Histories Collided — Not Planes In Chinatown, those who care say it's time for a U.S. apology On a rain-soaked Mott St. in Chinatown the other day there were few visible signs of anxiety over the spy-plane confrontation between the governments of the United States and China. The front pages of the Chinese-language newspapers were, of course, heavy with the story. People bought them, glanced at the headlines, moved on through the cold spring rain. But there were no yellow ribbons. There were no heated debates on wet streetcorners. The people of Chinatown were too busy working. "Get it over with," said Paul J.Q. Lee, whose family has operated the 32 Mott Street General Store for almost a century. "Apology, regret. Whatever it takes. But move on." Outside the 200-year-old Church of the Transfiguration at 29 Mott St., where Irish and Italian immigrants once sought consolation long before there was a Chinatown, young Chinese women waited under umbrellas in the rain for their American children. They had no time for conversations about dual loyalties; they had lunches to prepare and homework to supervise and part-time jobs to go to. Inside the church school, I spent some time with a Maryknoll priest named Raymond Nobiletti, who studied and worked in Hong Kong for 15 years and speaks fluent Cantonese. He's the pastor. On the wall of the parish reception room was a charming Chinese version of Joseph, Mary and Jesus, under the illuminating rays of the Holy Ghost and the sterner visage of God the father. All the figures were Asian. "I don't hear much talk about all this, unless I ask," Father Nobiletti said. "And when I do, people just say, 'They should work it out.' When I was in Hong Kong, I learned that most Chinese are apolitical, in our sense of the word. They worry about the economy, about making a living and feeding their kids. The same is true here. Most Chinese-Americans just figure that this is one of the games politicians play. My own feeling is that the President of the greatest, most powerful nation on Earth should never say we will never apologize. That's too absolute. Truly big people know when to apologize." Nobiletti's assistant, a young woman named Paulina Cheng, stopped in. She came to the United States two decades ago and is a naturalized citizen. "If the Chinese are right, we should apologize. I'm American, and I would apologize. But my Chinese side tells me that it shouldn't be too easy to have these kinds of flights. I understand how the Chinese government must be thinking. And I remember, when I was a girl, how we were brought up to believe that all Caucasians were devils, because of the history..." History provides the hidden templates in this story, and in Chinatown, there's an awareness of the Chinese history that is not generally shared — and certainly not felt — by the provincial rich guys who now run the American government. From the President down, these are people who have never lived in other cultures. Even the best of them, Colin Powell, experienced Asia only as a soldier. This unworldliness is crucial because the collision off the coast of China is also a collision of separate national histories, each based on fear. For 60 years, American governments (and many of our people) have feared one thing: another Pearl Harbor. That is, a sudden, brutal sneak attack by a foreign enemy. That fear drives the enormous U.S. military budget, which stands now at about $325 billion a year, more than the next 10 nations in the world combined, including Russia and China. The Pearl Harbor Syndrome is behind the Bush demand for an unworkable, amazingly expensive missile shield and the continued devotion of national treasure to the gathering of intelligence, through spies, satellites and airplanes. But China carries its own fear-driven baggage of historical memory. Call it the Wicked Westerner Syndrome. It's based on facts as irrefutable as Pearl Harbor. The crucial event took place in the early 19th century, when various perfumed British gangsters went into the drug business in Asia, contaminating China with opium. They were encouraged by the British government, whose millions of tea-drinking citizens had created an immense problem with the balance of payments. The British wanted Chinese tea; the Chinese had no interest in shoddy British goods. So the British went into the drug rackets, bringing their supplies from colonialized India, and were soon happily joined by such American entrepreneurs as John Jacob Astor, who peddled an inferior Turkish brand. Opium had been banned from China for almost 100 years before the British got serious, but drug dealers always find a way. By the mid-1830s, the British balance of trade problem was over (they demanded payment in silver), and more than 2 million Chinese were addicts. In early 1839, the appalled Chinese emperor ordered an end to the trade and appointed a tough anti-drug czar (as we would call him) to suppress the trade. British drug processing factories were placed under siege, stocks of opium worth $6 million were seized. The result was a disaster for China. The British were then the most powerful nation on Earth and they sent a battle fleet to Canton to kill and maim for the right to peddle drugs (this was as if Colombia were to bomb, shell and invade Florida for the right to peddle cocaine). The Opium War of 1840-1842 was waged with the usual British ferocity and, when it was over, China was left broken and humiliated. In the century that followed, perhaps 50 million Chinese would die fighting Japanese and other foreign invasions, civil wars, and epidemics of plague, cholera and anthrax. China was a country, but it would not be a nation again until Mao Zedong's Communist triumph in 1949. Cruelty, famine and repression did not end under the Communists, but China was free at last of the arrogance of foreign powers. During the decades after the Opium War, many Chinese moved out to the wider world, and some found their way to the Chinatowns of the United States. Here, they too often met fresh problems: exploitation, racist laws and the nativist caricature of the Yellow Peril. Given all that history, it's unfair to ask Chinese-Americans to make hard judgments on this nasty little affair. History is not a string of sound bites. There is as much diversity of opinion among Americans of Chinese ancestry as exists among those with other ancestries. But historical memory — as the Irish and the Jews know — is hard to erase completely. Many successful Chinese-Americans, in and out of the flexible borders of Chinatown, understand that notions of the Yellow Peril are never entirely dead in this country. Exhibit A is the case of Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos scientist who was cast for many months into solitary confinement by fearful men. "Get it over with," says Paul Lee, standing outside the family store on Mott St. "Don't let it build into something even worse than what it is." Across the street, Paulina Cheng agrees: "I love America. I love its fairness. I love its predictability, which comes from our Constitution. I love our human rights. But this thing: Don't make it a big deal. How is it said in English? Don't make a mountain out of a molehill." Original Publication Date: 4/9/01 New York Daily News