English version articles
Together, let us compile all the historical records about the contributions, sufferings, and battles for justice from the Chinese American community. Our ultimate goal is to include this important Chinese American history into elementary and secondary school curriculums.
At the beginning of the 1990’s, I had the honor of meeting the revered literary figure Qu Zhengmin, who became my invaluable mentor and helpful friend in the next twenty years.
In the famous 14th US Army Air Force, several logistic maintenance and intelligence squadrons were composed entirely of Chinese American soldiers, who proudly call themselves part of the “Flying Tigers”.
Joe Shoong (1879-1961) was a Chinese-American entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded National Dollar Stores. He was one of the first Chinese-American millionaires and was once described by Time Magazine as the “richest, best-known Chinese business man in the U.S. ”. Though National Dollar Stores is now closed, it served the local communities for a long time in the 20th century. As a philanthropist, Shoong funded Chinese schools, universities, churches, hospitals and other organizations for educational or humanitarian purposes. After World War II, Shoong established the Joe Shoong Foundation, which continues to support local communities.
In 1879 there were two Chinese Americans in the US Navy’s Arctic Expedition: Charles Tong Sing (1859-?) and Ah Sam (?-1881). They were the first Chinese Americans to explore the Arctic.
Since the 1960s, Chinese immigrants have arrived in the Bay Area/Silicon Valley; many more have come from the mainland since the eighties. In the last four decades, many of them have become high tech entrepreneurs and engineers who contributed a great deal to Silicon Valley and the US economy. The purpose of this article is to introduce 54 of these leaders to the audience.
Those who went to high school or college in mainland China and loved studying English will remember Deng Yanchang’s frequent articles on oral English in the magazine English Language Learning. Professor Deng Yanchang, born in Phoenix, Arizona, was a very distinctive figure of the Deng family.
As the fifth richest American in 1984, with 40 patents and 23 honorary degrees, Dr. An Wang was a computer industry magnate, inventor, and philanthropist who founded Wang Labs, which successfully competed with large companies such as IBM in the 1970s and 1980s. In the mid-1940s, after passing the competitive China Overseas Graduate Examination, he was accepted by Harvard University as a Ph.D. student and became a leading figure in the electronics industry in the world. His breakthrough in manufacturing core memory equipment was one of the greatest technological innovations of the last century. His Fortune 500 company Wang Labs, became a market leader in desktop calculators, word processors, and IBM-compatible mainframe computers. Most of his philanthropy was dedicated to strengthening understanding between Chinese and Western cultures and improving the arts, schools, and health care in Boston and surrounding communities in Massachusetts.
United States citizenship law is founded on two traditional principles – “jus soli” (“right of the soil”) and “jus sanguinis” (“right of the blood”). A person born in the United States who is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States is a U.S. citizen at birth. However, this was not true more than 100 years ago. As a pioneer of Chinese immigrants in this country, Wong Kim Ark obtained his citizenship by challenging the U.S. law through “right of the soil” and later helped his sons (including one “Paper Son”) become U.S. citizens through “right of the blood”.
This article introduces the readers to Gerald Chan Sieg, who, in spite of many business titles and career accomplishments, took great pride in being the first Chinese American poet in Savannah, Georgia.