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.
LESBIANS, GENDER, AND COMMUNITY
In the 1950s, the concept of same-sex marriage was largely inconceivable; interracial marriage wouldn’t even be legalized across the United States until 1967. Homosexuality was categorized as a psychological disorder until 1987, and laws against homosexual sex only began to be repealed in 1962. These legal restrictions didn’t mean that gay people did not exist, but being gay was not culturally acceptable, and that meant the gay and lesbian community was largely underground and had its own coded language.
Within San Francisco’s white lesbian community in the 1940s and ’50s, women used terms such as butch and femme in ways that could indicate gender expression and sexual preferences. At this time, gender was perceived as a predominantly binary concept. Although people certainly crossed gender boundaries and existed between them, the terminology available to Lily’s community was black or white: men or women, butch or femme. Butches were lesbians with masculine appearances; femmes were traditionally feminine; and butches usually had relationships with femmes. “Butch/femme” has sometimes been misunderstood as an imitation of heterosexuality, but in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis explain: “Butches defied convention by usurping male privilege in appearance and sexuality, and with their fems, outraged society by creating a romantic and sexual unit within which women were not under male control. . . . Butch-fem roles were the key structure for organizing against heterosexual dominance.”
Expressing a butch identity involved cultivating a masculine appearance, which could involve wearing men’s clothing. Many cities outlawed cross-dressing in public; San Francisco’s law was not repealed until 1974. As lesbian Reba Hudson relates in Wide-Open Town, gay men and lesbians were often harassed by police for cross-dressing in the 1940s and ’50s, but women who cross-dressed would wear women’s underwear, because then “they couldn’t book you for impersonating a person of the opposite sex.”