In the 1970s, a group of Chinese Americans and other minorities conducted an in-house study at Bell Labs that concluded that Asian American employees were grossly underrepresented in management. And the few Asian American managers working at Bell Labs tended to occupy the lower rungs of the corporate ladder. As a consequence, the group organized Asian Americans for Affirmative Action, also known as “4-A,” to try to improve their representation within the company’s highest ranks.

When the study’s results were released, some white managers expressed genuine surprise that Chinese and Asian American employees wanted executive positions. According to Carl Hsu, one of the founders of 4-A and now a vice president at Lucent, many white managers had simply assumed that Asian Americans were content to perform technical work and harbored no aspirations whatsoever to rise within the organization.

Many Taiwanese believe this stereotype arose in part from their own deep-seated but well-founded anxieties about challenging authority, which were somehow visible to white colleagues. “Most of us had very deep fears about retribution by management,” Hsu recalled. Even though these particular fears were unjustified, some members of 4-A worried about what management would “do” to them—a Pavlovian response, they believe, to their childhood under the 1950s “White Terror” in Taiwan when critics of the KMT were dealt with summarily. Suspected subversives, Hsu said, would simply disappear in the middle of the night, never to be heard of again, without benefit of a regular trial or even a court-martial. And even though these former Taiwanese were now working in corporate America, thousands of miles from Taiwan and years after the White Terror, many could not shake their early conditioning to the expectation that one wrong word or act, or even a posture of defiance, could lead to severe punishment, even death.

(Chang 308)