Chinese Americans in Albany, Past, Present and Future

Keynote Speech given by New York State Assemblyman John McEneny at CCC’s 30th Anniversary Dinner on Nov. 8, 2003.

Transcribed by Cynthia Cramsie from a videotape recorded by Jian-Guo Wang
*************************************************

Dajia Hao (Greetings to You All).

It’s a great honor to be here and to be able to address the Chinese Community Center. What your accomplishments have been over the last few years is absolutely astounding. I’ve been asked to talk about the Chinese in Albany in the past, in the present, and in the future.

I was born and raised in Albany, as my parents and grandparents were. My great-grandparents were all Irish immigrants or the children of Irish immigrants. I know I’m dealing with people who understand family and ancestry – as my mind’s eye goes back my memory is somewhat longer than my years would indicate. My father was born in 1899 and my mother in 1902 - although she’d be very upset if I announced that publicly while she is still living – and I was raised in an extended family, which included my grandmother, who was born just after the Civil War. All four of my grandparents were born in the 1860s. All of us carry in our minds and in our hearts our own memories and our own life experience, but we often forget that we also carry the memories of our parents, who carry the memories of our grandparents and their parents before them. It’s often said that when an older person dies, it’s like a library burning, because so much is contained in a lifetime, not only your memories but things that were passed down to you from those people in your ancestry that went before you.

One of the projects that I hope the Chinese community will take on, particularly now that you are so well-organized and you have support and you have so much enthusiasm from within the Chinese-American community and the larger community as well, is that you will put down those memories, the memories that you carry in your parents, and also of older members of the community, because these are rarely written down and when they are they are written only in a very cursory, superficial manner. And those valuable archives are most fragile. They are in the memory of men and women. And this I would hope is a good oral history that will explain the struggle of Chinese and Chinese Americans coming to this country. Tell the good parts, but don’t leave out the struggle and the bad parts, and there are many.

When I grew up – I was born in 1943. Is that an important year? Other than the fact that if you follow American coinage, because the war was on, all the pennies were silver-looking. They made them out of steel because we ran out of copper. I always tell my kids it was because I was born they changed the coins. 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, was the year that an act of Congress ended one of the shadiest, darkest periods of American history in terms of how we regarded other races of people. For 61 years, from 1882 until the middle of the war, people who were called ‘Mongolian’, and that was the term that was used at the time, were denied citizenship in the United States.

Not long ago, I came upon a pamphlet in a used bookstore, and it was a dollar for the pamphlet, and it said, ‘The Rules of Citizenship’ and it was a 1924 volume and it was written by an old professor who, when I was a child – I grew up on North Pine Avenue in Albany – I remember the professor because he wore a big – those of us who are older remember we called it a Gaby Hayes beard – a big beard that went around like that. He was quite a character and he taught political science – they called it government – at what was then called the State Teachers’ College. So I recognized Dr. Hutchinson’s name, and I go, ‘Well, I collect Albany authors. You know, Bill Kennedy and the like, and Bernie Conners and what have you.’ So I bought the pamphlet for a dollar, thinking I’ll just put it on the shelf, that’s one more. And one day, for whatever reason, I started to page through it, on what the rules of citizenship were in the 1920s. And they gave examples, that since members of the ‘Mongolian’ race were ineligible to be citizens of the United Sates and had been since 1842, that obviously they would be denied citizenship. There was a case that started and they were giving case law in, ironically in this area, where an RPI student, who was from Thailand, applied. He had long-term respectable residence here, he was educated with a college degree and he applied to be an American citizen. And in those days you went to the Albany City Court which would be the lowest, like a town court, and was denied, quite legally, because he was ‘Mongolian’. And this went to another court and another court and finally up to the Supreme Court and the ruling was – this was 1894 – by the time it went through the courts and they said, ‘Yes, that was the law.’ And he could not become a citizen, even though he lived here, he was educated here, and was certainly outstanding, in terms of what he had to offer. He was ineligible. Perhaps even more shocking, as late as the 1920s, it was ruled – now bear in mind that you know your history as well as I do – that the United States, because of the Spanish-American War, owned the Philippines from roughly 1899 to 1900 on (what official date you use, it’s never later than ’02). So the Philippine Islands were a part of the United States and a ruling came up that if an American citizen, in this case a Caucasian, married a Filipino, were they still citizens? And the ruling was, ‘Of course not.’ They married a member of the ‘Mongolian’ race and were therefore not citizens anymore, of the United States.

I spent some time – as some of you know I represent most of Albany in the State Assembly. I also have six towns: Guilderland and New Scotland, and the four hill towns up in the Heidelberg Mountains. I was talking to the mayor of Altamont a little while ago and the things one talks about with mayors, and they have in the village hall, a small history area with the kind of pictures that we were lucky to see that Lucy Wang brought and maybe some others here as well. And he says, ‘Well, you know, we could add to our collection now.’ I said, ‘Well, what’s that?’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘We have some other things in storage that we thought we wouldn’t bring out right away because they’d be a little bit embarrassing.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘Well, we have all these Ku Klux Klan uniforms.’ I said, ‘What Ku Klux Klan uniforms?’ He said, ‘Well, you know, Altamont was a hotbed of activity of the Ku Klux Klan, in the 1920s.’ I said, ‘You know, I remember that, that somebody had burned a cross on the side of the hill.’ And he said, ‘Yes, this was quite local, and we agreed that we would not embarrass the descendants until the last member of the Klan from the 1920s, died. And he just died a few months ago, so we’re going to bring them out now.’ We need those reminders. And that Klan was anti-foreign, anti- anyone who wasn’t white, and then once you got to white, then they started throwing out groups of people who didn’t fit into their definition of an American. The law of the land did not guarantee citizenship to anyone of the ‘Mongolian’ races. Guess who that included until 1943? American Indians. I guess they weren’t American enough. This was the legacy. And when I listened and I heard Dr. Shen get up and talk about, ‘When we came here there were about six families and we really had to look and find other people,’ and that was the mid-60’s. He’s absolutely correct.

Is there an early history? There is an early history. And I know you want to hear it, but it is not the happiest history. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, and because when a Chinese man was allowed to come to the United States, it was impossible for him to get a wife over here. The purpose was to make sure that the community never grew. During those years, there was enormous pressure, particularly from organized labor, sometimes from the very immigrants who were one notch higher in immigration, of grade, that the next group would come in, and displace them with cheap labor, etc…. During those dark days, many certainly came, and made their way to the big cities – rarely in the rural areas, there are no farmers in New York State back in these days that I have ever heard of – and they were confined for no other reason than, well, two reasons. One was language. It was very difficult when you’re denied sociability to learn the language well. And the other was outright discrimination. The union wouldn’t accept you, you didn’t get the jobs, if you got a job offered to you, it was as a strike-breaker and you were lucky to be alive after that experience. And so they gravitated into the two traditional businesses of Chinese laundries – and I can remember there were several of them in my youth – and Chinese restaurants, which were enormously popular with everyone. I can remember – and I realize now as I got older that there was another pattern which I didn’t recognize at that time – and it was a pattern of isolation and loneliness. In order to make a living, with a laundry, for example, if you were lucky enough to open one up, you certainly didn’t open it up next to another Chinese laundry. So you went to another part of town. Worse, you might go to Troy, or to Cohoes. And so the Chinese community, what little there was of it, was scattered all over. But there was another element as well. Where were the women? Without women, there are no children. A few, very few could send back to get a wife to come over from China. But that was the dream, not necessarily the reality.

My first job, getting out of Sienna College – it was in 1965 – and I worked in the Albany County Department of Social Services. We called it the Department of Public Welfare then. And I remember talking to people. I’ve always been interested in ethnicities. I’m president of the Irish Legislators and I belonged to the Italian-American Club out at Sienna. And no, I’m not Italian, but it was a good club and they fed you well. And I’ve always been very interested. I’ve also had an historian’s hat. And so I think I get away asking personal questions that other people don’t ask. Because they accept it because, oh well, he’s the historian. You know, I ask people when they came here, where they came from, and which language did they speak, and their name is unusual-looking, was it ever changed? Normally, that’s not polite conversation, but in the historian’s hat you can get away with a lot and also people open up to you much more freely. And I remember talking to some people who had worked for years in the Public Welfare Department and at one point, and only once, a Chinese name came up. And it was an old man. In those days you didn’t have Social Security, Supplemental Social Security like you do now. If you didn’t have enough credits for Social Security, you got nothing. And in the later years, in the 60s, they put in the gold check. It looked just like a social security check, called SSI. It replaces a Franklin Roosevelt project called Old Age Assistance, which is public charity, or public welfare. Then people would apply. But originally, people wouldn’t apply because it meant going on welfare. And I remember the Chinese name came up and I said, ‘This is unusual.’ They said, ‘Yes, It’s very unusual. We very, very rarely have anyone who is Chinese go on public welfare.’ And I said, ‘Let me see the case file.’ So they gave me the case file. And the pattern was – the man had either worked in a restaurant, I think he worked in a restaurant, he didn’t own it – he had gone through probably eleven years of being supported by his best friend. And he was from Troy and the best friend was from Albany. And the pattern was that these men – almost all of them bachelors, had no children, no relatives, not even brothers, living nearby – had formed an association, and whenever any one of them got in trouble, all the others would help out. Now here were two old Chinese men, one going broke to support the other to spare the indignity of going on public assistance. And I talked to several people and they said, ‘This is it, that’s the way they do business.’

Lucy Wang was saying that in the old days yes, Albany did have a Chinatown – very small, on Division and Green Street, and basically Hudson Avenue – and on Hudson Avenue there was a community center which in those days meant men’s club. And Lucy’s mother used to do the cooking on Sunday and they would come, not from just Albany and up and down the street. They had no families. They were each other’s families and they would get Sunday off from work and they would come down. Why? So they could basically speak their own language and talk to other people with the same experience. I think that early history – with a few exceptions – that early history in the Capital Region was one of great loneliness, suffering from discrimination, suffering from the results of discrimination even though you might not have been conscious of it directly. That law of the land had disastrous effect on the quality of their life.

When did all that change? It changed with John F. Kennedy. When, in 1943, and the reason the Chinese suddenly became socially acceptable was the reason that other groups rose up. During the war, the performance of Chinese Americans, regardless of discrimination, in uniform, was extraordinary. Tremendous bravery, sacrifice and a number of people who were not Chinese saying, ‘You know what? I guess these are really Americans after all.’ And there was pressure during the war, especially as one patriotic act of service and sacrifice came out after another to say, ‘This is a discriminatory law. I didn’t know it.’ So the Chinese were then allowed in and they were made citizens and so on and so forth, if they qualify, usually by residency or birth. But up until John F. Kennedy, in the early 1960s, the next law took affect. And the next laws were the very ethnically biased immigration laws that were passed after World War I. 1921 and again in 1924, the immigration law said that people could be admitted into the United States in the exact same proportion as they were in existence in the 1910 census. Well, what did that mean? It meant you have a lot of people of English descent and German descent and Irish descent and French Canadian descent and so, if they were, let’s say 10 or 15 or 20 percent of the immigrants, therefore 10 or 15 or 20 percent of all immigrants could come from those countries. Well, when you didn't have open immigration, what percentage were Chinese to begin with? Of all those immigrants in 1910 they would be allowed that same percentage of the country, which meant virtually nobody.

In the early 60s John Kennedy, who distinguished himself as a grandchild of immigrants and great-grandchild of immigrants, going before the D.A.R., the Daughters of the American Revolution, and is famous for opening his speech with ‘Fellow immigrants,’ which made people stop and think. We are all immigrants, the only question is when. And Kennedy felt that this was very unjust that people would be judged because of an accident of history or because of race or creed or color. And so he changed, had the congress change immigration laws, so that it no longer discriminated by who was here in 1910, but rather by what skills the United States needed. Because a lot of these countries – like England or Germany – they weren’t even sending immigrants anywhere near their quota. It was just a way of keeping people out. And new rules were set up, rules that said, ‘Are we reuniting a family?’ We always had immigration to some extent for refugees that continued and was expanded. ‘What skills do you have to offer this new country?’ ‘Where do we need skills? Is it in medicine? Is it in science? Is it in the halls of academia?’ And a new type of immigration came in, starting in the 1960s, as a legacy of John Kennedy. Now the stereotype of someone Chinese, would it be, that, ‘Oh, you must mean that doctor,’ ‘Oh who’re you talking about, the professor?’ And a new type of immigrant began to come in because the type of immigration was changed. Eventually you would see some diversification. Because once you’re in, then you can send for relatives and you’re dealing on family ties rather than perhaps, education. The new type of immigrant that’s coming in from China and elsewhere – in the Asian world in particular and elsewhere – tends to be an educated individual and you are seeing that more and more. But there are changes. The old ethnic stereotype is not there anymore.

Let me show you the greatest symbol of America, the home of the immigrant. Where is the United States Department of Immigration and Naturalization located? Latham, Route 7. The image of the immigrant coming to Ellis Island, impoverished, undereducated, desperate, moving into a tenement in an inner city – and the immigration office is where? It tells you that there has been a totally different change. There has been a sea-change of what it means to be an American immigrant. It also means that something that everybody loves – Chinese and non-Chinese – Chinatown, as we knew it, began to disappear. And the larger Chinatowns – certainly down in New York City, in Manhattan – Chinatown has expanded to the point where it’s taking over Little Italy. In fact, most of Little Italy is Chinese. I mean, you can still get noodles either way, but nonetheless. Other smaller Chinatowns like the one in Albany where people go back to Chinatown to, I guess get a shot in the arm for their culture and to speak their language and so on. This wasn’t that big a Chinatown. Or in Utica or Boston or wherever. They went, they faded. There might be an architectural relic somewhere, some lettering on a window. They’re gone. The normal, or average, I guess is a better word, Chinese family today moved to the suburbs. Why? Because they don’t like the cities? No. Because, what’s one of the key goals of a Chinese family today? Get the kids the best education you can. It’s a common American goal. Which means Shaker is going to look real good. That doesn’t mean you dislike Albany, but this is where you want to go for school. In fact, more so than housing, time commuting, or anything else, that school district – just like any other educated person – is the number one reason. And also, unlike so many of those bachelors of old, we’re talking about family people. It’s not unusual to find more than one child in a Chinese family in America. Unfortunately, that’s not the case back in the homeland.

There are other changes too. I was very happy to hear Juliana mention something. Because I’ve studied all immigrant groups. And sometimes old obsolete fears, phobias, rivalries tend to be brought over to the new world and they break people apart. The Germans for years were very divided in this country until they realized they were getting nowhere and finally realized they’d better get together or they would lose their culture and any economic or political clout they might have. The Irish in England, who are very strong – and if anybody knows anything about the Irish of course, ‘What county are you from?’ And things were not going well. I remember talking to an Irish immigrant over there and he said they had a meeting and they said, ‘No more County Cavan or County Kerry. If anybody asks you who you are, you say you’re Irish.’ The same thing happened in Syracuse, New York. In the 1860s there the Irish were all divided, getting nowhere. A meeting was held in a tavern, if you can believe that, and it was getting nowhere because people would be asking where you were from and you say, ‘Dublin.’ You’ve got to say, ‘Ireland’ and they’ll realize there’s more of you than they think and they’d better be mindful of that in business and in politics and in social life.

What has happened here is that there are words that I don’t hear anymore with young people. I have yet to hear a young Chinese say he’s from ‘mainland’ China. I don’t hear it anymore. I don’t hear ‘red’ China anymore. I think Americans do not understand how international the Chinese are. They have absolutely no idea how diversified they are. I’ve gone a lot of places in this world and I’ve been in Chinese restaurants in Ireland, Africa, and South America, for example. Which tells you something about my gourmet tastes. But I have found the Chinese literally everywhere. I was on a trip in Central Europe with my wife. We took off – and the last kid’s out of the house and in college now – so we celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary. We wanted to go somewhere we’d never been before so we went to Central Europe. And we had three people on the bus tour who were Chinese. Two of them – I recognized them as Chinese – I looked at their passports and they were Malaysians. Maybe 10 percent of Malaysians are Chinese. But very influential. They control large parts of the economy. They live in a Muslim country. In this case they were not Muslim. I have an attorney who works for me and some of the legislation I do. She is ethnically Chinese. ‘Where are you from?’ ‘The Philippines. Been there for a few generations.’ Up in Sacred Heart Church every Sunday there was a mass in Vietnamese. Ethnically they’re Chinese, they speak Vietnamese. The diversity of the Chinese population – whether they’re from Macao, or Hong Kong, or Singapore or whether like Lucy Wang, they’re from Albany – the diversity of this great race that has contributed so much and contributed so much to every single community that they have settled in is something that very few Americans, and maybe even a few Chinese don’t quite realize. There are literally hundreds of thousands of Chinese in Cuba. They’re the people who came over to dig the canal, work on various projects, came over as contract laborers and stayed. I have a friend from the Dominican Republic and we were talking about something once and he mentioned something Chinese. And I said, ‘What about Chinese, you’re from the Dominican Republic, spoke both Spanish and English.’ He says, ‘Why do you think I look like this?’ He’s part Chinese. How did this happen? The Chinese are virtually everywhere.

Now if the United States embraces the strength of the Chinese that are with us – and they will be with us. We have a very powerful economic and cultural asset that we can use virtually everywhere in the world, not just dealing with China. What has changed dramatically is that originally I can remember when Chinese came here in the 60s, in the 70s, they always had some kind of a technical position. That’s not true anymore, because the natural diversity of the people, the directions that their children are going in, are breaking out of the modern day stereotype. This Semitech at the State University that Paul Tonko and I, and Speaker Silver and everybody on the other side of the aisle as well really wants to see, the expansion of RPI, the increase of business-oriented sciences at Union and Sienna, the advances in medicine – all of these are relying on having the best skills in the Capital District that we can get. We want Tech Valley to work. Why? For the same reasons as everybody in this room. We want our children to be able to stay here and to prosper. The tremendous increase in the number of Chinese since the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and that legacy of J.F.K. changing the law has enriched America to an extraordinary degree and I’m proud to say, it’s enriched the Capital District.

I often give talks on Flag Day and I’ll go to the Elk’s Club – has an elaborate procedure, I’ve done them all so they haven’t asked me in a couple of years – and I always end that talk by pointing out that the dream of America and the freedom of America is something that people who are native born really don’t get. They’ve never known anything else and like so many things in life, they take it for granted. But the person who has known another way of life – a more repressive government, a lack of freedom, economic curtailment, the inability to grow, the inability to expand and have their family prosper, people who know this from their own experience or that of their parents – they have an appreciation of America which in many ways surpasses those who were here going back to the American Revolution. The flame of liberty burns brightest in the eye of the immigrant. He or she really understands. And so I’m very pleased that you had me here tonight. It’s always an honor to come out here. I look forward to you continuing this wonderful diversity of Chinese, Chinese-Americans, and even the wonderful young kids that you bring into the fold.

So, Xie Xie (thank you).

Back to About CCC