‘From Exclusion to Empowerment’

Schlesinger Library features an exhibition about Chinese-American women in New England

By Corydon Ireland

Harvard News Office

Jennie Chin Hansen grew up during the 1950s in Boston’s Chinatown, a place so insular and self-contained that she describes it as a village. Her mother worked in a sewing factory and her father, a journalist and teacher in his native China, worked in a restaurant.

Hansen, a graduate of Boston College and a professor of nursing in San Francisco, is now president of the 40 million-member Association for the Advancement of Retired Persons (AARP). She is the first Asian-American woman to take that office, just as she was the first Asian woman to attend her college, and — as she jokingly relates — the first Asian public health nurse in Moscow, Idaho.

Hansen visited the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study earlier this month (Dec. 1) to tell her story of coming of age in an American urban village isolated from the society around it. Her visit was a way to highlight and praise a Radcliffe oral history project, and a new exhibit that celebrates it.

“Chinese American Women: From Exclusion to Empowerment” — vintage photographs, artifacts, and snippets of oral and video testimony — is on display through March 6 at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. It’s a joint project with the Boston-based Chinese Historical Society of New England.

Speaking before an audience of about 60 at the Radcliffe Gymnasium, Hansen said the library and the Chinese American Women Oral History Project, in place since 1991, “preserves the record, and ensures our history will not be forgotten.”

Collecting oral testimony also serves “as a warning,” she said, “that such kind of injustice must never happen again.” Hansen was referring to the century and a half of repression that proceeded, and in part inspired, the achievements of her own generation.

Immigration laws dating back to just after the Civil War banned Chinese from the United States in any great numbers. (One exception: male laborers were needed for gold mines and railroads.) In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act allowed into the country only merchants and other members of the educated elite, who in turn formed the backbone of bi-coastal Chinatowns. That 19th century law still “hovers … like a dark cloud over our shared past,” said Hansen. “This act essentially legalized racial discrimination.” It also made “permanent aliens” of those Chinese already here, she said, freezing them in closed cultural enclaves and barring assimilation.

The 1924 Immigration Act went further, explicitly barring all Chinese from entering the United States. By 1943, in the spirit of wartime solidarity, the Magnuson Act negated all previous Chinese exclusion measures, but limited immigration to 103 Chinese a year.

It wasn’t until 1965 that U.S. law banned racial bias in immigration laws. By then, Hansen was a year away from entering college — and at home with a mother who instilled her with daring, she said, and a father who inspired a love of learning.

“All of our parents worked so hard and sacrificed so much so we could be free agents in this country,” said Hansen, whose family moved to Boston when she was 10. “We just have so many heroes and heroines to inspire and guide us … despite enduring a shameful period in American history.”

She emerged from girlhood with an abiding lesson, she said — “never to judge a person by his or her job. Everyone has capacity, intelligence, wishes, and desires.”

The voices that emerge from the Radcliffe oral history project are “entirely compelling,” she remarked, and a measure of “the forces that shaped our identities.”

A generation ago, said Hansen, those forces were a blend of exclusion from society at large and empowerment from parents at home: two poles of a power source that propelled Chinese-American women out of their homes and into the world, ready to face adversity.

Hansen said her parents typified the experience of Chinese immigrants. Her father “lived many years [and] lived frugally,” she said, sending money to relatives both back in China and here.

Her mother, she noted, sewed and did laundry. Hansen, in her own testimony for the oral history project, remembers her earlier girlhood New Jersey, where she fell asleep at night on an ironing surface in a Chinese hand laundry.

Her mother struggled all her life with English, she said, and that typified the experience of many Chinese of her generation. At age 7, Hansen recalled, she coached her mother in English so she could pass her citizenship test.

“Language separated older generations from the rest of society,” she said — and those same elders bore the final brunt of racial discrimination against Chinese immigrants to the United States.

Their children, like Hansen, hovered in a state between isolation and liberation, and lived lives leavened with hard work. (At age 7, the future AARP administrator stood on a box to run a cash register in a New Jersey Chinese restaurant.)

“We had a foot in both worlds,” Hansen said of growing up, “and the ability to navigate both.”