Chinese women in America have traveled an unusual path. Beginning in the 1840s, Chinese men came to the United States in large numbers as laborers in the gold mines and then on the transcontinental railroad, but few women emigrated. The first US immigration laws, passed in the 1870s, excluded prostitutes and contract laborers, and were clearly directed against Chinese, without naming them. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 then barred all laborers, male or female, from entering, but allowed in certain privileged groups, such as merchants and ministers and their wives, whose descendants peopled the earliest “Chinatowns” in American cities. The 1924 Immigration Act, however, prevented any Chinese from entering the country.
After China became an ally of the United States during World War II, the Magnuson Act of 1943 repealed all Chinese exclusion acts, although it limited immigration to only 103 people a year. Under the War Brides Act of 1945, more than six thousand Chinese wives and their children entered the United States. Finally, the Immigration and National Services Act of 1965 removed all racial bias from the immigration laws.
The Schlesinger Library began its Chinese American Women Oral History Project in 1991, after Patricia King, then director of the library, met Caroline Chang, a regional manager in the United States Office for Civil Rights. King told Chang about her desire to include the stories of Asian American women in the library’s holdings, and the two women decided to begin with an oral history project in Boston’s Chinese community. Subsequently, the Chinese Historical Society of New England became a cosponsor.
Chang herself has participated in the oral history project. Recalling discrimination she endured at Avco Corporation, where she worked as an associate scientist, she says, “I was hired in 1962, and I do recall sometime in 1964, ’65, I got a pay adjustment. And when I asked why that happened—it was after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 got passed, and you couldn’t differentiate between males and females—it wasn’t until then that I realized I had been paid less than the men.”
Twenty women have been interviewed for the library’s oral history project on Chinese American women, including a lawyer, professors, community activists, a factory worker, a nurse, restaurant workers, and a librarian. The project focuses on those in New England who are over the age of 65. Interview questions pertain to life in China, immigration to the United States, education, family life, ethnic identity, acculturation, and continuing ties to the homeland.
Another participant, Ai-Li Chin, who was born in China, came to the United States in 1937 to attend Colby Junior College and later studied sociology at Wellesley College. Her father was unusual in that he had allowed his daughters to go to school. Chin was hoping to return to China but was unable to do so because of the Japanese occupation. In 1951, she earned her doctoral degree in sociology from Radcliffe College and, during her studies, met Margaret Mead.
“Margaret Mead, after dinner, told me that she wanted to train me as an interviewer,” Chin recalls. “So, I remember vividly that I was sitting on the couch, and she was sitting on the chair, and she said, ‘Come closer to me. I want you to interview me. You can ask me any question you want to, I don’t mind.’” But because of cultural taboos, Chin couldn’t bring herself to interview an esteemed older person.
Rulan Chao Pian, a professor emerita of East Asian languages and civilizations at Harvard University, describes in her oral history how she was able to attend graduate school. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while her father was teaching at Harvard, she was educated at Radcliffe. Referring to her mother, she says, “You see, she was a medical doctor. But when I needed time or needed opportunity to study, and when she sensed that, she would help. . . . She said one day, ‘Why don’t you let me take care of your child so that you can go back to school if you want to.’ I think my mother sensed that I was restless. . . . So, I brought my daughter to her and went back to graduate school. That made it possible for me to work for my PhD.”
The exhibition currently on view at the library, From Exclusion to Empowerment: Chinese American Women in New England, includes women interviewed for the oral history project, along with Anna Chennault and others whose papers are housed in the Schlesinger Library. The exhibit—on display until early March—includes photographs, artifacts, and excerpts from interviews and shows the increasingly diverse roles of Chinese American women.
—Ruth Hill
Oral History Coordinator
For more information about From Exclusion to Empowerment: Chinese American Women in New England, please see its exhibition detail page.
The image is an excerpt from a manuscript for the American China Times, undated, from the Anna Chennault papers at the Schlesinger Library.
Photo by Jessica Brilli
