Moon Chin finished the mechanics course and thought he might be able to catch on as an airline mechanic. He cast around for openings, but the recession was slipping into a much more serious depression, and nobody was hiring. There was another problem, too: Moon Chin didn’t really want to fix airplanes, he wanted to fly them. He kept pestering his father. Finally one of his Joe Chin’s friends couldn’t stand the nagging: “Joe,” he said, “if Moon wants to kill himself, for God’s sake let him do it.”

Cost was a serious issue. Ground school alone cost several hundred dollars. Flight instruction cost $21 per hour, solo flying cost another $13 per hour ($302 and $187 modern dollars), and the economy was worsening by the day. Joe Chin still had his head above water, but profits from laundry and restaurant were declining. A practical man, like most Chinese, Joe Chin considered the cost and the opportunity. His son needed a career. He’d do better at something he liked. As an industry, aviation seemed viable. It was here to stay. There were risks, his son getting killed paramount among them, but maybe flying wasn’t such a bad idea. He decided to commit the necessary funds.

Moon Chin started ground school in 1932, and he learned to fly in a Curtiss Robin, a forgiving little high-winged monoplane that cruised at 102 mph, landed at 48 mph, and cost $7,500, factory direct ($108,000 modern dollars).He loved it from the first. Aloft, holding the controls and listening to the engine roar with the green trees and emerald Maryland fields passing under his wings, Moon Chin like he had the future in his hands. Economic conditions were atrocious, but he was only eighteen years old. Things would get better, and piloting was a skill. The airplane didn’t care where you came from, how much money you had, or what school you’d attended. It didn’t care about your skin color or the shape of your eyes. Either you could hack it, or you couldn’t. Flying was fair, and Moon Chin was good at it.

Moon learned to fly higher performing aircraft and earned his limited commercial license in the autumn of 1932, but by then, economic conditions were truly horrendous. There were no employment opportunities for unproven teenage pilots. Nor had Moon Chin considered the full ramifications of American racism. Few white persons would allow themselves to be flown by a “Chink” — as a commercial pilot in the United States, Moon Chin was utterly unemployable. It looked like Moon Chin’s entire aviation endeavor would amount to nothing besides a colossal waste of time and effort and of his father’s money.

Moon Chin received a letter from his father’s younger brother in the waning days of 1932. Little Uncle lived in Shanghai, throbbing commercial heart of the Orient, where economic conditions weren’t so bad, and he wrote to pass the news that the “Middle Kingdom Space Machine Family” – as the China National Aviation Corporation was known in Chinese – planned to open a new route between Shanghai and Peiping, and that they were looking to hire and train Chinese aviators. “So Moon,” concluded Little Uncle, “do you want to come over and sign up?”[i]

Next: Moon Chin in 1941

[i] “So Moon,” concluded Little Uncle, “do you want to come over and sign up?”: Moon Chin Oral History, the San Francisco Aeronautic Association Museum; author’s interview with Moon Chin, September 17, 2004.

A month after Moon Chin’s thirteenth birthday, on May 21 and 22, 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic, a feat that catapulted Lindbergh to the absolute apogee of American fame and sparked a mania for everything aviation. Lindbergh stories filled the nation’s newspapers and magazines; the nation hung on his every word. The glamor and romance of the crossing captivated boys all over the land, including one small, industrious, thirteen-year old Chinese-American lad in Baltimore who was so inspired by Lindbergh that he began constructing small balsa wood airplanes. Moon Chin shaped and fitted the spars and ribs with razor blades and sandpaper and carefully glued the pieces together to form the skeleton of the wings, which he covered with lightweight paper shrink-wrapped by steam jetting from a stovetop kettle. Thin bamboo strips framed the fuselages. Moon Chin mail-ordered lightweight aluminum propellers, powered them with fat rubber bands, and flew his models in schoolyards, parks, and empty lots, delighted to watch them climb to altitude and glide back to earth. He wore his fingers raw winding tension into the rubber bands until he discovered how to do it with an egg-beater.

Every aspect of flying fascinated young Moon Chin. It was the most exciting technology of the age, and aviation achievements made constant news as pilots and designers vied to fly further, longer, higher, and faster. Some records lasted a few weeks, some just days, and the flyers were national heroes.Moon Chin dreamed of flight, but he was just a boy. He finished grade school in 1928 and studied auto mechanics at the Baltimore Vocational School for Boys. He finished the course the following year and took a job at a truck repair shop at a wage that barely covered his lunch. A stagnating economy crashed the stock market that autumn, and business slowed, making it increasingly difficult for the truck shop owner to keep Moon Chin on the payroll. Joe Chin and the shop owner decided to return Moon to the vocational school for a second course, but when Moon finished in early 1931, the truck shop was in such dire straits that the owner couldn’t afford to rehire him. Moon Chin cast about for something else to do.

He knew exactly what he wanted to do – he wanted to fly – but his father wouldn’t hear of it. Joe Chin believed in tangible things, hard work. He didn’t favor romantic dreaming. Fatal flying accidents had been a newspaper staple for the last two decades. Moon Chin and his father compromised on aviation mechanics, and Moon took a mechanics’ course at the Curtiss Wright Flying School, located in Cheswolde Community beyond Baltimore’s famed Pimlico Racecourse. Moon was the only Chinese-American of the six students enrolled. He was the only ethnic Chinese who had ever enrolled.

Next: Moon Chin learns to fly

Moon Chin crossed North America in a train, sitting upright on a wooden bench with his face glued to the window, full of wonder at the sights of the new land. After five days in transit, father and son reached Baltimore, where they settled in Walbrook, a quiet neighborhood northwest of downtown. Joe Chin worked in a Chinese laundry for a few months before he was able to buy one of his own on West Baltimore Street. It was the ultimate Chinese-American cliché — the 1920 census reported that more than a quarter of all Chinese male laborers in the country worked in laundries.[i] Joe and Moon lived in the ground-floor laundry and rented the rooms on the two upper floors. An electric motor drove the washing machine and the wide leather belt that turned the clothes-squeezing rollers; a coal-fired stove heated the drying room. Moon and his father slept on two folding beds in the ironing room, saturated by soap-smells and cloying heat. The humid Maryland summer was torture.

A small unfenced pear orchard fronted the street across from the laundry. Summer aged into autumn and the pears ripened and fell. Moon Chin needed most of a day to summon the courage, but he finally darted across the street and wolfed a pear. Moon wiped juice on his sleeve and looked around. No one seemed to mind, so he ate another, and another, gorging himself on fallen pears, amazed to be in a country so wealthy that it dared waste such bounty.

In 1926, Joe Chin hired a trustworthy compatriot to run the laundry and opened a Chinese restaurant further down Baltimore Street, near its intersection with Frederick Avenue and across the street from a Salvation Army depot. Expressing hopes for his native land, Joe Chin called it The New Republic, and the restaurant proved a shrewd diversification. Within a year, Joe Chin was able to send his wife enough money to buy an apartment a few blocks west of Nathan Road in Kowloon, on the mainland side of Victoria Harbor in the British colony of Hong Kong.

Next: Lindbergh’s crossing captivates Moon Chin

[i] 12,559 Chinese-American laundry owners in the United States in 1920, thirty percent of all male Chinese workers: Chang, Iris, The Chinese in America, pp. 147.

Joe Chin wasn’t alone in having his citizenship minted in the San Francisco earthquake. Thousands of other Chinese had seized the same opportunity, and like Joe Chin, at long intervals those men returned to the villages, wives, and families they’d left in China. And when they returned to the United States, nearly every one of them registered a child with American authorities. Human biology immediately raised the suspicions of U.S. immigration, for men returning from China registered more than four hundred sons for every daughter. Legitimate immigration paperwork had extraordinary value, if not for one’s own son, then for another boy in the extended family. It could also be sold for an excellent profit. The INS found it difficult to discern true descendants from fictitious offspring, and every Chinese boy coming to the United States in the 1920s was jailed in detention facilities and subjected to grueling interrogations designed to expose the “paper sons.”[1]

The INS assigned Moon Chin a bunk in a room with about fifty male Chinese inmates, some of whom had languished in “detention” for more than a year. A lone window relieved the crushing monotony, and Moon passed hours perched on its sill, peering through glass and bars at the marvels of Seattle harbor, watching fishing boats, tugs, freighters, ocean liners, warships, and pleasure craft maneuver in Puget Sound, and trucks, longshoremen, trolleys, and trains bustling on the waterfront. A strange whiteness capped the mountains on Vancouver Island that reared into view beyond the sound. Moon Chin had no idea what it was. A stranger in confinement explained snow.

One day, Moon Chin heard a coarse, rapid-fire thunder coming through the window, a sound like nothing he’d ever heard. Moon wormed through the legs of the gathered adults and pressed his face to the glass. A black machine with wings, a tail, and floats flew across the sky! It banked close to the detention facility, and Moon clearly saw a man inside, perched between two sets of wings. Moon was transfixed. He’d never seen anything like that in Wing-Wa Village.

Immigration allowed Moon to see his father once a week. Each time, Joe Chin brought his son an apple and fresh clothes. Moon lingered in detention for almost six weeks. Finally, a jailer marched him to a cell in another part of the facility where three khaki-clad officers wearing jackboots and pistols suspended from Sam Browne belts sat behind a long desk and subjugated the boy to a half-hour interrogation with the aid of a Cantonese interpreter. The tall, glowering men were the first “foreign devils” with whom Moon had ever spoken, and his future depended on his answers. His father had warned him not to be tricked into mentioning either of his older siblings, but aside from that subject, Moon did his best to answer the questions as naturally and truthfully as he could. A single slip or inconsistency, even over something as trivial as the number of rooms in the family home, could cause the officers to reject the boy and return him to China.

The interrogators told Moon nothing when the interview ended. Moon didn’t discover that he’d been officially certified as a US citizen until he was released to his father two or three days later. Joe Chin took Moon straight to a shoe store and bought him his first pair of American-style shoes.

Tomorrow: the economic opportunities in a place called Baltimore.

[1] 400 sons for every daughter: Chang, Iris, The Chinese in America, pp. 147.

Moon Chin and his father lugged a single suitcase out of Wing-Wa village one humid morning in the summer of 1924. Sweat trickled from their short black hair and soaked their shirts. Dust trailed from their feet in the two-rut path that led to the riverbank, where father and son balanced aboard a junk bound for Macau, from whence they took a small coastal steamer 30 miles across the mouth of the Pearl River to the sleepy, harbor-side colony of Hong Kong. A Dollar Line steamer took them across the Pacific via Shanghai, Kobe, and Yokohama. Moon and his father slept on bunks jammed into a barracks-like hold they shared with dozens, if not hundreds, of other Chinese in “Asian Steerage,” the Dollar Line’s lowest class of travel. The steamer reached Seattle nearly a month after leaving Hong Kong.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service welcomed Moon Chin to American soil by separating the ten-year old boy from his father and locking him in the Seattle Immigration Detention Facility, a brick-built gulag that loomed over the Seattle waterfront whose main purpose was to allow I.N.S. officials to interrogate – and reject – Chinese immigrants.

Next: Ten-year old Moon Chin in the gulag