Special thanks to Chinese Historical Society of America for the exhibition photos. Click HERE to view the exhibition online.

By Guo Shipeng

It was a tranquil afternoon in the heart of the Oakland’s Chinatown on Wednesday, December 17.

Guan Shujuan was watching her four-year-old daughter playing around the “Junk Boat”, a replica of one used by early Chinese immigrants to sail across the Pacific and a popular play structure for kids on the Lincoln Square.

“What act? Anti-Chinese act?” the slightly built woman looked bewildered when asked if she had heard of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned virtually all Chinese immigration from 1882-1943.

With a Chinese American Secretary of Energy in the incoming Obama administration, the humiliation Chinese went through under the Exclusion Act doesn’t register with many people in American Chinatowns like this one, especially for the American-born youth and for the newcomers.

“I’ve only heard of Chinese exclusion incidents in Indonesia, not in America,” said Guan, who arrived in Oakland from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong just a little over a month ago.

The U.S. Congress introduced the notorious Chinese Exclusion Act at a time when the Gold Rush was about to deplete the California mines and when Chinese “coolies” willing to work for low wages stoked resentment among white Americans.

According to some estimates, the bill nearly halved the nation’s Chinese American population. It was repealed on December 17 1943, when China was a U.S. ally against Japan during the World War Two.

The 65^th anniversary of the Act’s repeal on Wednesday went largely unmarked in Oakland’s Chinatown and the Chinese community in the Bay Area in general, except an exhibition from December 2-13 at the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

On Wednesday night, influential politicians and business people of all races threw a big retirement and birthday party for Chinese-born Henry Chang, Oakland’s City Council Member since 1994.

As institutional discrimination was gradually dismantled over the last few decades, Chinese Americans have integrated into the mainstream society fairly well and have generated numerous success stories in various fields.

Holding a “green card” as a permanent resident, Guan came to join her husband, who has been working in a Chinatown restaurant as a chef for more than 10 years.

She said the family had decided to settle down in Oakland, despite the disorienting cultural differences and language barriers.

“The Americans here are nice to me. The main problem is I cannot understand a single word of what they say,” said Guan, 39.

“I’ll find something to do when she grows bigger and goes to elementary school, ” Guan said of the daughter, a shy girl who sometimes looked intimidated by English-speaking kids around her.

The daughter’s education is expected to land her a white-collar job, as well as full acceptance by and assimilation into the American society. It is a story that has been repeated over and over again by Chinese immigrant families who start from scratches.

While the 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act lifted the ban on Chinese immigration, it set an annual quota of 105 for people of Chinese descent arriving on American shores from any country.

When the Chinese community protested, the proposed number was increased to 107. The restriction and widespread discrimination persisted well into the late 1960s, when large-scale Chinese immigration took off thanks to the Immigration Act of 1965.

“In my first years in America, Chinese people couldn’t buy houses in white neighborhoods in East Oakland, even if they had the money,” said Chuck Lee, 77, who came to Oakland in 1950.

“Some landlords were unwilling to rent rooms to Chinese because they thought that would depreciate their property values.”

Chinese immigrants seeking to join family members in the U.S. were still “subject to detention and interrogations, much as their ancestors had endured at the Angel Island” from 1940s to 1960s, said Eddie Wong, Executive Director of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.

Some 170,000 Chinese immigrants were held in the detention center on Angel Island in the first half of the 20^th century, including American-born Chinese returning from trips to China and other countries.

The Immigration Station has been turned into a museum and will reopen to the public in February 2009 after a three-year renovation project.

Wong said commemorating the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act was still of significance, even though it was far from satisfactory at the time.

“Today, conditions have improved for Chinese in America, but immigrants of many nationalities have inadequate legal protections and are subject to detention, interrogation, and deportation,” said Wong.

“If we have learned anything from the Chinese Exclusion Act and other Asian exclusion laws, a just immigration policy must be a humane policy, not one engendered by racial fears and xenophobia.”

By Guo Shipeng

Four of the Oakland Chinatown’s best Cantonese Opera performers will make their debut in November on the prestigious stages of Canton, the art’s birthplace in south China, in recognition of their artistic achievements.

The amateur performers from the Red Bean Cantonese Opera House will attend the 5th International Cantonese Opera Festival, a four-yearly event that attracts artists from around the world and features simultaneous performances on several stages every day in the week from Nov 10-16.

“I am certainly very proud that we can perform in Canton, but in the mean time I am quite nervous, because it is the orthodox and the ultimate authority in Cantonese Opera,” said Linda Lee, 62, Red Bean’s vice president and one of the four Canton-bound performers.

“We who learn to play here are definitely not as good,” Lee said during a break from her rehearsal on Saturday October 11 in the Red Bean Opera House on Webster Street.

 Laura Ma, 52, Red Bean’s treasurer who’s also flying to perform in Canton, had a more relaxed attitude. 

“It will be a performance as usual, with a different audience though,” said Ma.

In addition to the four performers, more than 30 Red Bean members would make the trip to Canton and for all of the Bay Area the number would be over 100, Ma said. 

“It’s like the Olympics in Cantonese Opera and it is a great party. We’ll go there shopping, watching the shows and seeing the big stars and the respected predecessors in the art,” said Ma, who went to previous Canton festivals with other Red Bean members but did not have the chance to perform.

Cantonese Opera is a main subtype of Chinese opera and like other subtypes, it involves music, singing, martial arts, acrobatics and acting and shares a centuries-old repertoire. It originates in areas near Canton, or better known as Guangzhou nowadays, capital city of the southern province of Guangdong where most of the Oakland Chinatown’s residents come from.

Founded by Liang Jing, a famous Cantonese Opera actress, in 1996, Red Bean now boasts a membership of about 50, but more than 100 people, including many volunteers, are involved in its activities every year, which culminates in its sensational annual performance in San Francisco in the summer. It mainly relies on donations from the Chinese community for funding.

“Almost all the members are over 40 years old,” said Lee, who had always played male characters since she started learning Cantonese Opera in 1995. “Before that we have jobs and kids to worry about. Now we are free to have some fun by devoting ourselves to the opera.”

Lee, who moved the U.S. from Hong Kong more than 30 years ago, and other Red Bean members cited their childhood memories back in China of accompanying parents to Cantonese Opera shows for their love of the art, but passing on that passion to the American-born young generation in the Chinatown was a difficult task.

“I am worried about the future of the art here, but what can I do?” Lee said. “It’s hard. Not so many kids read Chinese.”

Lee at least has done a perfect job on her youngest son Erick Lee, 25, who has been called a wizard in Cantonese Opera by assuming his first major role at the age of 13 and being able to tutor kids in Red Bean’s youth troupe now. 

“He has to memorize all the lines and moves because he cannot read the scripts,” Lee said. “But he loves it.”

For a traditional art that is also facing declining popularity among young people in industrializing, modernizing China, recruiting new talents off its home soils in the U.S. was done mostly through referrals, said Ma, Red Bean’s treasurer.

“It has never been a very hot art and the kids find it a little strange, so we turn to friends and friends’ friends,” said Ma. “The Red Bean has been fairly successful in this regard, considering the difficulty and the fact that none of us is professional.”

Jamie Ma’s two sons and daughter are among the two dozen teenagers trained by the Red Bean’s youth troupe scheme in recent years and have starred in a number of big performances.

“My sister works here. That’s how my children started Cantonese Opera and I followed their suit a year later,” said Jamie Ma, 50, a government clerk from Union City.

She now drives to the Oakland Chinatown every Saturday for her own practice and again on Sunday for her children’s training session.

Donald Lee, Linda Lee’s husband, said it was only a matter of time for Cantonese Opera as a traditional art to disappear in Chinese American communities with the generational changes.

 “But we hope to see the art prosper, or at least continue, for some more time in the rest of our life.”