... [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] Lillian Chung Wong: I was born 1911, so this year is what?

I'm 103?

1-0-3.

My father was a Chinese herb doctor.

He studied medicine in China.

And when he came to America, he continued being a Chinese medical doctor.

And so, he had a practice on Hill Street.

You cannot say Dr. Y. H. Chung.

It's just Y. H. Chung, Herbalist.

But there was one doctor who got around it.

See, D. R. Chan, see?

So, from a distance, you saw Dr. Chan.

female narrator: Immigrants, those who leave the only homes they have ever known to embark on a fearful journey in search of a better life.

We are all their descendants from one time or another, from one place or another.

The Chinese immigrants who began arriving on the shores of America over a century and a half ago called America, "Gum Saan," Gold Mountain.

It was a place of hope.

Amongst those new immigrants were women with stories both tragic and triumphant.

But at the beginning, for too many of them, there was a terrible price to pay.

Scott Zesch: A lot of people think that the first Chinese immigrants to the West Coast came to build the railroad in the 1860s.

Actually, the first large wave came for the Gold Rush of 1849.

Like people from other parts of the world, the Chinese immigrants hoped to get rich quickly in what they called Gold Mountain.

Lisa See: People had come out of the Tai Ping Rebellion, millions of people killed.

You had droughts, and famines, and floods, and just--everyone was so poor.

[music] Lisa: During the time of the Gold Rush, and later during the building of the transcontinental railroad, and then all the way up until about 1950, it really was a bachelor society.

Very, very few women who came here from China.

I mean, California was about 1 woman for every 20 men.

Hiroshi Motomura: I think in American history, what's happened is that people have come to this country as immigrants.

They've established immigrant--sometimes immigrant enclaves, sometimes they're bigger neighborhoods.

And typically, they form families, and they have children, and the children are U.S. citizens.

And the children move away from those communities and they enter, in some way, the American mainstream, linguistically, educationally, professionally.

And that type of growth that is central, I think, to the American immigrant experience, was greatly restricted by the fact that Chinese-Americans largely became what they call a bachelor society.

Lisa: So, what does that mean?

You know, men are kind of left to their own devices when they will gamble, they smoked opium, and yes, they went to visit prostitutes.

So, there were a lot of brothels in that time.

Tom Jacobson: I looked at some maps, particularly a map of Downtown Los Angeles in 1888, and each building has written on it what that building's purpose was.

So, it might say "Blacksmith" or "Dry Goods."

And I noticed on this map, all along Alameda for three blocks, every single building said, "H.S.

of I.F."

And I asked the staff at the Seaver Center for Western History Research, "What does this mean?"

And they said, "House of Ill Fame."

So, all of Alameda was prostitutional.

So, this was, in some ways, the red light district of Los Angeles.

[music] Scott: The women who worked in brothels had very few ways of escaping that life.

Some of them did marry Chinese laborers.

A few, once they got older, did manage to find other work as laundresses, or perhaps seamstresses, or cooks.

Sadly, many of them became addicted to opium, perhaps came down with a chronic illness, in which case they would be expelled from the brothel and just be left to die in the streets.

Lisa: There were a lot of women who killed themselves by swallowing opium, or swallowing gold, or any myriad of ways.

It was just very, very tough for them.

[music] Scott: The Chinese prostitutes, of course, were pressured to solicit as many clients as possible, because they only charged 25 cents per client.

Lisa: So, it cost about $96 a year to feed them, and clothe them, and take care of them, and the brothel owner made about $850 a year off of them.

So, if a young woman ran away, there was quite a business in chasing those women down.

Scott: A young woman named Sing Ye had been purchased and was taken to San Bernardino to work as a prostitute.

The men who were keeping her took her to the outskirts of town where no one would see, ripped off her clothes, they tied her to a tree, and started beating her with sticks.

Then, they built a fire, they took some burning sticks, and pressed it against her skin.

And then started beating her again.

They finally released her, and when the men started walking away, she tried to follow them and stay with them.

Chinese prostitutes were terrified of non-Asians in America.

They had been taught from an early age that Westerners were barbarians, and so they were much more frightened of the prospect of falling into the hands of Anglos or Latinos than they were staying with these men who were mistreating them.

[music] Tom: Gangs, called tongs, in Chinatown, and they ran businesses.

And one of the businesses that they ran was prostitution, so women would be essentially owned by different gangs.

The gangs would have conflict, and one of the ways that they claimed ownership in a legal sense in the United States was to marry a prostitute to a member of that particular tong.

Lisa: Again, you know, I hate to go back to these stereotypes, but they were part of the history of gambling, opium, and prostitution.

So, all of that is there, and it's all being run mostly by these different tongs, rival tongs.

These women lived in really terrible circumstances.

In a tiny room, sometimes with just, like, a little fenced window to look out of.

Tom: Women just kind of almost stacked in these small spaces where their customers would come.

Lisa: Really, you know, venereal disease with no cure, no way--you know, who knows how many customers they would have in a day, in a night?

narrator: While most of the women were treated as no more than property to be used and traded, they posed little threat.

But as more Chinese settled in, the ugly strain of racism began to rear its head.

Now, the violence that had been visited on solitary women burst into flames that put an entire ethnic group in grave peril.

Lisa: There were several events leading up to what became known as the Night of Horrors.

Scott: One of the most highly publicized incidents happened in March 1871, which was 7 months before the Chinese massacre.

Lisa: A young woman, Yut Ho, is brought over here, and she married a man, Hing Sing.

But a tong comes and says, "No, she actually belongs to us."

Scott: One day, some members of the faction arrived at Hing Sing's house while he was away, and they kidnapped Yut Ho.

They took her before the Justice of the Peace and they forced her to marry a man from the opposing faction.

Tom: So, she was married in a bigamous fashion, to both men, and the one guy had taken possession of her.

Scott: In October 1871, one faction brought in some tong assassins from San Francisco to take revenge on the other faction.

There was a brief gun fight in the street.

Several people were arrested.

They were jailed, and the next day they were brought into court.

All of them were released on bail.

Late in the afternoon, gun fire breaks out again in Chinatown between the members of these two rival factions.

Lisa: They're fighting.

This isn't all that unusual.

But caught in the crossfire is a rancher named Robert Thompson, a white rancher.

And now, suddenly, word goes out across the city and the phrase is, "They're killing whites wholesale."

And basically, the whole city descends on Chinatown.

Tom: About 500 converged on Chinatown and started looting the stores, and assaulting the Chinese, and immediately started hanging them as retribution for this one white man that was being--that had been killed.

Scott: They placed ropes around their necks, they started dragging them through the streets, and at three different locations in Downtown Los Angeles, they ended up hanging a total of 15 Chinese men.

Three had already been shot and killed at the Coronel Adobe, for a total of 18 victims.

One was a 15-year-old boy named Ah Lu, who had just arrived from China a week earlier.

Another man was a musician who had just arrived from San Francisco on the last steamer and had only been in Los Angeles a few days.

Lisa: The buildings were looted.

Businesses were destroyed.

Buildings were burnt down.

Scott: The best known victim was a popular physician named Gene Tong.

Tom: He was a herbalist, and very well respected.

He spoke English and Spanish and was pretty integrated into the community.

Scott: When he was dragged out of his home, he and his wife, Tong You, were clasping each other.

They were separated by the mob.

They took him to a place called Tomlinson's Corral, which had been used for lynchings in the past.

And there, Dr. Tong pleaded for his life in English.

He offered his captures his entire life savings.

Tom: He was not only lynched, but also shot in the mouth.

And then, once he was strung up, his pants were stolen and his finger was cut off, sort of as a souvenir.

Scott: There were some citizens of Los Angeles who were doing whatever they could to try to stop it.

Attorney named Robert Widney-- Lisa: Who ended up being a judge at the trial against the worst of the perpetrators.

He would take men, and he would have them in his company, and he'd say--people would say, "Oh, you know, we gotta get those guys, and they'd say, "Oh no, these are just women."

So, he sort of snuck them out as though they were women.

There were many, many people who hid Chinese in their basements and their attics in the jail to protect them.

But by morning, there were these 17 men and boys who had been killed.

[music] narrator: The racial prejudice that festered into the horrors of the Chinese Massacre will become enshrined as official government policy through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Lisa: The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was designed to bar the immigration of all Chinese to the United States, except for 4 categories: those who were ministers, students, diplomats, or merchants.

Judy Chu: It actually named Chinese-Americans as a group to exclude.

In fact, it's the only law that actually named a group for exclusion in the actual Code of Congress.

Hiroshi: We have Chinese exclusion cutting off a labor force, labor supply, that had been instrumental to all kinds of development, economic development, particularly in the Western United States.

That gets cut off.

And so, there's always this back and forth between what the law provides and what the economy demands.

Lisa: So, my great-great-grandfather was actually the first person in my family to come here from China.

So, many of those early men were going over as sojourners.

"I'm gonna come, I'm gonna save up my money, I'm gonna go home, I'm gonna buy some nice land, and my wife and I are gonna live happily ever after."

And that was really the goal in the beginning.

People didn't come here intending to stay.

It was just a place to get rich and go home.

But once those families start to come, you start to see this shift in Chinatown in the first children who were born here.

So, what happens, you know, as you sort of start to transition from a totally bachelor society to a society with families.

And so now, we wanna be a part of the community and what that means to build that community.

It sort of covers all of those things: food, education, traditions, culture.

narrator: The women were at the heart of this transformation from a bachelor society to a true Chinese community.

It was they who kept the lights of the Chinatowns burning as they worked alongside the men, bore and raised children, and passed on traditions.

Bit by bit, little by little, Chinatowns were erected all around the United States.

The Chinese were no longer sojourners.

America had become their home.

Hiroshi: Think about immigration in some kind of a static sense, that we're the population that we are, we've created the us, but everyone else who comes new, that's the them.

Those are the newcomers, and now it's time to close the gates, or pull up the ladder, or whatever, however else you wanna describe it.

But I think it's also been important to the idea of nation of immigrants to understand that part of being a nation of immigrants is not just something that's frozen in time.

It's really a process.

And part of that process is to understand that, over time, people come to this country and they're newcomers, but over a generation or two, people who start out as "them" become part of "us."

narrator: And so, slowly, the Chinese were integrated into the fabric of America.

They had long been laborers and merchants.

Now, they entered the professions and they entered the arts.

As the movie industry that grew out of Hollywood changed the world forever, a Chinese girl looked toward the silver screen and dared to dream.

[music] [music] Mary Mallory: Hollywood, as a filmmaking industry, started in 1910.

And by the mid to late teens, you were just getting companies founded almost every day out here.

Anna May Wong, who was, like, the top Chinese-American actress, very well respected, a really fine actress, unfortunately she was caught in this strange netherworld, as it were.

narrator: While Hollywood produced many films that capitalized on the exoticism of Chinese themes that audiences flocked to see, Chinese characters were constantly portrayed in a negative and stereotypical light.

Furthermore, Chinese roles were mostly filled by Caucasian actors who utilized a makeup practice called "yellow face."

Moonflower: You wouldn't dare!

Mr. Wong: Wong has dared many things.

He will continue to dare.

And one day when he is acclaimed by all of Keylat.

narrator: But despite the odds stacked against her, Anna May Wong believed in her dreams and was determined to be a star.

Paula Yoo: Anna May's childhood was very difficult.

She was one of several children born to basically a working class family in Downtown Los Angeles.

They lived in the Chinatown area of Los Angeles at the time.

Her childhood was hard because she worked at her family's laundry business, so right away, you can see that she had a very hard life.

But she also had a great imagination, and she was very mischievous, and very curious.

So, whenever she had to take the laundry--delivered the laundry to her father's customers, a lot of times in Downtown L.A. at that time, they were filming silent movies.

So, she would kind of stop, put her basket down, and kind of just start watching.

And she started asking everybody questions.

She would just go up to an extra, she would go up to the actors, to the director, to the cinematographer, and just start asking questions like, "What's that camera for?

Why is she doing that?

What's the story about?"

And they got used to her, and they started calling her "The Curious Chinese Child."

Graham Hodges: Anna May Wong was third generation Chinese-American, but she thought of herself and was perceived as Chinese.

The concept of Chinese-American doesn't really take hold until after World War II.

Paula: What was interesting is that she kind of looked very different from a lot of Chinese people back then because she as unusually tall at 5'7".

She had huge eyes and this incredibly distinctive heart-shaped face.

So, I think Anna May Wong always knew she stuck out in a crowd, whether it was a crowd of white people or a crowd of Chinese people.

She knew she was unique.

She was very well aware of her beauty as a young girl.

But I think the struggle she came up with was realizing how people didn't quite see her as beautiful.

Graham: Anna May is quite aware of the impact of Western society upon her.

And so she says, "East and West are fighting inside me like cats, and I don't know who's going to win."

Paula: Anna May Wong definitely struggled having to play these very stereotyped, demeaning roles.

You know, she definitely knew some of the stuff she was doing was not in a positive light for Chinese people.

But I think, in the end, when you look at her movies, you can see a little bit of revenge because she acts so well in these movies, and she gives a dignity and the best she can with the limited roles that she has.

And what's ironic is she stole the show every time.

"Thief of Bagdad," she's--you know, she's a minor character.

She's a Mongol's slave.

Everybody loved her.

They're like, "Who's that beautiful woman?

She stole the show."

From Douglas Fairbanks, you know?

Come on.

Graham: They say her eyes are on fire, her lips are screaming.

It's so over the top and wonderful, but you see, under a lot of other people, Sojun talking about her eyes.

Walter Benjamin talks about her eyes.

He said, "All of life flows through her eyes."

Anna May Wong oftentimes wore outfits that would overwhelm her audiences.

Sometimes these were Chinese outfits, but she was very fashionable.

In 1934, she was voted the best dressed woman in the world.

She had the aura of a true star, and as a result, you know, she was always in people's minds.

Mrs. Pyke: You are very nervous today.

Mary: She could only go so far, right?

She was Chinese.

She could never kiss anyone in the movies.

She could never have a happy ending.

She could never get married.

It was a very, kind of, limited roles that she could have.

Paula: Anna May Wong was definitely typecast in her movies.

She's been described in some movies as the manipulative Oriental vamp, dragon lady, the submissive slave.

Graham: Her family would not have regarded this with approval.

In fact, they didn't.

There's an old Chinese saying that you don't want your son to be a soldier, you don't want your daughter to be an actress.

Indeed, in Chinese culture, actresses are seen barely above courtesans and prostitutes.

This is not a field that any respectable family would want to see their daughter go to.

Paula: There definitely was friction with her family.

They were not happy and they felt that it was disgraceful.

It went against Chinese tradition and it was not what a proper lady should do.

In fact, at one point, she--her dad said, "All right, I want you to get a real job, so she became a secretary.

She was terrible at it.

Just absolutely terrible.

She couldn't do shorthand, she was terrible.

So, she realized, in a way, she became an actress too because that was the only thing she could really do.

narrator: The Hollywood production code and anti-miscegenation laws forbade any portrayals of intimacy between different races.

Without the Hollywood on screen kiss with a leading man, Anna May Wong would never be a leading lady and would never reach the summit of her profession.

Toni: He asked me to come.

Mr. Young asked me.

Tu Tuan: We're both in the same house now.

You're good at remembering.

Remember to leave him alone.

Graham: The anti-miscegenation laws influenced Hollywood to have, first, an informal code, and then in the 1930s, a formal code which forbade any suggestion of sexual intimacy between a Chinese person and a white person.

Paula: If Hollywood allowed actors of color to kiss white actors on screen, she could've lived and gotten married, or there could have been the wedding scene, or she could have had a happily ever after, but she was the tragic Asian, sacrificing herself for the white man, or just all that kind of stuff.

So, I think she got a little tired of it and I don't blame her for leaving to Europe.

[music] Paula: Anna May Wong left Europe after a very successful few years of being a very popular movie star.

She was in a bunch of movies that were very well received.

Critics even called her a transcendent talent.

And so, she came back to Hollywood and said, "I paid my dues.

I've played all your stereotype roles.

I am set, give me my movie role."

And that movie role that would change her career and take her to the next level was the role of O-Lan in Pearl S. Buck's novel, "The Good Earth."

narrator: Pearl S. Buck's Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning book depicted the Chinese with authenticity and humanity.

The book captured America's imagination about China and a movie adaptation soon followed.

Graham: After MGM acquires the rights and everybody recognizes they can't film it in China, the question is, who's gonna play the key roles?

And it'd always been presumed and Pearl Buck wanted them to have Chinese actors doing this.

Given that, the role of O-Lan, there was really only one answer, and that was Anna May Wong, because she is the most important Chinese actress of her time.

announcer: Anna May Wong knew this was the role she was born to play and lobbied endlessly for the lead role.

This was the opportunity she had been waiting for all these years and she knew her time had come.

Mary: But unfortunately, too, the way the American film public was, as well as the American film industry, that we had Caucasian characters play the main Chinese roles.

Graham: Paul Muni is cast in the role of Wang Lung.

Once that happens, once they get this important star as the principle character, there's simply no way that she can--Anna May Wong can get the opposite role because of all the anti-miscegenation codes.

She cannot play the wife of a white man.

Mary: It had to have been one of the greatest disappointments of Anna May Wong's life, because here is a Chinese-American woman.

It would be such an honor to represent your culture in such a major film, and to be replaced by someone that is not of your culture, it just had to have been terribly disappointing to her.

Graham: So, the role then goes to Luise Rainer, who is a contract player for MGM.

She'd done a couple of small movies.

And she goes on to win the Oscar for this movie.

Paula: Maybe she won Anna May's Oscar.

We'll never know, but that was, I think, the straw that broke the camel's back for Anna May Wong.

That was a watershed moment in her life.

[music] Paula: A lot of sexy rumors about her love life, let's just say that.

So, I think that she definitely knew what she was doing, and I think it's the devil you know when it comes to stuff like that.

Graham: The real love of her life was Eric Maschwitz.

He writes a very beautiful song for her, "These Foolish Things."

It's a wonderful, wonderful song.

"The cigarette that bears lipstick's traces, airline tickets to romantic places, these foolish things remind me of you."

[music] Graham: It really is Anna May.

I mean, she was somebody, you know, who lived life hard.

Drank hard, and smoked a lot, and also traveled everywhere.

And so, Maschwitz sort of captures her a little bit there.

She died at 56 from cirrhosis of the liver, which is a chronic alcohol-related disease.

And mind you, all of her siblings lived into their 80s and 90s.

So, the family pattern would be to live for decades past what Anna May was able to achieve.

[music] Paula: When you look at her movies today, you start to realize there's a certain dignity and a certain humanity she gives to those very, very limited roles.

And people have now come around, and now the tide has turned, and now she's considered a hero for at least trying to give dignity.

And she's given credit now for kind of paving the way for Asian-American actors and actresses today.

You know, we cannot deny what she had to go through.

It's kind of like what Hattie McDaniel, the African-American actress who won the Oscar for "Gone With The Wind."

I think there's a quote.

I'm paraphrasing here, but she said something about how, you know, "I had to walk through the back door so actors in the future could walk through the front door."

[music] narrator: As Anna May Wong was fighting her battles in Hollywood, 5,000 miles away, another young woman was embarking on a journey to America.

May-ling Soong and her two older sisters were said to be the first Chinese women to be educated overseas in America.

As destiny would have it, this American educated Chinese woman would become the first lady of China and would return to America years later to play a role in ending the dark era of Chinese exclusion.

male announcer: No stranger to American universities is Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

Twenty-six years ago as May-ling Soong, she was graduated from this same Wellesley campus with highest honors.

Today, as the wife of China's great leader, she returns to meet undergraduates, American girls just like those with whom she attended school.

Wellesley is proud and honored to welcome home its most distinguished graduate.

narrator: When May-ling Soong returned to China, she married the charismatic politician Chiang Kai-shek.

As his political fortunes grew, so did hers, and before long, she would move to the center of world politics as Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

Laura Tyson-Li: In those days, women very often were married very young.

You know, 15, 16, 18, 20.

And she--in the end, she didn't get married until she was about 30, which is unheard of.

You know, in those days, it was really unheard of.

She really waited a very long time, and it was considered over the hill.

Extremely over the hill.

She was very, very choosy, and I saw in the letters to her Wellesley friend, you know, she debated the merits of these various suitors.

She was very concerned about what role she would play above and beyond being, you know, a wife.

People always say it was a marriage of convenience, or they ask.

That's the first question people always ask.

"Well, was it a marriage of convenience?"

You know, "What about their marriage?"

And you know, I always say it was both.

Genuinely, there was love there.

It was a love match, and at the same time, was it a marriage for her to fulfill her own ambitions?

Absolutely.

Absolutely it was.

Dr. Tai-Chun Kuo: Chiang Kai-shek began writing in his diary in 1915.

He wrote his diary every day, without missing any single day.

On that very day of the wedding, he wrote that, "My wife, May-ling, came just like a piece of cloud coming from the sky."

Laura: I don't know if convenience is the right word, but that's the term obviously.

I think she saw in him, you know, that he was tremendously ambitious himself, and that together they could be a team.

They both had this notion that they were going to somehow save the Chinese people.

narrator: May-ling Soong stepped onto the world stage garnering praise as a visionary who set a new standard for women.

On the other hand, she, along with her husband, was condemned as elitists who served their own goals above China's.

Those controversies continue to this day.

Laura: I just grew intrigued by this woman who seemed to be so controversial and to provoke so much emotion and passion in people.

Whether they were American, or Taiwanese, Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese, everyone seemed to have incredibly strong opinions about her, one way or another.

There was no middle ground with her.

People either, it seemed, loved her or hated her.

Or absolutely--hated isn't the right word.

Despised her, you know?

Despised isn't--you know, just this tremendous contempt, or they seemed to adore her.

Tai-Chun: It's hard for her, a lady who is Chinese, but with Western background.

Laura: You know, she had two publics that she was looking to, one in the United States and the other, of course, in China.

You know, the Chinese people very often see her as, you know, very Americanized and not caring about China and the Chinese people, and that's absolutely not true.

She was always very patriotic about China.

She wanted to--she had this desire and a strong yearning and ambition to do something to help improve the circumstances of China and the Chinese people.

[music] male announcer: In their occupation of Nanking, the Japs again outdid themselves in barbarism.

The helpless populace was trapped by the city walls and could not flee.

narrator: In 1941, the United States officially entered World War II.

America and China were now allies in war, and Madame Chiang found herself in a new alliance with her adopted country.

Madame Chiang Kai-shek: I can also show you that China is eager and ready to cooperate with you and other peoples to lay a true and lasting foundation for a sane and progressive world society which would make it impossible for any arrogant or predatory neighbor to plunge future generations into another orgy of blood.

[applauding] narrator: In 1943, the year that China's First Lady addressed Congress, the Chinese Exclusion Act was still in full effect.

The Chinese were still excluded from the Land of the Free.

Laura: And of course, at that time, there were--you know, the United States was a divided country, in a way.

There was still Jim Crow in the South--Jim Crow laws.

And you know, in many places in the country, she was considered colored and she would not have been allowed to use the white restrooms, and eat in certain restaurants, and stay in certain hotels.

And so, you have to look at her trip in that context.

And she was very much aware of all this.

She would have been obviously clearly, acutely aware of all of this, and the gender factor too.

And she turned all of that on its head.

male announcer: New York City gives Madame Chiang her first big public welcome to America.

Thousands gathering at City Hall to cheer the American educated woman who has pledged, with her husband, to lead China to victory.

Chinese-Americans from all walks of life come to hear her and to do her honor.

From City Hall, she visits New York's famous Chinatown, just a few blocks away.

Gala flag bedecked streets, signs of welcome greet her on all sides.

Future generations of Chinese will be told for many years to come of the day Madame Chiang Kai-shek rode through the streets of New York and won the heart of all America with her courage and her charm.

[music] Laura: The media coverage of her trip to the United States was almost overwhelming.

It was--the vast majority of it was extremely positive.

A woman who wasn't afraid to be attractive and feminine, and yet, here she was, you know, tough and strong.

She was very much admired by American women as well, you know, as an outspoken woman who could, you know, hold her own on the world stage and verbally spar with Roosevelt and Churchill, and she did.

You know, she was very, you know, as we said, good with one-liners, and very quick-witted, and good at sort of repartee.

And she made a tremendous impression.

She lobbied, also, more publicly and behind the scenes for the overturning of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

narrator: The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had, by this time, been in force for 60 years.

President Roosevelt wrote to Congress describing the act as a historical mistake and demanding its repeal.

Congress approved the repeal and the act was sent to President Roosevelt, who signed it in the presence of Madame Chiang Kai-shek during a war strategy conference in Cairo, Egypt.

Madame Chiang spent the last 50 years of her life living between America and Taiwan.

During her address to Congress in 1943, she once said, "I will always look on America as my second home, and it is good to be home today."

She remains buried in her adopted country, America.

Laura: You know, she probably has many legacies, depending on who you speak to.

You know, she was a very complex, very multi-faceted woman.

She was sort of placed, or thrust herself into the center of a lot of the great debates of the 20th century.

And she and her family, you know, her sister, were--you know, stood on opposite sides of the great divide of the 20th century, which was Communism versus capitalism, and that's really encapsulated in her life.

It's that whole immigrant experience, the Chinese-American experience, and being caught between two countries, and two cultures, and two lands.

That mirrored a whole generation of families, including my husband's family.

You know, that divide being having to leave people behind, and people escaping.

And you know, it's just the horrible, painful, painful, painful struggles and experiences that Chinese people, whether they were in the mainland in China, in Taiwan, or in the States, that they went through during the 20th century.

And her life encapsulates all of that, all of that complexity.

narrator: The repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act ended a dark era that both Anna May Wong and Madame Chiang Kai-shek had to live through.

This page of U.S. history has long since been forgotten, but more than a century later, a Chinese-American woman would seek justice in the halls of Congress.

Judy: A century ago, the Chinese came here in search of a better life, but they faced harsh conditions, particularly in the halls of Congress.

Congress passed numerous laws to restrict Chinese-Americans, starting from the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, to stop the Chinese from immigrating, from becoming naturalized citizens, and from ever having the right to vote.

These were the only such laws to target a specific ethnic group.

The Chinese were the only residents that had to carry papers on them at all times.

They were often harassed and detained.

If they couldn't produce the proper documents, authorities threw them into prison or out of the country, regardless of their citizenship status.

Judy: My own grandfather, of course, as every Chinese-American, had to carry papers on him at all times, or else be deported even though he was here legally.

And if that happened to him, only the testimony of a white person could save him, and that was actually in the law.

If you talked to a Chinese-American who has some ancestry in this country, every single one will have some story about the negative effect of the Chinese Exclusion act.

Lillian: I think it was the general atmosphere between the Americans and the Chinese.

Their impression of the Chinese were just railroad workers.

because when I was in junior high or elementary school, the kids would sing, "Ching Chong Chinaman, sitting on a rail.

Along came a train and chopped off his tail."

His tail!

[music] Judy: I was a math major at the university, and I was a freshman, and I was walking across the quad when somebody handed me a flier for something that I'd never heard of before, which was an Asian-American studies class.

So, I took that class, and it was like a light went off in my head.

I learned about the Chinese Exclusion Act.

I learned about the Japanese concentration camps.

I learned about all these discriminatory laws that had served to discriminate against the Asian-American community.

And that's when I thought I really had to change the course of my life.

Judy: For a generation of our ancestors like my grandfather who were told for 6 decades by the U.S. government that the Land of the Free wasn't open to them, it is long past time that Congress officially and formally acknowledges these ugly laws that targeted Chinese immigrants and express sincere regret for these actions.

Judy: When I was elected to Congress in 2009, a group of national Chinese-American organizations came to me, and they said, "Now is the time to finally get an apology for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882."

It had been 130 years since it was passed.

It was one of the most discriminatory laws ever passed in Congress.

We were able to get it passed in both the Senate and in the House of Representatives.

It was unanimous, and it was only the fourth such apology to ever happen in history.

Judy: The American dream is so important for all of us.

It's so important for all of us to have hope that we can live a better life and that we can achieve everything that we are capable of.

Scott: I think, for most people, the American dream can be defined in term of a lack of limits, of not being limited by social class or by other factors that in some countries might prohibit a person from climbing beyond a certain level.

I think the immigrants then, just like many immigrants today, found that the dream was much more difficult to achieve than they expected.

Lisa: My grandfather, did he have the American dream?

I don't know.

In many ways, I think he had achieved, from the outside looking in, the American dream, but I think at heart he probably was always a sojourner, somebody who always planned to go home.

Hiroshi: It's really important to think beyond the immigrant generation.

The parents come to this country and they certainly come out of a belief that they're better off, but they're doing it for their children and for their grandchildren.

And I think it's really important to think about the land of opportunity idea for the children and grandchildren, because they're the ones that are going to contribute to America even more, and they're the ones that are going to see the opportunity that their parents helped create.

I mean, I think that's always been the American immigration story.

It's not just the immigrant generation, it's the children and the grandchildren.

It turns out by the way, a significant number of Nobel Prize winners based in the United States are foreign born or the children of immigrants.

I think my daughter believes in the American dream.

I think that even as she pursues the American dream, I think she realizes that the American dream is only a half a dream for some people, in the same way that maybe it has been true in the immigration history of this country.

Lillian: Our brother Arthur, who's a year and a half younger than I, won first place in an oratorical contest at L.A. High, and he represented L.A. High in competition with other public schools is Los Angeles, and he got third place.

And it was rumored that someone said, "Why do we want a Chinese to represent L.A.

High?"

And his teacher, Mrs. Whitman, said, "Well, he won first prize.

He was the best."

Lisa: You know, I know that I'm only here because of what they did and what they went through, and then I'm on--you know, I'm here--they've carried me on their backs.

We all had someone in our families that was crazy enough, scared enough, dumb enough to leave their home country and make this incredible voyage to come here to the United States.

Nancy Pelosi: Do you solemnly swear or affirm that you will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic?

Judy: My grandfather came to this country with nothing.

In fact, he faced the discriminatory laws that were in the Chinese Exclusion Act, the laws that said that Chinese-Americans could not be hired by any corporation, the laws that prevented Asians from owning land.

And yet, he decided to make something of himself anyway.

He started a small Chinese restaurant.

He worked night and day, and day and night.

He used that very expensive labor, his sons, and he was able to make ends meet.

And now, two generations later, his granddaughter can become a member of Congress.

What was amazing was the next day after my victory, when President Obama called to congratulate me on becoming the first Chinese-American woman elected to Congress in history.

But can you imagine, we've been in this country for all this time, since the 1850s, and I was only the first Chinese-American woman to be elected to Congress, and that was in 2009.

It took that long.

So, that just tells you what kind of barriers there are for Asian-American women to succeed in office.

Lisa: So, here you have a Chinese-American woman who has come up through the ranks, has been able to build a constituency, build consensus, make change in her community.

And I think that that becomes again, inspiring in the same way that Anna May Wong was inspiring, or Madame Chiang Kai-shek was inspiring, or the first woman Chinese-American doctor, or Katherine Cheung, the Chinese-American aviatrix.

These were people who are, you know, breaking the mold.

And so, you may not, if you're a young woman or a little girl, you may not grow up thinking, "I really wanna be a congresswoman."

What you may think is, "I see somebody who's out there, and she's making a change in the world, making a difference in the world, and that's what I wanna do."

Judy: America is truly the land of opportunity.

I thank you all very much.

Judy: I really reflected on the American dream on the day that I was sworn into office in Congress.

There I was, in front of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, getting sworn into office, and I could not bring my husband down there to the floor with me, but I was allowed to bring my three little nieces.

And so, there they stood behind me as I was being sworn in.

And I am hoping that my three little nieces can see that the world is wide open to them, that there is nothing that they cannot accomplish, that there are no barriers for them in their efforts to achieve their full potential.

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