Chinese refugess at UC Berkley - 28 July 1989

Early in the morning, here in San Francisco, when the night fog has burned off and the town's beginning to sparkle, I look out from a room on top of Nob Hill across to the bay, and then down, immediately below me, and there is a small park, no bigger than a city block.

At that time, before the town has really started to stir, there are no youngsters lying on their backs picking up a touch of skin cancer, and no loungers, but there are always, dotted here and there on the small lawns, old and middle-aged Chinese doing what at first you take to be some grave ritual dance.

They are doing their morning exercises. They swivel, with infinite slowness, on one leg and their arms weave up and round and, with a controlled slowness that must be murder on the calves and thighs, they move on to the other foot, placing it finally on the ground, with a gentle motion that wouldn’t hurt an ant. Sometimes there is a teacher there. Four or five men and women gravely mimic his gradual movements.

Slow motion is the word that distinguishes these people from any other exercises in a nation that is obsessed with jogging, aerobics, stationary bicycle pedalling, stretching, deep breathing, meditating and, coming in to breakfast, counts the calories and checks the cholesterol content of the approaching meal, all in the interest of prolonging the mortal span.

Which, if you try often enough, and regularly enough, can be done, for, as the excellent Jane Walmsley puts it – she is the expatriate American married to an Englishman, who wrote the funny, shrewd book, Brit-think, Ameri-think, "this is a nation which believes that death is optional".

I doubt the old Chinese down in the park bother much to count the cholesterol. They eat their own foods, they practice their own herbal medicine, and, perhaps more than any other immigrants, they keep to themselves. They live apart, once their jobs are done, rarely inter-marry and have never been cited, so far as I know, as notable ingredients in the melting pot.

The Chinese have been here longer than all the people they trade with and launder for and wait on. They were here in small numbers when California belonged to Mexico, and a couple of years after Mexico had lost it and gold was found on the American River, they came in to work for diggings and then, when the east-bound railroad was being contemplated, they were brought in their thousands to build it.

Today they have received a quite new type of visitor, one that came here as a visitor but is going to stay here by presidential permission for a year at least – some of them, no doubt, for life. They are the university students from Communist china, a small proportion of the 40,000 or more that Mr Deng, in a failure of foresight for which he must be cursing himself, allowed to come to the United States for a year or two of study.

They were in the vanguard of the students in the nearby campuses Berkley, San Francisco State, who paraded in protest over the Beijing massacre. Some of them were wary enough not to parade, for among the young Chinese here, especially the visiting students, there is a lively fear of spies and informers.

Some of the young who say they won’t go back of course are committed to the democracy movement and won’t go back because they daren’t. The wary ones who intend to go home have no intention of finding their names on a list of dissidents.

In between these extremes there must be, a heartbreaking variety of young people torn between loyalty to their families, their country, their beliefs. And some of them, I imagine, who have read the stirring democratic rhetoric of American leaders, who have applauded the congressmen who passed the bill that allowed them to stay here, who have dutifully read some American history and been moved by the tradition, the whole idea of the melting pot.

They must now be alarmed, disheartened at least, to discover that the melting pot, is no longer the true image of American society even as an ideal. It belongs to a vanished era, when the millions of immigrants came in from southern and central Europe after the turn of the century, whose first thought for their children was that they should become Americans. The time when President Theodore Roosevelt bravely pleaded, "Let us have an end of talking about German Americans and Polish Americans and Italian Americans, let us have no more, hyphenated Americans – the English language is the crucible which turns us all into one nation".

This idea, this ideal, is now being actively resisted, has been over the past two decades, by great numbers of immigrants, mostly from the Spanish-speaking people of south and central America.

Here in California the great immigrant flood, which is larger far than the European tidal wave that fell on the east coast, has poured in from two directions, from the south, from central America, but more and more, from the Pacific, from Vietnam and Cambodia and Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the Philippines and now – and never expected – a trickle from mainland China.

In Washington eloquent senators and other public ideology applaud in ringing tones the western flood. And, more perceptively, remark on the fact that of all the immigrants that have come here in the past 20 years, the children of the Asians – the Vietnamese especially – have outstripped native American students in such specialities as science and mathematics.

Having as tots to use the new language, it seems to me bizarre that it should be these people more than immigrant Europeans, or Hispanics, who alone have embraced, and in a sense glorified the idea of the melting pot.

The signs of this stubborn retreat into one’s own culture are plain and, to some people, disturbing in many parts of the country – not least in Florida, where, in the largest and most populous county, Dade County, the Hispanics have formed such a tight and prosperous community that the mayor of Miami could say, "There is no need whatsoever to learn English".

Dade County must be unique in having the largest population of unemployed who are unemployed because they are white and speak no Spanish. But, nowhere, I dare say, in this country are the symptoms of this fracturing of American society more virulent than in California.

Take the revealing case of a young Filipino girl who came here last year, enrolled at Berkeley high school. Miriam Avila, 17 years old, evidently a girl who had been brought up on the old American texts. "I came here," she said the other day, "expecting to be in the melting pot, the kind of place where I would meet people from all over, and get to know them."

But, she said, she found, Filipinos socialise only with Filipinos, Chinese only with Chinese, Latinos only with Latinos, blacks only with blacks, whites only with whites. Another girl, an 18-year-old, a refugee from south-east Asia, made the same despairing discovery. You don’t hang out with Vietnamese if you are a Chinese from Vietnam, and you don’t hang out with Chinese from Hong Kong either – they all hate each other.

Well, the testimony of two disillusioned teenagers hardly constitutes a scientific study, but it was given before a conference, sponsored by the University of California, in Sacramento, the state capital last week. The title of the conference was, "The changing face of race relations".

It was a very crowded conference of government officials and educators from California and beyond. It has, on its agenda, workshop discussions of white Californians, blacks, Hispanics, but the first session was on the state's more pressing racial problem, the mushroom growth of its Asian Pacific communities. Notice they stress the word communities, not the influx of immigrants from many contributories into the mainstream but their early absorption into closed communities of their own nationality.

At the beginning the conference heard from a demographer who brought the reminder that last year, for the first time, the numbers of white children in Californian’s schools fell below 50%. And the further reminder of a fact, which has been widely noted and discussed for several years, that by the year 2000, California will be, from the whites' point of view, a minority state – that's to say a majority of Californians will be Asian, Hispanic, Pacific Islands or black.

Now the danger in this knowledge among white people is the danger of conservative panic, which did set in just before the First World War, in response to the south, central European flood, and took the form of severe restrictive immigration laws against the new immigrants.

I must say I am surprised and heartened to see that, so far, this panicky reflex has not happened in Congress, though I must say also that as the millions keep pouring in, including more Mexicans to boost the seven million illegals, already here, it seems to me inevitable, in a country with 30 million very poor native Americans, that a strong protest movement is bound to arise, among the blacks, most likely.

For the present, though, such a conference as the one in Sacramento is facing the very unpleasant reality, as one Chinese American professor put it – California can no longer think of simple majority-minority relations. The reality now, is shifting power relationships between races and classes.

The tentative conclusion, the probable answer, he reached was a quite new one and a bleak one. Assimilation, he said, is no longer the dominant trend. Or put it more harshly and say we are looking at the prospect – not, I hope, inevitable – of the collapse of that much vaunted American dream into a nightmare of conflicting minorities, like the old German Republics' hardening into suspicion and distrust of each other.

We await the Bismarck who will bring them together again.

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