Voyages of Inquiry: China

When immigrants and refugees cross seas and borders, they hold tightly to certain beliefs. One shared by many is that the commodities that never lose their value are gold, land, and your familly name.

Andrea Louie is an adjunct writer in the Office of College Information and Publications. She is the author of a novel, Moon Cakes (Ballantine Books, 1995).

   When my grandparents were a young couple in the mid-1930s, they returned to what is now Guangzhou, in southern China. It was an act of faith, a reverse pioneering to the home country to start a business or build up a plot of land they owned. Their precise intentions have been lost over the years, but certainly they must have been earnest, even buoyed by a strong optimism. My grandmother sent letters regularly to her brothers and sisters in San Francisco; she wrote in English, with an elegant, sure hand. These missives were mostly requests for things—tins of soda crackers and clothes for her newborn children, one of whom was my father.
   Once, my grandmother asked for a specific kind of battery that my grandfather needed. A family friend offered to hand-carry the heavy battery to China on an ocean voyage. When he disembarked, he accidentally dropped the burdensome item over the edge of the gangplank. Horrified, he tried to pay someone to dive for it, but to no avail. Soon afterward, my grandparents gave up China for good; like the battery, their reasons for relinquishment were lost at sea. They packed up three children and their disappointment and became, forever, exiles in America. By 1940, they had two more children and were making a go of things in a too-small tenement apartment at 8 Doric Alley in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
   Especially because there are so few stories in my family, I love this tiny bud of information. I imagine the man’s breath of astonishment as the battery slips from his grasp and disappears into the sea. Perhaps this small incident speaks of life’s elliptical paths through action and consequence. We learn that information may be more valuable than gold, that land may be snatched away, and that names—sometimes whole lives—may be bought for a price. Even children learn that what was once called home may be pressed into ingots of memory, and, at times, that is all that is left to declare.
   The world may be getting smaller, but great gulfs of questioning and misunderstanding remain. While one no longer must take the slow boat to China, a voyage of inquiry remains a passage of diligence and patience. In the following articles, members of the Brooklyn College community describe their intercultural experiences.
   Winifred Chin, ’74, has published her father’s memoir, Paper Son: One Man’s Story (Temple University Press, 2000). Paul Shelden, professor of music, and Barbra Higginbotham, chief librarian, have each recently traveled to China to share their expertise with Chinese colleagues and lay the foundation for a continuing relationship. They returned with new knowledge and appreciation of a world that remains, to a large degree, unknown to Westerners.

—Andrea Louie

The Making of Paper Son: One Man's Story

by Winifred C. Chin

Winifred C. Chin, ’74, is an associate professor of religious studies at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. Paper Son: One Man’s Story (Temple University Press, 2000) is the story of her father’s experience immigrating to the United States from China during the Exclusion era. The following essay, accompanied by an excerpt from the book, explains how Chin helped her father shape the book for publication.

Above: The Chin family at   home, c. 1955. Right: Certificate of Identity   for Chinese Persons, issued  to Tung Pok Chin, in Boston, August 1, 1934.

   My father arrived in the United States in 1934, at a time when Chinese people were not exactly welcome here and had to “buy” their way in. This method of entry began with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred the immigration of Chinese laborers for the following ten years, and continued with a series of acts that severely limited the immigration and naturalization of Chinese people. Not until 1943 were the acts repealed and an annual quota set for immigration. Undaunted, many Chinese immigrants began life in the United States as “paper sons.”
   Some of the earliest Chinese immigrants married in the United States and produced the first generation of American-born Chinese. When these children grew up, they traveled to China to marry and, in time, returned to the United States, reporting that they had children in the Chinese motherland. The United States would issue papers to those wanting to bring their “children” here (wives were barred from entry). However, rather than bring over their own children—if they really existed—many sold the papers on the Chinese black market to men who wanted to enter the United States. The prospective émigré memorized all the information on the paper—his paper name, age, paper father’s name, date and place of birth, and so forth—and upon giving the right answers to immigration officials, lived the rest of his life under that name and with a false identity as the son of an American.
   Paper Son: One Man’s Story is the memoir of my father, Tung Pok Chin, who came to the United States in this manner. But it is more than just one man’s story — Paper Son speaks for countless anonymous Chinese immigrants of the Exclusion era. It documents life for the early Chinese immigrant in one of the least studied periods of Chinese American history — the 1930s through 1970s. Its East Coast setting is unique to the subject of Chinese immigration, as most studies document the experiences of immigrants to the West Coast.
   My father earned his living working in laundries, but he was also a prolific writer. His poetry and essays were published in the China Daily News, a Chinese-language newspaper, believed by the FBI during the McCarthy era to have Communist sympathies. Despite being the first Chinese citizen in the Northeast to enlist in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he was not immune to McCarthyite witch-hunts—house searches were rampant and people were often considered “guilty by association.”
   I never gave much thought to the plight of the paper son when I was growing up. To me, the FBI agents who came to visit my father in the laundry were just friendly customers. By the time I entered Brooklyn College in 1970, my father had gradually revealed to me his past: the name that he had used all his life was not his real name, nor was it mine. It was only our paper name, and all that I had known factually about my father was false. My father assured me that I probably had many classmates who were also children of paper sons. I never asked, and none of my Chinese classmates ever broached the topic. Brooklyn College remained my haven from confusion at this time—I majored in philosophy and consoled myself with the higher truth that a name is, after all, just a name, with no significant bearing on my ultimate being.
   While in graduate school at Seton Hall University, I took a course in contemporary Chinese poetry that included my father’s writings. Tung Pok Chin, who had not only stopped writing during the McCarthy years but who had also burned much of his work, had resumed his art and was finally given due recognition as a contemporary Chinese poet.
   When my father retired in 1978, he commenced the writing of his life story with the encouragement of his lifelong friend Dr. Ralph E. Pickett, then dean of the New York University School of Education, to whom Paper Son is dedicated. By 1986, he handed me his memoir and the more I read it, the more I became convinced that his story should be given to the public. I worked with my father to edit the manuscript and translate some of his poetry. After his death in 1988, I continued our work, providing historical perspective to his story.
   I don’t know if my father understood the full significance of Paper Son at the time he was writing it. For him, Paper Son is an unseen personal triumph. Yet in documenting his life and the lives of his friends and acquaintances, Tung Pok Chin spoke not just for himself but for all the paper sons who lived their lives in silent fear of discovery and persecution—and he acknowledged the kindness shown to him in times of tribulation by the one American friend who made a difference.

Excerpt from Paper Son:One Man’s Story A Dream in Flames The following excerpt tells of the aftermath of a visit by two FBI agents who questioned Tung Pok Chin about the poet Lai Bing Chan, the pseudonym Chin used in writing for the China Daily News.    At that hour there was usually not much talk at dinner. On the day the FBI agents came to the laundry, however, I told [my wife] about the visit. After the children were tucked into bed we discussed precautions we should take in case of a house search, not an uncommon event in those days.    That very night, we carefully wrapped all our back issues of Chinese newspapers with back issues of the New York Times and threw them away (we subscribed to the “pro-Nationalist” Chinese newspaper, as well as to the China Daily News, but that did not seem to make any difference to officials). By not hanging onto the Chinese papers, we thought we would appear, in our own little way, more “American.” The idea seems a bit silly now, but at the time it seemed the patriotic thing to do. The poetry that I wrote, more than two hundred poems published between 1945 and 1955, poems I had carefully cut out of each issue of the China Daily News and pasted into scrapbooks, were all taken out and burned. What reason would I, Tung Pok Chin, have for collecting the poetry of Lai Bing Chan, a writer for some “pro-Communist” paper?    I could not hold back the tears as I watched my life’s work literally go up in flames. I once had visions of binding my poetry into a book for publication. Perhaps some Chinese American scholar would come across it and translate it into English, I thought. With such a detailed record of immigrant life, the old home town, the history and emotions of the paper son, I would really gain recognition as a poet! But now, all was lost. Winifred woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. She paused, sleepy-eyed, to look at the flames from the burning of my works and asked what we were doing.    “Just creating a little fire to warm our hands,” I said. “But don’t you try it,” I gently warned her. She went to the bathroom and returned to bed. She did not ask about it again the next day, or ever, but when she was old enough to understand current events and to read about the McCarthy Era on her own, I reminded her of that night. She remembered it as a dream, she would later tell me . . . vague, but very real in its own way. From “A Dream in Flames,” Paper Son: One Man’s Story, by Tung Pok Chin with Winifred C. Chin. Reprinted by permission of Temple University Press. © 2000 by Temple University. All Rights Reserved.

An October in China:The Art of Keeping Track

by Barbra B. Higginbotham

Barbra B. Higginbotham is the chief librarian and executive director of academic information technologies for Brooklyn College.

Barbra Higginbotham, before the gates to Shanghai Jiaotong University.

   Two years ago, during my tenure as president of the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), I struck up a friendship with Yu Lan Chou, a librarian at the University of California at Berkeley’s East Asian Library. Originally from Taiwan, Chou has maintained many professional contacts throughout Asia, and she asked me whether I had any interest in lecturing about technology in China. Chou facilitated dialogues with the Chinese Ministry of Culture, which provided support for a visit. I was then invited by the ministry to lecture at three of China’s top ten universities—Qinghua University in Beijing (China’s MIT) and Xian and Shanghai Jiaotong Universities, both superior institutions with emphasis on the sciences. My combined professional responsibilities at Brooklyn College, plus my tenure as the president of LITA, made my expertise particularly attractive to these institutions.
   Long before I left the United States last October, my hosts at each university had asked me to suggest a list of topics from which they selected subjects for my lectures. Armed with PowerPoint slides and my laptop, I talked about everything from issues and standards surrounding the preservation of digital information, to Brooklyn College’s Virtual Core Project, to the design of contemporary academic libraries. My audiences included librarians, faculty, administrators, and IT staff, and the discussions that followed each presentation were rich in content. In Beijing, I lectured without an interpreter; in Xian and Shanghai, while my hosts were fluent in English, at each meeting or presentation an interpreter assisted as needed. Everyone was invigorated by our exchange of ideas about current academic librarianship.
   From the very beginning, it was apparent that there are many more similarities than differences between Chinese and U.S. libraries, especially with regard to their technological achievements. Qinghua’s library is a mirror site for many U.S. and European electronic journals, sending these resources to academic institutions all over China. Library director Liu Guilin, professor of chemistry, is justifiably proud of his staff’s technological prowess. At each of the three universities, students have the same full and unfettered access to the Internet as do Brooklyn College students—no attempt is made to limit their explorations.
   The most visible disparities are tied to staffing. Chinese libraries are far more comprehensively staffed with disciplinary specialists than those in the United States, and the concept of clerical staff is virtually unheard of. All library employees are called librarians, but rather than holding graduate degrees in library science they earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in such specializations as physics or literature; professional library education is rare.
   Chinese academics are among the country’s elite. Nearly all faculty and librarians live on campus in high-quality faculty housing and tend to retire young, making way for the next wave of new scholars—often foreign trained—seeking employment. At the Shanghai Library, all staff under age forty-eight must pass a rigorous computer literacy course in order to obtain or retain their jobs. Why forty-eight? Fifty is a typical retirement age, my hosts told me, and “older people” often lack the ability or the motivation to learn technology skills. After retirement, faculty spend time with family, write, and continue to do their research.
   My hosts at all three universities are interested in exchanges with Western libraries; they are eager to send librarians to work in the United States and to accept American librarians in turn. We are aiming for our first exchange in spring 2002, when the new state-of-the-art Brooklyn College Library will provide an unparalleled experience for a Chinese intern. We plan to bring Zhao Feng of the Shanghai Jiaotong University Library to Brooklyn and to send one of our own to Shanghai. There is much to be shared between Chinese and U.S. libraries, to the profit of both cultures.
   It is expected that by 2007, Chinese will be the predominant language on the Internet, and China’s increasing activity in world trade surely will influence its role as a major global player. Americans—and all Westerners—will benefit from learning more about China, the Chinese, and the way they approach information storage and technology. Likewise, the Chinese have much to learn about the creative approaches the West has developed in service delivery and the economic considerations of running a modern academic library. We are only just beginning to forge global and personal relationships.

Crossing Musical Borders: Chinese Instrument Manufaturing

by Paul Shelden

Paul Shelden, professor of music and assistant dean of graduate studies and research at Brooklyn College, is an accomplished clarinetist and conductor. He is spearheading the development of the Interdisciplinary Musical Instrument Research Center at Brooklyn College, a new scientific research and development laboratory in musical instrument technology.

Professor of Music Paul Shelden reviews the intricacies of a clarinet with an employee of the Hebei Jinyin Musical Instrument Company.

   Throughout my school years in the 1950s and 1960s, I had always considered China beyond exotic—it was a forbidden place and as far away as any Westerner could imagine. Last year, I had the opportunity to see for myself if China was as mysterious as I had imagined.
   My weeklong stay in beautiful, modern Beijing was highlighted by a side trip, a five-hour drive to the Hebei Jinyin Musical Instrument Company, Ltd. Jinyin is a leader in making inroads into the American musical instrument market. The company manufactures primarily student-model instruments of superior quality. The numerous buildings within its compound are dedicated to the manufacture of particular instruments—in one building workers produce only saxophones and flutes; in another, orchestral stringed instruments; and in others, oboes and piccolos. Clarinets are manufactured exclusively in a neighboring town. After touring the company, I returned to the States with the seeds of what has become a burgeoning relationship as well as respect for and a changed perception of China.
  Shortly after my return, Jinyin sent me some remarkable student-model instruments—clarinets (both hard rubber and plastic), flutes, a violin, and soprano and alto saxophones—that in many respects were very close to a professional standard. My colleagues praised the quality of the instruments, especially noting the consistency of structural details.
   Last summer, I returned to Jinyin to consult with individual factory managers about quality control, research and development, and various aspects of the American mainstream market.

A technician at the Jinyin factory reviews the tone holes on various woodwind isntruments

   We began by discussing slight modifications of the key mechanisms of clarinets—small details of key support placement, bridge key alternations, slight alterations to the tone holes, and a few cosmetic details—which the head technician incorporated into the instrument.

   My experience was similar at the saxophone and flute factories. Each instrument sounded wonderful—perfectly in tune, with rich tone, excellent mechanism, and balanced registration. At Jinyin, the manufacturing process is executed with a devotion to the highest standard of quality. Throughout the machine shops, where bores are cut, tone holes are drilled, brass cylinders are fashioned into saxophones, and raw rubber is turned into hard-rubber clarinets, artisans give meticulous attention to the handcrafting of woodwind instruments. The integrity of Jinyin’s product will surely contribute to the success of the Interdisciplinary Musical Instrument Research Center at Brooklyn College.
   My experience with Jinyin has made me realize the truth of music as a universal language, one that transcends differences in political, ideological, and cultural traditions. Even in remote areas of China, where the developed world seems far away and time appears to stand still, there is a great appreciation for absolute perfection, an extraordinary attention to minute details and the ability to transform practical objects into works of beauty.
 

The Interdisciplinary Musical Instrument Research Center to Open

A reception was held in the Georgian Room on January 11, 2001, for Cheng Yong Hao, a dignitary of the Hebei Jinyin Musical Instrument Company, Ltd., to announce the establishment of the Interdisciplinary Musical Instrument Research Center at Brooklyn College.    “We are looking forward to a fruitful relationship with Brooklyn College’s music program,” Hao said at the reception.    The center will work with the Conservatory of Music and the Departments of Physics, Psychology, and Computer and Information Science to conduct scientific research on musical instrument technology. It is hoped that the research—with technical support provided by Jinyin—will lead to new techniques for manufacturing professional-quality student instruments.    “This is a rare marriage of all three disciplines,” said George “Skip” Brunner, senior laboratory technician, Conservatory of Music. “The center will provide a unique opportunity to study the link between technology and sound.” In a welcoming address at the reception, President Christoph M. Kimmich said that the imaginative interaction needed to develop the center has been “fun to watch. It represents a novel approach to teaching and performing and a reaching out to the community beyond the college.”