She may have grown up under the Chinese Exclusion Act, which restrained the basic rights of Chinese Americans for more than half a century until its repeal in 1943, but Betty Lee Sung says she does not remember feeling much discrimination as a child. That may have been because of her isolation, however.
'I worked in the laundry and went to school, then back to work again,' says the 86-year-old, a retired professor of the City University of New York and a prominent scholar in Asian-American studies. 'We never went to restaurants or theatres. We had no contact with the outside world.'
Sung's father arrived in the United States in 1908 and, like many other Chinese immigrants, opened a laundry. Betty, the third of four children, was born in Baltimore and grew up in Washington. But during the 1930s depression, times were so hard that Sung's father led the family back to Taishan, their coastal Guangdong home town.
Despite losing her mother and a younger brother to disease, the Sungs lived well in China. 'My dad washed clothes for 10 cents apiece in the US, but in Taishan we were considered rich,' Sung says.
In 1937, Japanese invaders put paid to that. 'My 16-year-old older sister took us to hide and run,' she says. 'We could hear the gunshots. We went to Canton [Guangzhou] and found the American embassy. We stood by the wall and thought it was safe because the Japanese were unlikely to bomb the embassy.'
They eventually escaped back to the US by ship. However, Sung's relationship with her father soon soured. 'In those days, girls weren't supposed to go to college,' she says. 'Parents would find you a man to marry. That's the route my sister took but I didn't want to get married. I wanted to go to college. He said, 'If you dare to, I'll disown you'.'
Sung disobeyed and went to the University of Illinois, becoming one of only two Chinese girls among the 2,400 students there in 1944.