An undertone of bitterness can be detected in many interviews of American-born Chinese who grew up in the South during this era. Like the Jewish community in the region, the Chinese had successfully adopted white culture, yet they could not earn full acceptance by the white elite, not even as honorary Caucasians. Nor did they feel entirely comfortable among their own people, especially the gossipy, tight-knit social network of their parents. “I didn’t go to the Chinese dances,” one American-born Chinese woman told sociologist James Loewen. “My parents tried to push us to go, and we resented it. I always tore up the invitations before Dad saw them.” In addition, they expressed disgust for the Jim Crow laws that humiliated the black community. When they came of age, many ABCs protested not with their mouths, but with their feet. Gradually, the South witnessed an exodus of the American-born Chinese, who left the small towns of their childhood for the cities of the North and West.
Such was the decision of Sam Sue, son of an immigrant Chinese grocer in Clarksdale, Mississippi. His father had worked seven days a week, every night until ten o’clock, providing blacks with essential social services. His store was not only a warehouse and a home but also an informal bank and accounting firm. Speaking broken English in a black dialect, his father would extend black sharecroppers the credit denied them by white institutions. The conditions under which local black farmers labored for whites landowners resembled the Dark Ages, and the primitive cabins they rented from whites had no running water or electricity. The blacks bought from Sue’s father kerosene for lamps and Clorox to purify drinking water. Sam Sue, who grew up in the store, did not recognize his own poverty until years later. “It was tenement-like conditions, though we didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t even know how poor we were until I left. Everyone slept in one big room. There was a kitchen in the back. We used to use the place to store goods too, so there would be boxes all around. If you went into the living room, you’d be sitting on a box of laundry detergent.”
Worst of all was the vague sense of being a second-class citizen, yet having an unspoken, tentative membership in the first class. “As a kid, I remember going to the theatre and not really knowing where I was supposed to sit,” Sam Sue told an interviewer. “Blacks were segregated then. Colored people had to sit upstairs, and white people sat downstairs. I didn’t know where I was supposed to sit, so I sat in the white section, and nobody said anything. So I always had to confront those problems growing up. So these experiences were very painful.”
Sam Sue eventually became a lawyer in New York City, but his father remained in Mississippi after retiring, despite efforts by the family to get him to leave. “It is all he knows,” Sue said. His father was “attached to the area—not that he has affection for it, only that he is used to it—he feels it is home.”
(Chang 279-280)