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WORK TITLE: From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express
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BIRTHDATE: 1953
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https://www.cpp.edu/~ceis/ethnic-womens-studies/faculty-and-staff.shtml
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LC control no.: n 2004047971
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HEADING: Liu, Haiming, 1953-
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670 __ |a Liu, Haiming. The transnational history of a Chinese family, c2005: |b CIP t.p. (Haiming Liu) data view (b. 1953)
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PERSONAL
Born 1953.
EDUCATION:University of California, Irvine, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator and writer. Former English teacher in China; California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, professor of Asian American studies.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Haiming Liu is a professor of Asian American studies in the Ethnic and Women’s Studies Department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He moved to the United States in 1986 from China, where he taught English. Liu researches and writes about Chinese immigration, culture, and food. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine.
In 2005, Liu published The Transnational History of a Chinese Family: Immigrant Letters, Family Business, and Reverse Migration. The book expands on his Ph.D. thesis. Liu describes the concept of jia, the Chinese word for both family and home. His subjects are family patriarch Yitang Chung, who came to the United States as an herbalist in 1900, and his son Sam Chung, who immigrated in 1915. Sam worked as an asparagus farmer in the San Fernando Valley, despite having trained at a police academy in Guangzhou. Sam’s letters to his wife Zhiyuan, daughter Constance, and son Tennyson back in China reveal the duality of their lives in America and China. In 1923 Constance joined her father in America, but she returned to China in 1927 to attend the Nankai School in Tianjin for high school and college. Meanwhile, Zhiyuan came to America, where she and Sam had two more daughters.
Liu discovered the writings of Sam Chung in the archives of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California and recognized the letters as a gold mine of information. “The corpus was the raw material awaiting someone like himself, a person well versed in Chinese history, culture, and the written language to decipher it and weave it into a coherent picture,” observed Franklin J. Woo in China Review International. “The transcontinental aspect of the corpus led him to conclude that a Chinese family can be a dynamic network as well as a static locus of geography,” added Woo.
Focusing on one Chinese immigrant family, Liu scoured more than 3,000 family letters and other sources to reveal how migration does not mean a full break from the past but the beginning of a new life in a new country that incorporates dual cultures and transcends national boundaries. He explains how the Chung family lived between their two worlds and how, even if family and home were separated, there was a mutual obligation of responsibility, kinship, and cultural values. While the older generation looked back to a past in China, the younger generation adapted to American life and culture, pursuing education, good careers, and meaningful life as they negotiated racism in America.
Liu next published the 2015 volume From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express: A History of Chinese Food in the United States, part of the “Asian American Studies Today” series. Liu traces the introduction and popularity of Chinese food in America. Drawing on hundreds of historical and contemporary documents, newspaper reports, journal articles, and writings about Chinese food in both English and Chinese, Liu starts with the immigration of Chinese to the U.S. West Coast during the California gold rush. These people brought with them their food traditions and tastes. Over the years, however, Chinese food sold commercially was adapted to the tastes of the American masses. In fact, Liu reveals that American favorites in Chinese restaurants, like chop suey, General Tso’s chicken, and fortune cookies, are all American inventions.
In addition to the diversity of Chinese cuisine, Liu also explores related issues, such as Chinese migration, cultural negotiation, race, and ethnicity. He presents an array of information, such as with respect to the stories of Chinese Americans, how Chinese food influenced American culinary culture, national restaurant chains like P.F. Chang’s, and how Chinese restaurants have become a place for shared ethnic identity—not only for Chinese but surprisingly also for American Jews. He also talks about Chinese food culture spreading around the world.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
China Review International, spring, 2006, Franklin J. Woo, review of The Transnational History of a Chinese Family: Immigrant Letters, Family Business, and Reverse Migration, p. 204.
ONLINE
Haiming Liu. The Transnational History of a Chinese
Family: Immigrant Letters, Family Business, and Reverse
Migration
Franklin J. Woo
China Review International.
13.1 (Spring 2006): p204.
COPYRIGHT 2006 University of Hawaii Press
http://uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals/
Full Text:
Haiming Liu. The Transnational History of a Chinese Family: Immigrant Letters, Family Business, and Reverse Migration. New Brunswick, NJ,
and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005. xiii, 257 pp. Paperback $23.95, ISBN 0-8135-3597-2.
This book is a case study of a Chinese American family whose home in the U.S. is greater Los Angeles. The two pivotal patriarchs in this account
are Yitang Chung, who came to the U.S. as an herbalist in 1900, and his son Sam Chung, who joined his father in 1915. After trying
unsuccessfully to be an herbalist himself, Sam finally settled as an asparagus farmer on a piece of his father's land in the San Fernando Valley.
Although Yitang and Sam were father and son, immigration authorities listed them as business partners, for Yitang had sold Sam's immigration
papers to a relative who wanted to emigrate to America. The transnational history in this book is about the progenies of (1) Yitang, who (after his
wife died in China in 1908) married Nellie Yee, a much younger American-born Chinese woman from Ventura, California, who bore three
daughters and a son (all except one daughter married spouses from China); and (2) Sam, his much older U.S. immigrant son who left behind in
China a daughter (Constance), a son (Tennyson), and a wife (Zhiyuan), who later in 1923 came with daughter Constance to join him in the U.S.
In 1927 Constance returned to China, joining her brother Tennyson at the Nankai School in Tianjin for her high school and college. In the U.S.
the reunited couple (Sam and wife Zhiyuan) gave birth to two other daughters. (1)
Considering himself to be a "knowledgeable" person with a classical Confucian education and training at a police academy in Guangzhou to be
an officer, Sam Chung in true filial obedience but with reluctance, accepted his fate in America as a labor-intensive asparagus farmer, an
occupation he held for more than half a century. What little spare time he had from his farming chores was spent in writing directive letters to his
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son and daughter in China, delegating family responsibilities to young Tennyson, and outlining in detail the educational schemes for both
children. Much of Sam's writing time was also spent in composing poetry, and reflecting on life in America as a minority Chinese person,
specifically as a Chinese farmer amid competition in white society. Over the decades, Sam Chung's cumulative writings in Chinese amounted to
some 900 letters to Constance and Tennyson and other relatives in China (hand copied in "eighteen student notebooks"), more than a thousand
letters to clan members and friends, including essays and poems on Chinese life in America in general and farming in particular (p. 9).
Arriving in America in 1986 from China where he taught English, Haiming Liu completed graduate studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Through contacts with the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Chinese Historical Society of
Southern California (established 1975) he came upon the collected archives of the latter with a virtual "gold mine" of Sam Chung's writings, all in
Chinese. The corpus was the raw material awaiting someone like himself, a person well versed in Chinese history, culture, and the written
language to decipher it and weave it into a coherent picture. For his Ph.D. dissertation Liu decided on a study of this unusual extended Chinese
American family that spans the Pacific. The transcontinental aspect of the corpus led him to conclude that a Chinese family can be a dynamic
network as well as a static locus of geography. His transnational thesis is succinctly encapsulated in the opening salvo of his Introduction as
follows:
Family and home are one word, jia [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in the Chinese language. Family can be apart, home relocated, but
jia remains intact, as it signifies a system of mutual obligations and a set of cultural values. Deeply rooted in members' emotional affinity, ethical
beliefs, and life-long obligation to one another as family, many Chinese immigrant families had the viability and adaptability to survive long
physical separation, expand economic activities beyond a national boundary, and accommodate continuities and discontinuities in the process of
social mobility. (p. 1)
In focusing on Yitang Chung, a prominent citizen of the Chinese American community of Los Angeles and an herbalist (who claimed only to
"sell" but not "prescribe" or to "treat" patients), Liu gives a window into the problems and difficulty of a specialist in Chinese traditional medicine
in a white America prejudiced toward things foreign. Liu also illuminates the guarded American posture against "quacks" or "folk-doctors"
marginalized by established Western medicine, represented by the American Medical Association (p. 61). At the same time, the author shows
"how Chinese immigrants used an ethnic skill to create a lucrative and respected career outside the limited sphere of menial labor jobs typically
open to them at the time" (p. 69). Liu cites a 1913 directory that lists 27 different herbal specialists in Los Angeles, many catering to "Caucasian
clientele" as well as Chinese. Because of its "noninvasive" nature, characterized by only feeling the pulse or observing the tongue, herbal
medicine was attractive, especially to Caucasian women who were hesitant to be examined by a male practitioner. Herbal medicine is seen by the
author as a "transplanted culture" and a bridge between East and West. Yitang's third son, Weiying "Elbert" by his first wife in China, succeeded
in entering the U.S. as a youth for most of his education leading up to medicine as his father had, but with an M.D. degree from Georgetown
University in Washington, D.C. He returned to China to serve at several hospitals and marry. Eventually, he resettled in southern California with
his wife and three daughters after a successful career in Western medicine in China. Not wanting at first to remain in China because of immediate
language and adjustment difficulty, Elbert's decision to stay was in part due to the strong urging of older brother Sam who never hesitated to be
direct: "In America, the racial difference is profound. The whites are regarded as the most superior race. Very few white people would go to a
Chinese doctor [of Western medicine]" (p. 171).
The combination of Sam Chung's written documents in Chinese, Liu's ability to read and interpret these documents, and extended interviews with
different living members of the two Chang nuclear families provided the author with the material that went into his story. Although English is not
his first language, Liu nevertheless communicates clearly his ideas and historical understanding of Chinese American life in the U.S., which was
plagued with the "push" of white racism and the "pull" of Chinese cultural identity, in an era governed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that
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did not end until 1943 (pp. 7-8). Liu's deficiency in the English language has not marred the excellence of this study. His recurrent interpretation
for the reader of what may be quite self-evident in the exchange of letters between Sam Chung and his two children only reinforces the deep
impression they leave. Even his several typos, misspellings, and mistakes do not diminish the readability of the text. Most obvious is his use of
the word "diseased" for "deceased" family members (p. 92).
At the young age of 15, Constance as an educated youth was a feisty and determined person, imbued with a mission of her generation, as well as
her father's "to save China" by making the nation strong, free from foreign domination (p. 140). Writing to Sam after returning to China to join
Tennyson at the Nankai School in Tianjin, she states her ambition:
First, I want to promote equal status between men and women in our society.... Second, I want to reform Chinese education. [...] Third, I want to
reform the political system. When people receive adequate education, the political system can easily be monitored and then there should be also
an election system, in future. By that time, those financial monopolies cannot oppress and exploit the ordinary people. (p. 186)
Sam Chung's authoritarian manner (i.e., father knows best) can be seen in the forthrightness of his views and plans for his children. In an earlier
letter to Constance regarding smoking, he admonishes:
I hear you started to smoke, which has made me very upset. You are only thirteen and should know that this is a bad habit. You should really
change to a different school. Very few countries allow women to smoke in public. In America, you could hardly find one woman out of ten
thousand who could smoke. If there is one, she must be a low-class woman. Decent women never smoke. (p. 133)
Chung's primary concern, however, was to map out the education programs for his two children in relation to the parents' plan:
Your mother and I plan to retire after all of you finish your college education. Hopefully, we will fulfill our plan in about ten years. For Tennyson,
he will get a B.A. degree in Los Angeles, an M.A. in Columbia University, and a Ph.D. at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where
your third uncle studied. Then he will study in Europe for two years before I send him back to China, and work for the Foreign Ministry. If a
position abroad is available, it should at least be a consul position. Otherwise, he will stay in China. (p. 157)
At Nankai School Constance met Tang Mingzhao, who was destined to be her husband. Constance completed her education at Nankai and was
admitted to Yanjing University in Beijing where she completed her studies in the summer of 1936. She returned to the U.S. and studied at
Columbia University in New York where she met up again with and married Tang Mingzhao (despite her father's objection that he was of a
"lower class"), who was a social activist working with the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance and founding chief editor of the leftist China Daily
News in New York. A daughter was born to them. McCarthyism in the 1950s made it necessary for Tang to return to China, followed later by
Constance and their daughter, Nancy.
After the People's Republic of China replaced Taiwan in the United Nations in 1971, Tang and Constance returned to New York with a diplomatic
mission to the UN. Staying in China, their daughter Nancy was the official translator for Mao Zedong during the visit of President Richard Nixon
in 1972. Despite his pro-Nationalist China leanings, Sam Chung was proud of his daughter, son-in-law, and especially granddaughter Nancy.
After the death of both parents, Nancy continues to live in Beijing today. She serves as vice-chair of the Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and
Overseas Chinese Affairs Committee and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference; advisor to the All-China Federation of Returned
Overseas Chinese; and executive vice president of the Translators Association of China. She is interested in connecting with Chinese historical
societies in the U.S.
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Following closely his father's design, Tennyson arrived in the United States in 1929 as a foreign student. (Sam had sold his son's immigration
papers to another relative, one of many whom the Chung patriarchs had helped.) He earned his B.A. from the University of Southern California,
followed by a master's degree at Columbia University, and then a Ph.D. at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., where he married Xi-en
Ying, the daughter of a Chinese diplomat. Together they had three daughters. After a brief career as a diplomat in the Chinese embassy in
Nicaragua, he taught for many years, ending his career as a professor of Asian Studies at the Florida Presbyterian College (renamed Eckerd
College in 1960), in St. Petersburg until retirement.
Haiming Liu's first book in English is an excellent beginning for research into this transnational Chinese American family. It is a microcosm of
the historical contexts of both China and the U.S. at a period of history when Chinese immigration was at a trickle and interracial and intercultural
understanding of Asian peoples had hardly begun. (2)
This transnational history of Liu's Chinese American family, however, is atypical of their generation. So many Chinese settlers in the U.S. were
restricted to the Chinatowns in the laundry, restaurant, and other services, which Sam Chung as a self-cultivated person, regarded as the "lower
class." These settlers too, however, had interesting stories to tell, perhaps not through writing. The Chinese laundry can also be seen as another
Chinese ingenuity in adapting to the prejudice and racism of white America. The laundryman had a sense of self-determination and being in
control of his workplace, despite the fact that his hours were long, tedious, and filled with boredom. (3) As an interloper into American ethnic
history, Haiming Liu has shown what analytical, systematic scholarship, and careful reading of the growing body of Chinese American literature
can achieve. Other scholars as well as players in this history can further flesh out the missing pieces of this story of a transnational Chinese
American family. (4)
NOTES
(1.) The indexes of the book provide a useful family tree chart, Glossary of Chinese terms (some in Cantonese), and the names of members of the
Chung network in Chinese characters. In the middle of the book, there are a dozen photographs of key members and places of the Chung Chinese
American family network.
(2.) Asian American (along with Latino and other ethnic as well as feminist) awareness and advocacy groups came onto the American scene
riding the coat-tails of the African American civil rights movement that gained momentum in the 1960s. By the 1970s, ethnic studies programs
were established in many of the universities, including the Asian Studies Center at UCLA (founded in 1969) that provided Haiming Liu with a
prestigious Rockefeller Fellowship to complete this research. By the late 1990s, some Asian Americans, well-embedded in mainstream American
society, such as Harvard Law School graduate and one-time speech writer for President Bill Clinton, Eric Liu, can even boast that being Asian is
merely "accidental." Born in the suburbs of Wappingers, New York, to Taiwanese parents, well-steeped in Asian culture, and married to an Anglo,
Eric Liu is relaxed and poised to say that Asian American identity is no big deal, only "contrived" and "unnecessary." (See Eric Liu's Accidental
Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker [Random House, 1999].)
(3.) See Paul C. P. Siu, The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation, ed. John Kuo Wei Tschen (New York University Press, 1987). This
University of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation took more than thirty years to see the light of day. Before World War II, there were tens of thousands of
Chinese in the U.S. who never fulfilled their dreams of returning to China. Living in isolation as laundrymen, domestics, cooks, and restaurant
workers in an essentially bachelor society, many vented their frustration and boredom by seeking excitement in gambling and/or seeing
prostitutes. The Chinese became laundrymen to escape labor agitation against them. "The technique," observes Siu, "is American, but the
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structure is Chinese" (p. 296). Paul Siu has also provided two very useful categories for understanding the Chinese in America: the sojourner and
the marginal man. For him, the
essential characteristic of the sojourner is that he clings to the
culture of his own ethnic group as in contrast to the bicultural
complex of the marginal man. Psychologically, he is unwilling to
organize himself as a permanent resident in the country of his
sojourn. When he does, he becomes a marginal man. (p. 299)
My own two categories (developed almost three decades ago) are somewhat generic and also focus on the psyches of Chinese ethnicity in the
United States: the Chinese in America and the Chinese-American. The former think of themselves essentially as Chinese in a foreign land; the
latter see themselves as an integral part of American society. When met with prejudice or racism, the Chinese in America reacts with disdain and
disassociation, while the Chinese American with hurt and humiliation ("A Pluralistic Perspective on Asian American Identities," by Franklin J.
Woo, in Bridge Magazine: An Asian American Perspective, New York, Fall 1978, pp. 48-49, 53).
(4.) See the autobiography of Arthur W. Chung, M.D. (son of Yitang Chung born in Los Angeles) who was head of a hospital in Beijing when he
became one of five assistant director generals of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, and later returned to California in retirement.
His book, Of Rats, Sparrows and Flies: A Lifetime in China (Heritage West Books, 1995) was reviewed by this reviewer in China Review
International, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1996. Arthur Chung's second book, Bitter Roots: A Gum Saan Odyssey, was released by Pacific Heritage,
Palos Verdes, CA, in 2006.
Franklin J. Woo (retired) was chaplain and lecturer in religion, Chung Chi College, Chinese University of Hong Kong (1965-1976) and director
of China Program, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. (1976-1993).
Woo, Franklin J.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Woo, Franklin J. "Haiming Liu. The Transnational History of a Chinese Family: Immigrant Letters, Family Business, and Reverse Migration."
China Review International, Spring 2006, p. 204+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA160422480&it=r&asid=32edbd2016bd5aa7cff862f5bf00f1db. Accessed 20 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A160422480