Chinatown Grace
| 🥢 | |
| Era | The Sixties |
|---|---|
| Age | 40-55 |
| Home | San Francisco, CA |
| Demographic | Chinese-American, small business |
| Lean | Swing voter |
| Race | asian |
A Chinese-American restaurant owner in San Francisco in her forties, a swing voter whose people were barred from immigration until 1943 and from equal treatment long after. She is the cast's only Asian voter and its quietest.
Who they stand for
Chinese Americans numbered about 237,000 in the 1960 census, concentrated in San Francisco, New York and Honolulu, which is why this voter carries her greatest weight in Hawaii. Congress ended Chinese exclusion in 1943, during the war, but replaced it with only a token quota. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 kept the national-origins system, which kept the quota very small. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, signed by President Johnson at the Statue of Liberty, ended the national-origin quotas and allowed families to reunite. It is the one policy of the decade that changed the future of her community.
During the Cold War, Chinese Americans were widely suspected of disloyalty to the United States. The FBI's confession programme of the late 1950s pressured San Francisco's Chinatown to expose so-called paper-son immigration, in which people had entered the country using false family papers. China's first atomic bomb test in 1964 increased this suspicion further. Her politics belong to neither party. The Chinatown establishment leaned Republican and Nationalist in the Eisenhower years, and the shift towards the Democrats followed their record on immigration and civil rights. Housing covenants and school placement were her daily experience of discrimination.
Playing to them
Immigration reform matters to her more than any other issue. A president who ends the national-origins quotas and allows families to reunite has done the single thing she wants most from government. After that, she cares about small business loans, public schools her children can attend without discrimination, and the enforcement of fair housing laws. She tends to vote based on a candidate's competence and quiet respect for her community, rather than on party loyalty. She does not forgive being treated as a suspect because of her ethnicity. This includes a president whose rhetoric about Communist China leads to suspicion of Chinese Americans in her own neighbourhood, a government loyalty programme, an FBI operation targeting Chinatown, or immigration raids conducted to demonstrate government strength. Great Society programmes and anti-communist policy statements matter little to her unless they produce a direct, visible effect in her own neighbourhood.
Winning her support costs almost nothing else in the cast. Prairie Ruth and Goldwater Barry Jr dislike the 1965 immigration act on principle, and Pentagon George wants China treated as an enemy without qualification, but neither is lost over her alone. Reservation Mary and Bracero Miguel respond to the same respect.
Where they live
The five states where Chinatown Grace makes up the largest share of the electorate in the sixties:
- Hawaii
- California
- Washington
- Oregon
- New York