang; authors Iris Chang, Gish Jen, Gus Lee, Bette Bao Lord, Adeline Yen Mah, Pai Hsien-yung, Lynn Pan Ling, Amy Tan, Shawn Wong; advocates Ying Lee Kelley, Stewart Kwoh, Daphne Kwok, Francis Wang, Frank Wu; philanthropists Leslie Tang Schilling, Oscar Tang, Sue Van, Lulu Chow Wang, Laura Wen-Yu Young; business leaders John Chen, Philip Chiang, Charles B. Wang, Geoff Yang, Shirley Young; journalists Ti-Hua Chang, Steve Cheng, Frank Ching, Maureen Fan, Vic Lee, Dan Woo, William Woo; scholars Gordon H. Chang, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Mae Ngai, John Kuo Wei Tchen.

  This incomplete list of notable children of Shanghai migrants could go on, but the point is to show that the hardships and sacrifices of those who made the difficult exodus were not lost on their offspring—some of whom became vocal critics of the adversity they witnessed. Many took the lessons of their parents’ lives and paid them forward, changing the landscape of their migrational homes with the voices, viewpoints, and character of the Shanghai diaspora.

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  THE EVENTS, DESCRIPTIONS, and dialogue recounted in this book are based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Annabel Annuo Liu, Benny Pan, Bing Woo, Ho Chow, and those close to them, as well as letters, photographs, and documents they generously shared. Numerous scholars have been consulted for their perspectives, as were research materials, oral histories, and private collections. More than one hundred other Shanghai exiles submitted to interviews as well; these were conducted mostly in English, though in some cases a translator assisted. Regrettably, it was not possible to include all their remarkable experiences in the confines of this book, but their sharp memories and observations grace each page. The names of only two people in the book, Doreen Pan and Frank Hsieh, have been changed due to family concerns. Though there wasn’t room to include the complete stories of what later happened to the four main characters as they blazed their diasporic trails, here, in brief, is a summary of the next part of their very full lives:

  After Ho Chow succeeded in gaining security clearances to work on defense-related contracts, he found his way to Melnor Corporation, where he remained for most of his professional life, garnering more than sixty industrial design patents. He took a brief leave from Melnor to start his own company—thus fulfilling a boyhood dream.

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  HO’S BRILLIANT WORK AS an engineer bought him a comfortable home in the suburbs of New York, where he and Theresa raised a daughter and a son. They remained active in their community as well: Theresa served as president of the China Institute Women’s Association, and Ho became national president of the Jiao Tong University Alumni Association of America, successfully spearheading a major campaign for a scholarship fund.

  From all appearances, Ho’s life epitomized the American ideal that new immigrants and refugees can only dream of. Yet a large hole remained in Ho’s idyllic picture: He could not enjoy his accomplishments when he was separated from his mother, brother, and sister, knowing the difficulties they faced in China and Taiwan. Like so many migrants, Ho sent money to help out his family, never giving up on his hope of reuniting and bringing them out of China to join him in the United States. For years, he wrote letters on their behalf to the State Department and officials in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

  In 1973, one year after President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China, Ho was invited to join a high-level delegation of American scientists and engineers to meet with their counterparts in China. Ho asked the hosts in advance if he could visit his mother. With the permission of both governments, Ho met his mother and brother in a tearful reunion after their twenty-six-year separation. His mother still lived in the same house on Medhurst Road, but it had been subdivided to add several other families that had moved in; the government had assigned additional occupants to residences deemed too large for just one household. An added bonus for Ho’s family resulted from his visit: Shanghai authorities gave their rooms a fresh coat of whitewash, the first in almost thirty years.

  When Ho returned to the United States, he kept up his efforts to get his mother and brother out of China, but both died before he could succeed. It would be another several years before Ho managed to bring his sister, Wanyu, and her husband and four children out of Taiwan. When he did, he set them up with jobs and a place to live. Eventually, he was able to sponsor some of his deceased brother’s grown children to the United States as well. After Ho retired, he and Theresa moved to northern California to be near their children and grandchildren. Several of their New York Shanghai friends also relocated to their West Coast retirement community, where they have kept a busy social calendar and stayed connected to their ever growing extended family.

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  ANNABEL ANNUO LIU WAS working at Scholastic Magazines in New York City when she married Sam, the physicist she met through her brother Charley. After Sam went to work for IBM, Annabel found a job at nearby Reader’s Digest in Westchester County. Then Iowa State University offered Sam a professorship in physics, and they moved to Ames. There, Annabel’s journalism career took off. The first story she wrote was a feature-length article about a local sculptor, which appeared on the front page of the Des Moines Register Sunday magazine. The story won top honors in the annual Iowa Press Women awards. As Annabel stood to be recognized at the awards ceremony, she heard someone gasp in surprise, “She’s an Oriental!”

  After writing nearly ninety front-page feature articles, Annabel was invited to teach journalism at the state university. The young couple welcomed the birth of a daughter and a son, and the family followed Sam’s research opportunities to Denmark, Germany, and finally Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they stayed for more than a decade. Finding no publications to write for in Oak Ridge, Annabel took her creativity into another genre: humorous essays in Chinese. Her stories about life as a Chinese migrant in America were serialized on the front pages of the literary section of Taiwan’s leading newspaper. She became a regular essayist for the World Journal, one of the most widely read Chinese-language newspapers in the United States. Not unexpectedly, her father disparaged her popularity, finding offense in his daughter’s self-deprecating humor. But Annabel persisted. And, in spite of her initial disastrous effort in the kitchen, she became quite skilled as a cook and was the translator of Adelle Davis’s popular Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit into Chinese—in part to keep her father in good health.

  With her brother Charley, she helped bring her younger sister, Li-Ning, and two cousins to the United States, coaching them on the English proficiency requirements and secretly editing her sister’s graduate school papers and doctoral dissertation into proper English. Eventually Annabel’s parents joined their children in the United States after her father retired from a distinguished career in Taiwan, thereby fulfilling his master plan for their family.

  For many years, Annabel tried to overcome her amnesia covering the period of the Japanese occupation when her mother had sent her to live with another family. She hungered for insight into that traumatic episode and the insecurities, self-doubts, and fears of abandonment that continued to plague her. Even after hypnosis, that period remains a disturbing void. However, other memories are so vivid that Annabel has refused to go back to Shanghai or to buy any major products from Japan. Just before she turned eighty, Annabel wrote and published two books of memoir and poetry in English. She adds these to the several popular books she has written in Chinese. Living near her daughter on Philadelphia’s Main Line, she writes and lectures about her complex and conflicted life, in which every place and no place is truly home.

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  AFTER TWO YEARS OF immigration proceedings, Bing Woo and her husband, Frank, managed to stave off the INS and avoid deportation to Taiwan. By then they had four children. Finally able to settle down, they bought a house in a New Jersey tract development after getting turned away from a neighborhood of Philadelphia, where they were told that “Orientals aren’t welcome.” Bing was treated for
her TB and on doctor’s orders put her children into foster care. This rekindled the nightmare of her own abandonment, and she tearfully insisted on bringing them home. Bing’s TB subsided, but her life wasn’t easy. Her educated husband was a proud man and a dreamer, unwilling to be subservient or second-class. Thanks to the same opinionated temperament that got him arrested for fighting with Elder Sister in Florida, his conversations with employers, neighbors, and strangers often ended in angry curses.

  To support their growing family, Bing’s husband drove a taxi and sold Fuller brushes door to door. Then he started a home business producing baby-themed novelties to sell to florists, with Bing, himself, and their children providing the labor. After a long day of caring for the children, Bing would spend each night doing hours of piecework on the items that Frank later delivered to flower shops in the family car. The income from the business barely covered the groceries, but at least Frank was his own boss. In between sales trips, he wrote love poems to his wife, and several books and plays that were never published. However, his published articles and essays criticized America’s China policy and attracted the attention of J. Edgar Hoover. FBI agents canvassed the family’s neighbors about Frank, but the investigation led nowhere.

  Bing found a few good friends in the suburbs. Once, as she pushed a shopping cart in a supermarket, with babies in tow, she locked eyes with another East Asian woman. Bing asked, “Are you Chinese?” at the same moment that the other woman asked, “Are you Japanese?” Sue Warren, the war bride of a GI who had been stationed in Japan, introduced herself and the two women became fast friends—just seven years after their two countries had been at war. Later, Bing’s closest friend, Maybing Chan of the downtown Manhattan Shanghainese group, moved her family to Bing’s New Jersey town. For years, their two families were the only Chinese Americans in town.