Helen Zia was one of five children of immigrants from Shanghai who had met and married in New York. Her father had a degree from Saint John’s University, but he couldn’t find a job after the family settled in New Jersey in the 1950s. “He earned money as a taxi driver,” Zia recalls. “Later we kids helped him out in our home making baby toys and trinkets for flower shops.” He regularly wrote letters to newspapers and politicians, complaining about their views on China. This attracted the attention of the FBI, which put him under surveillance. When an aunt was evicted from her restaurant after she had upgraded the kitchen, Zia began to wonder if Asians were singled out for such treatment. As a child, she began to dread one question–“No, where are you really from?” The message, she says, was “you can’t be one of us.”
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She got the message. In her new book, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, Zia remembers receiving a letter from a Scottish pen pal when she was about 12. The girl had sent photos of herself and her family. “Of course,” Zia writes, “she would expect pictures of me–and somehow I had neglected to mention that I was Chinese American.” Certain that the Scottish girl would reject her, “since, after all, she had wanted an American pen pal, not a Chinese one,” Zia never wrote back.
Higher wages drew Zia to Detroit in 1976. “I got a job in a Chrysler stamping plant,” she recalls, “but two years later the auto industry collapsed and most of us got laid off. The executives, instead of looking at the rusted equipment, blamed us workers.” They also pointed fingers at their Japanese rivals, whipping up xenophobic sentiments exemplified by bumper stickers reading “Honda, Toyota–Pearl Harbor.”
“People used to define us, but we turn out to be none of those things,” she says. “The time has come for us to define ourselves.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Lionel Fluker.
