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Wave One -- The journey of Filipinos to what is now American soil actually began in the 16th and 17th centuries through the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade. In 1587, the first recorded presence of Filipinos in the continental U.S. occurred in Morro Bay, California.   The year 1763 marked the first permanent settlement of Filipinos in what is now New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1846, two men from "Manila" apply for Hawaiian citizenship.

Wave Two -- The second wave started when the Philippines became US territory as a result of the 1898 Spanish-American War. From the early 1900s through 1935, Filipinos were free to enter the United States as long as they could purchase a boat ticket. From 1903 to 1910, the US government sponsored pensionados (Filipino students) in American unversities and many returned to the Philippines. On December 20,1906, 15 sakadas (Filipino plantation workers) from Manila stepped off the gangplank of the Doric at a Honolulu dock.  From 1906 to 1935, American labor unions recruited many Filipino men to work as low-paid farm laborers for sugarcane, pineapple and other plantations.  Moreover, the United States Navy played an important role in developing the Filipino American communities.  As early as 1898, the U.S. Navy began actively recruiting Filipinos as stewards and mess boys. In 1901, President William McKinley issued General Order No. 40 allowing the U.S. Navy to recruit up to 500 Filipinos for the Naval Insular Force. By World War I, there were some 6,000 Pinoys, or Filipinos, in the U.S. Navy

 

Wave Three --  The third wave was triggered by World War II.  President Roosevelt’s Executive Order signed on July 26, 1941 called members of the Philippine Commonwealth Army to serve in the US Armed Forces of the Far East, with the promise of U.S. citizenship and other benefits. However, the Rescission Act of 1946 signed by President Truman reneged on that promise and declared Filipino US Veterans ineligible for the promised benefits.  As May 2008, US lawmakers are still working to resolve this injustice through the Filipino Veterans Equity Act. More Filipino women came during the third wave, partly through the War Bride Act of 1945.  Meanwhile, the Filipino American community continued to experience the adverse impact of U.S. anti-miscegenation laws prohibiting certain inter-racial marriages.  As for the US Navy, a 1947agreement allowed only the US Navy to recruit Filipinos for its armed forces and during the Korean War, the Navy annually took in up to 2,000 Filipinos, ages 18 to 24. By 1970, there were close to 17,000 Filipinos in the U.S. Navy.

Wave Four -- The fourth wave began in 1965 with much larger numbers of new immigrants to supply America’s need for professionals. They arrived in the third preference category of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This wave has resulted in the significant presence of Filipino American doctors and nurses, as well as engineers and other professionals  -- and the growing number of second, third, and fourth generation Filipino Americans. Meanwhile, recruitment of Filipinos into the U.S. Navy ended when an agreement for U.S. bases in the Philippines was scrapped in 1991.

 

Possible Themes in Chinese American Chapter: (by Ted Gong)

 

The Chinese-American experience in the United States is long. It reaches back significantly to the early 1800’s. The regional and linguistic differences of migrants arriving at different historical periods and for different reasons are marked. As a consequence, the social backgrounds and world perspectives of their communities and their American descendants are varied.

This variety makes it impossible to ascribe a single representative history for Chinese-Americans residing in United States. The Chinese-Americans residing in Fairfax County reflect the variety as well. For example, there are Mandarin speakers from North China who came to the United States to study at universities and who remained to conduct research There are Minnan speakers from Southeast China who came without visas, many of whom have gravitated to the restaurants and family businesses once dominated by Cantonese speakers who had arrived a century earlier. There are urban Cantonese speakers seeking commercial opportunities as hedges against the political reversion of Hong Kong to China. There are the American born descendants of Chinese laborers who came bore the brunt of the worse of the Exclusion Laws.

Rather than perpetuate impressions of a single Chinese-American community, it is more accurate and meaningful to organize the chapter on Chinese-Americans into cohorts by major events that represent the issues that motivated them to migrate to the United States and eventually into the Fairfax County area. These events shaped their responses to the fundamental question faced by all migrants of how to integrate into the larger American community and how to succeed individually. From the stories of two or three representatives of each cohort linked in historical sequence, the chapter provides an oral history of the Chinese-Americans in the United States generally and in Fairfax County in particular.

Cohorts are defined by historical and social events. These events overlap. Cohorts may live together spatially and share broad historical and cultural commonalities, but that does not mean they form a single Chinese-American community. Importantly, while the historical and social events defining them as a cohort have national and even international characteristics, their local experiences are unique to Fairfax County. This uniqueness marks the Chinese-Americans as part of the Fairfax community in which other members have shared understandings of immediate events and history continuously reinforced by active networks of relationships distinct from other local networks. In the case of the Fairfax County, it is a community that increasingly takes strength from its growing ethnic and cultural diversity.

This chapter on Chinese-Americans in Fairfax County (like the other chapters) describes the cultural and historical roots that have converged in ever entwining veins to nurture the tree that is the Fairfax community. Our roots are critical because we draw sustenance from them and their depth provides firmness to withstand storms. But as we explore the roots we must keep in mind that the beauty before us and that which is ultimately more interesting than the past is the living tree and the fruit it continuously bears.

With this background in mind, our next step is to find story tellers whose lives match with the following six cohorts:

I. Exclusion and the Expulsion -- The politics and racism of Exclusion shaped the psyche and communities of the earliest Chinese migrants to the United States. Largely a factor of West Coast and Rocky Mountain prejudices that manifested into racist laws and acts of violence and killings to drive the Chinese out of the United States, the East Coast saw its share of anti-Chinese activities. New York and other states passed laws to break skilled Chinese laborers seen as threats to populist union activities. The growers of Southern states thought they were importing compliant laborers to replace the freed slaves and were surprised when Chinese took employers to court over unfulfilled labor contracts despite the growth of Chinese commercial strength and competition checked by segregationist laws. Virginia and Fairfax County could be excused from the worse of the anti-Chinese activities by the fact that there were so few Chinese in the area. At the passage of the 1924 National Origins Act on immigration which codified the previous different Chinese Exclusion Laws, there was XXXX number of Chinese in Virginia and XXXX in Fairfax County. Eventually, American wartime alliance with China resulted in the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion laws in 1943.

II. National China, KMT Diplomats, Scholars and Merchants -- Those who were living the Washington DC region tended to be Chinese diplomats, college students and merchants. Unlike the Cantonese-speaking and laboring cohort shaped by the Chinese Exclusion Laws, these individuals were largely Mandarin-speaking urban elites from Nanjing, Beijing and Shanghai. They have little in common with the first cohort. Their defining events are related to the formation of modern China from the collapse of Imperial China, through the 1911 Revolution, the establishment of the Kuomingtang (KMT) government and the War of Resistance against Japan. Their shaping events continued in the aftermath of World War II and the retreat of the KMT to Taiwan in 1949. They continued through a period of close military and commercial relationships between the United States and Taiwan during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Nixon’s visit to Beijing and the opening of diplomatic ties between Washington DC and Beijing marked the end of the situation shaping this cohort and the emergence of events that shaped a younger generation.

III. Diaspora and Searching for Homes – Between the fall of KMT China and the emergence of a powerful Chinese government on the mainland, the economic and commercial emergence of Hong Kong and Taiwan fed the movement of Chinese to the United States in the sixties and seventies. This cohort consisted typically of exchange scholars and students and by others who primarily sought linkages to the United States as backstops to their business and commercial ventures in Hong Kong and Taiwan. From the fifties and through the sixties, there was also an understated, but significant, migration through Hong Kong of people displaced by the economic and political upheavals of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. These migrants took advantage of the family reunification provisions of the 1952 US Immigration and Nationality Act which had replaced the exclusionist 1924 Act. While affected to different degrees and different times by intellectual movements to establish Hong Kong and Taiwan identities, the world perspectives of this cohort were shaped by the cultural domination of a traditional China inconsistent with the rapid modernization of their society linked closely to British and American education and to Western judicial perspectives despite the political domination of a Communist China constantly posed to take back its territories. Emigration to the United States (as well as to Canada and Australia) became an option to the tension or fear of political takeover by a Communist China and by their anxieties to establish a future home. These people are represented by the “space men” who fly back and forth between business in Asia and families in the United States. They are the fictional “yacht people” expected from Hong Kong, in contrast to the boat people displaced actually from Vietnam in the seventies and eighties.

IV. Angel Island and Integration -- A fourth cohort revolves around the American Born Chinese (ABC) of the Cantonese laborers shaped by the Exclusion Laws and the violence that drove them into protective Chinatowns. This cohort is defined by events happening on Angel Island and the falsification of identities through the “paper son” phenomenon created by their forebears to circumvent the Exclusion Laws. This group and their sons and daughters are born and raised in the United States. They have bought into the American Dream. They do not experience the extreme violence and blatant racism perpetrated on their grandparents. While their parent’s language is mostly Cantonese, this cohort is more comfortable in English. Chinese politics and culture is foreign to them, although they take pride in certain traditions maintained by the family. World War II is another defining element of their psychology but, unlike the KMT cohort, their commitments are for defending America and they emerge with greater opportunities for them and their children to integrate and to advance in the American community. More Chinese-Americans arrive in Fairfax County motivated by Federal Government employment.

V. China Emerging -- With Mainland China opening in the late-seventies and continuing through the nineties and today, a new cohort emerges. They are represented at first as government sponsored students and exchange scholars and researchers, and increasingly as privately funded students. The defining event for them is the Tienanmen incident in 1989 but, as Chinese economic power grows and the political and social conditions stabilize and as Hong Kong and Taiwan are drawn economically and commercially to the mainland rather than repelled politically, these people also are attracted to work in the China, often as dual nationals. Typically, in contrast the Hong Kong migrants of the prior cohort who utilized the family-based visas, individuals in this cohort tend to enter the United States on their own as students, investors or employees under the F, J, H and similar visas.

VI. Making Opportunities, Illegal Migration -- While these cohorts become established and integrated, another group is emerging. Unlike the Cantonese-speaking cohort of the earliest migrants and the Mandarin-speaking urban elites of the later migrants, a Minnan -speaking cohort largely from Fujian Province has rapidly emerged. They are defined by the Golden Venture Incident of 1993. In that incident, about 280 migrants tried to avoid border inspectors and land in New York harbor but their ship, the Golden Venture, crashed (ironically within sight of the Statue of Liberty). Many of them were killed and the majority of them were detained by INS and eventually deported to China. Nevertheless, the Fujian Chinese population is growing and their psychology is shaped by organized alien smuggling operations. They are displacing the Cantonese-speakers in New York Chinatown and are taking over many of the small restaurants and laundries that once formed core businesses for the Cantonese of the Exclusion period.

 

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