August 3, 2009
Dear Colleague:
In the early 1950s, I did field work for my California degree in the deserts of Arizona. From time to time, I would drive through a ghost town, astonished by how well preserved it was, as though the occupants had just left for an evening stroll, but even more astonished to find—Yee's Laundry! In the bleak landscape of gun-toting ranchers, I thought I stood out like a sore thumb. The occasional man on horseback I met must have wondered, "What on earth is this pith-helmeted Chink doing on my property?" And yet why not? Here, after all, was Yee's Laundry and a couple of steps beyond might well be Chang's Chop Suey! In other words, dear reader, I belonged to this landscape! My compatriots came a century before I did. Only they came not to study pediments, but to lay tracks across the barren land, dig tunnels through the Sierra Nevada, so that the American empire could be bound, from coast to coast, by a band of steel. Chinese laborers by the tens of thousands did much of the heavy lifting, with great loss of life. Their reward? The passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. It was repealed only in 1943. Anti-Chinese laws remained on the law books of California until as late as 1952—a date that is hardly ancient history to me since I arrived in California only a year earlier. Needless to say, discrimination against Chinese immigrants continued. On August 1, 2009, Paul Fong, a state assembly man representing Silicon Valley, co-sponsored a bill apologizing for the State's long history of bigotry and injustice.
Silicon Valley? Aren't the Chinese over-represented in that hotbed of innovation? And, for that matter, aren't Chinese faculty and students conspicuously present on the most prestigious university campuses? Among ethnics, the Chinese are undoubtedly a success story. Now, what accounts for the success? Why is it so difficult for other ethnics—especially the targeted minorities—to duplicate? The usual answer is that Chinese culture favors education. True. But that's not the whole answer. What others? Well, let me tell a story. When I was still teaching at the University of Minnesota, I knew of a bright American Indian student whose grades suffered because she was repeatedly withdrawn from the university to help her relatives—on one occasion as frivolously as to assist her aunt shopping. Ethnic students are severely handicapped by this cult of tight reciprocity. The Chinese are different: their reciprocity is postponed reciprocity. They invest in their brightest child as though he is a thoroughbred race horse, and they won't dream of recalling him just to pull the manure cart at home. Another difference is this. The Chinese, numbering in the hundreds of millions for two millennia, have a large and complex civilization; and like all civilizations, it is a flea market overflowing with goods—pot stickers, birds'-eye soup, pigtails, foot-binding, concubinage, mahjongg, calligraphy, paper, magnetic compass, fire crackers, civil-service examination, blue-sea navigation, kang bed, rakishly curved roof, hutung, courtyard house, the Great Wall—the list goes on and on. What I am getting at is this. The Chinese, like all householders with full closets, don't mind ridding themselves of a few items—even many—so as to make room for newer and fancier goods, which they purchase from foreigners without ever fearing that they might thereby lose their identity. Can this be true of the much smaller groups—the targeted minorities? Their closets being less full, they may have reason to fear that losing any of their contents will mean the loss of their identity; hence, unlike the Chinese, their reluctance to take on science and technology. My advice to them is, "Let go! Hanging on is never the answer to life."
Best wishes,
Yi-Fu
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