After the war, quotas for Chinese immigrants loosened, first allowing veterans （including Chinese American veterans） to bring their wives to the United States, then extending that right to non-veteran Chinese Americans. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act allowed the naturalization of family members of American citizens, which enabled many Chinese families to reunify in the States. By the early 1950s, San Francisco’s Chinatown had developed two distinct but overlapping populations: the aging group of bachelors who’d immigrated before the war, and a growing community of families based in the merchant class. Shirley Lum is rooted in this part of Chinatown, and her aspirations to compete in the Miss Chinatown pageant echo the broader goals of Chinatown’s business community.
Due to longstanding racist beliefs that Asians could not be true Americans, which were drawn into sharp focus first by Japanese internment and then by McCarthyism, Chinatown’s leaders aimed to blunt white fears of the “other” by engaging in a quintessentially American cultural practice: the beauty pageant. Chinatown girls were selected to represent their community as models of American womanhood, spiced up with a little carefully cultivated exotic flair in the form of their dress, the cheongsam. The Miss Chinatown contest was originally held over the Fourth of July, making clear the patriotic connection, but by 1953, the beauty pageant had moved to coincide with the Chinese New Year festival. The festival and the Miss Chinatown contest were part of a broader effort to convince white Americans that Chinese Americans could assimilate and become model citizens—model minorities.
Combating racism through fitting in has never entirely worked. In 1956, the Immigration and Naturalization Service began the Chinese Confession Program, which promised forgiveness if an immigrant revealed their fraudulent “paper son” documents. However, if one confessed, that would implicate by extension their family, and sometimes the information revealed was used to deport suspected Communist sympathizers. In fact, the Confession Program snared members of the leftist youth group that Lily encounters, and ultimately revoked the citizenship of at least two of its members.
Lily’s family represents a category of Chinese immigrant rarely depicted in popular culture and is inspired by my own family’s experience. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, sons （and a few daughters） from upper class families in China sometimes came to the United States to study at American universities. The Chinese students who came to the States to study were not subject to the same immigration restrictions as laborers because of their class privilege, and they generally returned to China after completing their education. Some of them came from wealthy families; others were funded by scholarships. Many of them learned English in missionary schools in China. Although these students faced racism like all Chinese immigrants, their privileges smoothed their passage to America.
From 1937 to 1945, the Sino-Japanese War and World War II, both fought on the ground in China, limited the number of Chinese students in America, but after World War II, thousands more came in search of a modern education that they could use to rebuild their devastated homeland. However, the Chinese Civil War, fought from 1946 to 1949 between Chiang’s Nationalist Party and Mao Zedong’s Communist Party, got in the way. When Mao triumphed and the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, those Chinese students were stranded in the United States, which did not recognize the Communist government until 1972. Many Chinese students were able to be naturalized, especially after the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952, but a few were deported—notably, Dr. Hsue-shen Tsien.
My paternal grandfather, John Chuan-fang Lo, came to the U.S. in 1933 to earn his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago. While there, he met my paternal grandmother, Ruth Earnshaw, who was white. After he graduated, he returned to China to teach at Huachung College. He and Ruth were married on August 5, 1937, in Shanghai, days before Japan invaded. They spent the rest of the Sino-Japanese War and part of World War II as refugees in western China near the Burma Road. In 1944, my grandmother was evacuated with the help of the U.S. military, but my grandfather remained in China until 1946, when he obtained a temporary teaching job at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. He soon realized that he was being paid less than his white colleagues, and due to health care issues, the family needed additional income. Thus, the entire family went back to China in 1947, and were not able to leave until 1978, after I was born.
My grandparents didn’t know that the Communists would take over China. I have often wondered if they would have tried to stay in the States if they had known. Lily’s family, although different from mine, was loosely inspired by this question.