The first Chinese landed in San Francisco in 1848, and soon afterward settled in the center of the city near Portsmouth Square in an area that would become known as Chinatown. For the next several decades, anti-Chinese bigotry tangled with demand for Chinese labor. White American entrepreneurs needed Chinese workers to build railroads and wash laundry, but white American workers resented the Chinese for taking those jobs. In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration ban in the United States targeting a specific ethnic group. It remained in place until World War II.
The sixty years of Chinese Exclusion created a bachelor society among Chinese Americans, because most Chinese women were legally barred from immigration due to the racist belief that they were all prostitutes. The vast majority of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from southern China and spoke Cantonese and its related dialects, including Toishanese. Robbed of the ability to form stable families in America, Chinese Americans formed institutions to serve communities of bachelors, such as mutual-aid societies based on family surnames or home villages. Businessmen founded the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, or the Chinese Six Companies, to officially represent their interests and Chinatown.
World War II had a major impact on Chinese immigration. With Japan situated as the enemy, China—which had thrown off imperial rule in 1912 and formed a republic led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek—became an American ally. Chiang’s wife, Soong May-ling, aka Madame Chiang Kai-shek, was a key part of persuading America to support China against Japanese aggression. Madame Chiang was a Wellesley College–educated woman who spoke English fluently and was so adored by the American media that she appeared on the cover of Time magazine three times. In 1943, she embarked on a national tour to raise money and goodwill for China and became the first woman to address a joint session of Congress. After Madame Chiang’s tour, Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in December 1943 and established a quota that permitted 105 Chinese to immigrate each year.
Meanwhile, the war provided an additional route to citizenship for Chinese immigrants: the military. Previously, due to Exclusion, many Chinese Americans arrived under false pretenses. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed thousands of public documents, Chinese began to arrive with false documentation claiming that they were the children of American citizens of Chinese descent. These immigrants became known as “paper sons.” When the United States entered World War II, approximately one-third of all Chinese American men between ages fifteen and sixty enlisted, in comparison with about 11 percent of the general population. Military service is not traditionally valued in Chinese culture, but perhaps one reason so many Chinese American men enlisted was because it enabled them to become naturalized American citizens, regardless of their previous immigration history.
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.