A Human Rights Debt Far From Being Repaid

At the beginning of March, a ceremony was held to unveil the plaque on the Chinese memorial wall at Evergreen Cemetery in the east of Los Angeles. Because this wall is loaded with and bears witness to the humiliation, the rise and the fall of several generations of Chinese in America, it is of extraordinary significance. Following the ceremony, the remains — scattered across the wastelands of Los Angeles — of the more than one hundred Chinese who participated in the opening of America’s West were interred in the cemetery. America’s Chinese community is greatly excited by this turn of events and believes it marks a significant achievement for Chinese seeking to protect their own rights and interests.

Beginning in 1848, America began its great expansion into the West and required a huge amount of labor; accordingly, large numbers of Chinese workers entered the United States, helping to build the railway arteries that cut across America from east to west and making an enormous contribution to the development of the American economy. But Chinese workers in America suffered the full weight of racial discrimination, absolute poverty throughout their lives and had no burial plots when they died. In 1866, 3,000 Chinese repair workers on the Pacific Railroad were killed during five successive months of blizzards. Their bodies were neglected and carelessly buried later. After 1882, Chinese suffered yet more persecution, thanks to several “Chinese Exclusion Acts.”

I remember the best-seller, “China Men” (published in Chinese translation as “The Chinese of San Francisco”) by the American-born Chinese author Maxine Hong Kingston, which came out in the early eighties. It described, with exquisite turns of phrase, the harsh plight of Chinese workers in America. Upon entering the country, they were detained in an immigration detention center, where they were forced to submit to humiliating “health checks” where immigration officials treated them like cattle. Chinese workers built roads through the mountain ranges of Nevada, risking their lives to blast holes into mountainsides, sitting in baskets hanging from cliff edges. And yet, these pioneers could not own their own land or property, and did not even have a decent grave. Where are the human rights in that? Where is the logic in that?

The erection of the Chinese memorial wall at Evergreen Cemetery marks a change, in line with the current international situation, as America begins to face its history and correct its mistakes. In July 2009, the California State Assembly passed a resolution apologizing to the Chinese community for the hundred-year period of the Chinese Exclusion Act. But the American government has not done nearly enough with regard to this issue. At the beginning of this year, the United States proclaimed January 21 as “National Angel Island Day,” to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the establishment of a detention center on that island. According to historical records, Chinese people were held at the detention center for an extremely long period of time, and the number of detainees was extremely high. However, during the speech in which he announced “Angel Island Day,” President Obama avoided any mention of what the detention center was set up to achieve.

High-level U.S. officials traveling abroad like to pressure other countries about human rights issues and dress it up as a “human rights dialogue.” As long as America continues to talk about human rights, we too can mention human rights “in passing,” making sure that America does not forget all of its own unpaid debts to human rights.