5ANNA

GROWING UP IN A CHINESE LAUNDRY on the fringes of Chinatown certainly gave young Anna a rather unique girlhood in early twentieth-century America. As soon as she reached school age, Anna was sent, along with her elder sister Lulu, to the California Street School. Founded in 1872 and first known as Central Street School and then Sand Street School, the public institution had just been renamed California Street School in 1903, two years prior to Anna’s birth. Located in downtown Los Angeles, it attracted mostly white and some Hispanic students.¹ For the handful of Chinese children like Anna and Lulu, their opportunity to attend a predominantly white school was bittersweet fruit that emerged from the toxic soil of American racial politics.

Shortly after California joined the Union in 1850, the state’s earliest law establishing public education in the state made no mention of racial restrictions, but subsequent legislative acts were quick to impose school segregation. The 1866 Act, in particular, restricted enrollment in public schools to white children only and required that “children of African or Mongolian descent, and Indian children not living under the care of white persons” be educated in segregated schools. In 1884, when Mamie Tape, the eight-year-old daughter of a successful Chinese businessman and his artist wife, was denied admission to the Spring Valley School, her parents sued the San Francisco Board of Education. On January 9, 1885, Superior Court Judge James Maguire ruled in favor of the plaintiff in Tape v. Hurley, which declared that the race-based denial of school admission was unlawful. On appeal, the California Supreme Court upheld the decision of the lower court. But justice was short lived. In response to the state’s Supreme Court ruling, the state legislature swiftly passed Assembly Bill 268, which allowed the establishment of “separate schools for children of Mongolian or Chinese descent.” The bill added that, “when such separate schools are established, Chinese or Mongolian children must not be admitted into any other schools.”² What is especially remarkable is that the law passed a full eleven years before Plessy v. Ferguson, the United States Supreme Court decree that ushered in nearly a half-century of “separate but equal” legislation.

Elsewhere in the country, such as in the Jim Crow South, the plight of Chinese children was equally parlous. The so-called Mississippi Chinese—hundreds of laborers recruited to the Delta area during Reconstruction—had planted their roots in the South over time. Due to their skin color, however, they fell into a racial vacuum in a bifurcated Black-and-white society. The Chinese children were excluded from white schools, and their parents were unwilling to send them to Black schools because most thought of themselves as non-Black. In 1924, when the eight-year-old daughter of Gong Lum, a Chinese merchant with considerable standing in the white community in Rosedale, Mississippi, was rejected from a white school, he went to court. After his lawyers argued that Martha “is not a member of the colored race nor is she of mixed blood, but that she is pure Chinese … [and that] there is no school maintained in the District for the education of children of Chinese descent,” the Circuit Court decided in Lum’s favor. But the state Supreme Court reversed the decision, citing the 1890 Mississippi Constitution, in which “separate schools shall be maintained for children of the white and colored races,” and asserting that Chinese are not white and must fall under the category of “colored races.” The case—Lum v. Rice—then went to the nation’s highest court, which upheld the decision of the Mississippi Supreme Court—an outcome all too predictable in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson. Writing the majority opinion, former president and now Chief Justice William Howard Taft maintained that “It has been at all times the policy of the lawmakers of Mississippi to preserve the white schools for members of the Caucasian race alone.… A child of Chinese blood, born in, and a citizen of, the United States, is not denied the equal protection of the laws by being classed by the State among the colored races who are assigned to public schools separate from those provided for the whites, when equal facilities for education are afforded to both classes.”³

In the years before Brown v. Board of Education finally outlawed school segregation in 1954, Chinese children in America walked a fine line, their education subject to the vagaries of local laws and national trends. For Anna and her sister to be able to attend a predominantly white public school in Los Angeles, their parents must have felt fortunate and proud. But as much as the girls took pride in attending the school outside Chinatown and looked forward to making friends, bullying would put a stop to any such dreams. Later in life, Anna would tell an interviewer, “My first school was in the old building on California Street. I was very miserable. The American boys used to chase me around at recess, called me a Chink and pulled my little pigtail.” In an autobiographical piece written in the 1920s, she described those horrors in greater detail: The schoolboys surrounded her and her sister and “pulled our hair, which we wore in long braids down our backs. They shoved us off the sidewalk, pushing us this way and that, and all the time keeping up their chant: ‘Chink, Chink, Chinaman. Chink, Chink, Chinaman!’ ” Tormenting the Chinese girls became sport for the other schoolchildren. The Wong girls felt that they were “suddenly thrust into a new terrifying world.”⁴

What young Anna failed to realize was that her personal pain was merely part of a collective experience, a rite of passage for Chinese Americans that commenced in the mid-nineteenth century. Bullying or mob violence against the Chinese had already become a staple of American street life. Some linguists believe that the word hoodlum derives from the anti-Chinese cry of “huddle ’em,” a signal for mobs to surround and harass the long-braided “Celestials.”⁵ Shrewd readers would know that Lord of the Flies is much less a tale about children left to their own devices in a natural state than an allegory of the adult world as a wild jungle. Or, as the Confucian adage puts it, “Human nature is good at first. The same nature, varies on nurture.” Perhaps inspired by those nickelodeon reels portraying robotic Chinese bodies that could be stretched or elasticized at will, a boy sitting behind Anna at school stuck pins into her to see if the China doll felt pain differently. The next day, when she wore a thick overcoat for protection, the boy used a longer pin. Soon, as Anna recalled, she had to wear six coats as a barricade against him and got sick from overdressing.⁶

No stranger to these anti-Chinese shenanigans, Sam Sing told his daughters, “We must be proud always of our people and our race.”⁷ But, concerned for their children’s safety, the parents transferred the girls to the Presbyterian Chinese Mission School inside Chinatown. One of the first Christian institutions to enter the Chinese community, the Presbyterian Church was founded in 1876 under the leadership of Ira M. Condit, a veteran missionary who had served in Canton for five years in the 1860s. The school had first begun in a mission house near the old Spanish Plaza, where both English and Cantonese were taught. Then, around 1894, the Chinese Children’s School was founded at 766 Juan Street. Twenty years later, public school enrollment figures listed twenty-one children in the primary grades and twenty-three in the middle grades. One early account portrays the Chinese Children’s School quite favorably:

The most interesting and unique place in Chinatown is the kindergarten for Chinese children, maintained by the Presbyterian church. It is situated in a quiet nook, away from the bustling portion of Chinatown. It is tastefully furnished and arranged, and in every respect it is the most pleasant and healthy place. Here gather a dozen or more healthy and active urchins in their quaint dresses, daily.⁸

But other descriptions paint a more unflattering picture:

Classes in the mission vary. Grades disappear. Regulations are elastic as attendance in this factory of private coaching is not unlike a country school.… One boy wrestles with fractions, another scratches his head over complicated verbs of the English language which stick out their tongues at rules. The smaller girls learn to sew and sing psalms interchangeably in Chinese and American until they can do handsprings.⁹

In addition to the Presbyterian School, other church schools were also available. In its heyday, Chinatown boasted eight Christian missions, including Methodist, Nazarene, Congregational, and others, all competing to save Chinese souls, young and old. For many of these children, including the Wong sisters, the mission schools served as a transition to the regular public schools. Forced back to Chinatown for their schooling, Anna and Lulu would later return to public schools as they got older, but they continued to juggle the various school systems, and the long hours became punishing: Regular school went from nine to three, followed by Chinese school from four to seven thirty or eight, with only a half hour for supper. On Saturdays, Chinese school went from ten to four, and then half a day on Sunday.

Nora Sterry, a principal of the Macy Street School in Chinatown, pointed out that the great handicap of Chinese children like Anna was that “they do not know how to play.” This observer of Chinatown life went on to say, “The routine of their daily life outside the public school does not allow for play and they must actually be taught what seems instinctive in other children.”¹⁰ Though not as condescending as Jacob Riis’s comments, this statement does not hold water when we measure it against the life of young Anna. In fact, she recalled fondly the happy times at the Presbyterian School. “Here though our teachers were American, all our schoolmates were Chinese. We were among our own people. We were not tormented any longer.” Those were the years when Anna, a tomboyish creature with a grimy face, tousled hair flying, played baseball and marbles, all the while having a good time with her “gang.”¹¹