Chinese Americans
In the middle of the nineteenth century, pressed by poverty at home and attracted by job opportunities in America, thousands of Chinese, mostly from the southern province of Guangdong (Kwang-tung), immigrated to the United States. They planned to put in a few years of hard work on Gam Saan, or "Gold Mountain," as they referred to America, then return home wealthy and respected, but they instead found themselves working in mines, clearing forests, building railroads, tunneling through mountains, fishing along the Pacific Coast, gathering wheat and cash crops in the Far West and Southwest, and, in general, helping to "open" the trans-Mississippi West for settlement. Some, from Fujian as well as Guangdong, went first to Hawaii to work as contract laborers on the islands' sugar plantations before heading home or on to the mainland of the United States after their work contracts had expired, but most traveled directly to California. Especially after 1848, the year gold was discovered near San Francisco, the Chinese began to arrive in significant numbers on the coast and then headed inland to the gold fields and other destinations. Their numbers reached perhaps a total of one-half million before the immigration was abruptly halted by the legal fiat of Chinese exclusion in 1882.
Although Chinese emigration had begun centuries before Europeans and Americans became involved with China, many of those in this latest exodus left for reasons that were related to recent turmoil created by Western opium smuggling. In the Opium Wars of 1839 to 1842, the British and other Europeans forced the Chinese government to allow the hitherto illegal traffic in the drug and pried open additional Chinese ports. American merchants, anxious to keep a toehold in the China trade, pressured the U.S. government to move quickly and intervene in their behalf. Negotiations surrounding the Treaty of Wanghia in 1844 gave the United States access to the ports opened to the Europeans, the same "rights" in China enjoyed by the Europeans, and any future concessions granted the Europeans. The huge postwar indemnities demanded by the Western powers caused China considerable problems. To pay them, the Manchu (Qing) government imposed high taxes on peasant farmers, who were unable to meet the levies and consequently lost their lands. Then beginning around 1847, a series of floods caused the rice crop to fail, and starvation stalked much of rural China. The chaos in the countryside led to rebellions by the now landless peasants, whom the Chinese government described as bandits, and a civil war broke out in the river deltas of South China. "Ever since the disturbances caused by the Red Turban bandits and the Keija bandits," a Chinese government report from the period read, "dealings with foreigners have increased greatly. The able-bodied go abroad."
By then, stories about America's gold-rich hills were floating around China as they were most of the world. Ronald Takaki has described how, after mid-century, U.S. labor brokers circulated fliers in the port cities of China announcing: "Americans are very rich people. They want Chinamen to come and make him very welcome. There you will have great pay, large houses, and food and clothing of the finest description." America was "a nice country, without mandarins or soldiers" where "[m]oney [was] in great plenty and to spare...." In addition, the Chinese who had already returned to their villages from Hawaii or America were local legends for the money they had made, the "palaces" they had built, and the land they had bought. The young, the impatient, the daring, and the desperate reasoned that they, too, could find fortunes on Gold Mountain. Some immigrants were lured by labor recruiters, but most Chinese left of their own free will. Others paid their own way, but many borrowed the funds for the trip under the credit-ticket system, in which they took money from a broker to cover passage and paid off the loans, plus interest, from their earnings in America. Many of them were illiterate or had little schooling, but they were not coolies, "shanghaied" and forced into foreign labor as myth would have it. In 1849, 325 Chinese came looking for gold on the American River. The next year, 450 Chinese arrived; in 1851, 2,718; in 1852, 20,026. By 1870, there were 63,000 Chinese in the United States, three-fourths of them living in California. The 1880 U. S. Census counted 105,465 Chinese on the mainland and around 10,000 living in Hawaii. Between 1880 and 1882, 57,271 Chinese arrived in the United States, and 26,788 returned to China, leaving a net increase of 30,483.
When the Chinese first began to arrive in any numbers in America, as Takaki notes, there were signs that they were welcomed. The Daily Alta California reported, for example: "Quite a large number of the Celestials have arrived among us of late, enticed thither by the golden romance that has filled the world. Scarcely a ship arrives that does not bring an increase to this worthy integer of our population." One Chinese merchant in San Francisco observed: "The people of the Flowery land [China] were received like guests [and] greeted with favor. Each treated the other with politeness. From far and near we came and were pleased." Such treatment did not last. Not all of the Chinese headed for the gold fields or stayed long if they did. Many, chased from claims or treated violently in the mining regions, returned to the city of their disembarkation. Bigotry and racial hatred denied them full access to the San Francisco job market and forced a number of them into self-employment. They opened stores, restaurants, and, especially, laundries.
The Chinese laundryman was an American phenomenon. In China, men did not do laundry, and there were no wash houses. The Chinese considered washing to be women's work, and a Chinese man would have lost social standing if he had taken up such an occupation. But in America, a laundry, like a Chinese restaurant, could be launched with very little capital. A few hundred dollars, even as little as seventy-five dollars, would buy a stove, a trough, a dry-room, an apartment to sleep in, and a sign to hang over the door, which was all the Chinese immigrant needed. Laundrymen did not have to speak English, except perhaps to say "yes" or "no." By the 1850s and 1860s, Chinese laundries were common sights in San Francisco and in rural towns whose Chinese business communities catered to the needs of Chinese miners and farmers--Sacramento, Marysville, Stockton. By the end of the century, one in every four Chinese workers in the United States was a laundryman, and the Chinese made up more than 70 percent of all laundry workers. Other jobs also traditionally associated with women became the province of Chinese men in the West, especially in San Francisco, including work in domestic service. As cooks, the Chinese found another profession that, like laundering, would become one of the four "pioneer" occupations--as they were called by historian Sucheng Chan. All were jobs that enabled the Chinese to move eastward across the country.
Restaurants enabled the Chinese to thrive in communities where few of their fellows lived because restaurants attracted a clientele that was not exclusively Chinese. Gold-rush California, rampant with young men in their twenties but boasting precious few women of any age, was the perfect setting for launching such a venture. Men of any nationality who learned to cook could earn an easy living. Quick to realize that the food typically served in the West was, in a word, awful and that here lay the opportunity for a steady income, the Chinese took positions as cooks in private homes, on ranches, and in hotels. Soon, they opened their own restaurants and, in the late nineteenth century, moved to other parts of the country to launch new enterprises as well. In the bigger towns and cities, Chinese restaurant owners served nothing but Chinese food and employed only the Chinese as cooks, waiters, and bus boys. But in smaller communities, they tried their hand at more traditional American dishes and hired local women to work as waitresses. Chinese restaurants frequently shared a feature with other Chinese businesses: a large group of those who worked in the restaurants owned small pieces of the operations. Such employee participation helped ameliorate conflicts between management and labor and enhanced their ability to get along in close quarters, a crucial ethnic survival skill.
According to Chan, the four pioneer occupations of the Chinese also included Mining and railroading. By the 1860s, two-thirds of the Chinese in America, some 24,000 people, were working in California mines. Most were independent prospectors, although some organized into small groups and formed companies of twenty or thirty. According to one newspaperman, they were "inhabiting close cabins, so small that one... would not be of sufficient size to allow a couple of Americans to breathe in it. Chinamen, tools, tables, cooking utensils, bunks, etc., all huddled together in indiscriminate confusion, and enwreathed with dense smoke, presented a spectacle." Chinese miners became a common sight in their blue cotton shirts, baggy pants, wooden shoes, and wide-brimmed hats with queues trailing down their backs. They played penny-ante poker; they took opium rather than alcohol; they seemed frugal and industrious. Isolated by culture, language, and even work habits, they tended to keep to themselves as they worked mainly placer claims in the California foothills, especially along the Yuba River.
Despite their industriousness, they soon became scapegoats for frustrated fortune-hunters and targets of American nativist movements. As early as 1850, when the infant California legislature passed a foreign miners' tax aimed primarily at the Chinese, the cry from the Sierra Nevada gold fields was: "California for Americans." Every foreign miner who did not desire to become a citizen was required to make a monthly payment of three dollars. Chinese men could not become American citizens under the 1790 immigration law that reserved naturalized citizenship for "white" people, so even those men who had no plans to return to China were required to pay the monthly fee. The tax remained in force until voided by the 1870 Civil Rights Act, by which time California had collected $5 million from the Chinese, an amount tantamount to between 25 and 50 percent of all state revenues. In the mining camps themselves, racial antagonism was more direct. Allowed to work only abandoned claims and placer finds others considered unworthy of effort, the Chinese were soon scorned by white Forty-niners who described poor-yielding claims as those that "even the Chinese passed by." The Californians called for every Chinese man to cut his queue, which they called his "pigtail," before qualifying for residence in the state, and the miners often took the matter in their own hands and cut off the braids themselves. Some drove off Chinese who turned up promising prospects and worked the claim themselves. One story making the rounds of the camps claimed that a miner had hung up six Chinese by their queues and cut their throats. Although som e Chinese abandoned hope and returned to San Francisco, many continued to scratch out an existence in mining despite the drawbacks, and eventually mining drew the Chinese to the Pacific Northwest and to the northern Rocky Mountains and Great Plains.
Large numbers of the Chinese immigrants to the American West went to work on the railroad after the Civil War, when the fever for a transcontinental line gripped the country. Hired as an experiment to do grading for the Central Pacific Railroad in 1865, the Chinese soon became the mainstay of railroad construction despite sneers about their size and physical strength. By the end of the year, three thousand Chinese were working for the Central Pacific. They formed the bulk of unskilled labor for the road and did more than their share of the demanding--and dangerous--work, such as hanging from the sides of cliffs to place the dynamite charges needed to blast through Western mountains. In the winters, they worked underground in snow tunnels, which occasionally collapsed. A good many died, although the railroad did not keep count. The Chinese were indispensable to the Central Pacific's race east against the Union Pacific Railroad building westward not only because they did the hard and dangerous work, but also because they were paid considerably less than the wages demanded by similarly skilled Euro-American workers. Thus they allowed the Central Pacific to overcome the two disadvantages it suffered at the beginning of its rivalry with the Union Pacific: the more difficult terrain it had to traverse and the fact that California boasted the highest wages in the nation. Other Westerners resented the Chinese railroad crews not simply because they worked cheaply. Many reasoned that cheap Chinese labor also allowed the railroads to keep the price of the land granted it by the federal government artificially high rather than selling it off, as had been anticipated, to settlers at affordable rates in order to finance construction. The railroads first introduced the Chinese to Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, but upon completion, the railroads also stranded them there. The companies kept several hundred men for maintenance work and fired the rest, some 10,000 Chinese in all. Denied free passage back to California along rails they had built, the Chinese trekked westward on foot in small groups. Some found work along the way as common laborers and migrant farm workers. Those who straggled back to California found that the railroad was bringing in ever more Euro-Americans, who disliked the fact that they had to compete against the Chinese for local jobs.
In the American West, the Chinese, like most others, lived in a society full of young males. But while other communities experienced increases in the number of women, the Chinese community remained predominantly a world of bachelors and married men far from their families. Hence, as some scholars have pointed out, the Chinese immigrants could not create replicas of traditional Chinese society in miniature. Given the scarcity of women, the Chinese population remained rootless, which only fueled the racial agitations against them and helped give rise to anti-Chinese outrages. This, in turn, led the Chinese to band together in Chinese quarters for protection. The small, often crowded Chinatowns in San Francisco, Sacramento, Honolulu, and other urban communities were national enclaves, not unlike those of other immigrants, where many residents clung to their traditions even as they created new social institutions. In Chinatown, the residents built temples and public halls, established businesses and set up shops, opened restaurants and ran laundries, and formed clan associations, regional organizations, and secret societies for their safety and welfare. These organizations functioned as instruments of social control over the mass of Chinese immigrants and as "legitimizers" of the status of immigrant leaders, who operated as power brokers between their compatriots and the outside world.
The most important associations in the American Chinatowns were those made up of people from the same districts in China. Called huiguan, the first of these district associations were the Sam Yup Association (Sanyai Huiguan, sometimes called in English the Canton Company) and the Sze Yup Association (Siyi Huiguan), both established in San Francisco in 1851. The more cosmopolitan Sam Yup, who went both to Hawaii and to the U.S. mainland, became merchants, grocers, butchers, tailors, and entrepreneurs; the poorer Sze Yup, who flocked to California, got their start as laborers and miners. Other district associations also formed after 1851, and members of those groups took to tenant farming in the Central Valley delta or set up as nurserymen around Santa Clara. Another key to Chinese immigrant life was its family or clan structure. In China, those with the same surnames assumed they were related, and in America each such clan, when large enough, established an association of its own; the smaller clans formed coalition family associations. Both types of associations provided mutual aid. They met ships with new arrivals; offered short-term lodging; outfitted aspiring miners, workers, and farmers; transmitted mail and money back to China; offered health-care services; maintained cemeteries; built altars and temples; handled funerals; and set up rotating credit operations that allowed both individuals and groups to start businesses.
To mediate disputes among members of the various associations, the leaders of the six huiguans located in California in 1862 created a loose confederacy composed of representatives from each association. They called the federation a gongsuo (or public hall), but the Euro-Americans dubbed it the "Six Chinese Companies." After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed, the Chinese leaders established a formal organization named the Zhonghua Huiguan, or the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, and it too, soon became known by a variation of the English nickname, the Chinese Six Companies. Dominated by merchants, who in traditional China had been at the bottom of Chinese society, the Chinese Six Companies claimed that one of its principal functions was to fight anti-Chinese legislation, and it hired a series of talented Euro-American lawyers to carry on the fight. But the Six Companies also exercised great control over Chinese immigrant life, a control some scholars have described as despotic. Because the organization regulated the issuing of "exit permits" to any Chinese who wished to return to China, it exerted immense influence within the community. No Chinese could acquire a permit unless either the Chinese Six Companies itself or one of its constituent associations had cleared him (and more rarely, her) of all debt. Steamship companies would not sell tickets to those without permits. The Chinese Six Companies, without question, functioned also as a charitable and benevolent organization. In 1884, for example, it opened the first Chinese language school for the children of Chine se immigrants. Some have compared the Chinese Six Companies to Gilded-Age America's big-city machines, which operated by providing patronage, mutual aid, and social services in return for ethnic loyalty and the power to act on the entire community's behalf. Certainly as Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Associations spread to New York, Honolulu, Vancouver (Canada), Lima (Peru), Portland, and Seattle from 1883 to the end of the decade, they all looked to the San Francisco Chinese Six Companies for leadership. Even after the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949, China's mainland government continued to attempt to use the organization to influence American Chinatowns.
Chinese immigrants also formed groups based on common interests such as trade guilds, political parties, and "secret" or "sworn" brotherhoods. Craft guilds and labor unions had existed for centuries in China, where they trained apprentices, established work standards, set prices, and protected territorial and professional prerogatives. The Chinese in America followed suit, setting up guilds for laundrymen, shoemakers, tobacconists, and the like, which established uniform prices for different merchandise, divided up neighborhoods among members to decrease competition and, thus, help ensure survival, and collected dues to pay lawyers to fight anti-Chinese ordinances against the guild's specialities. More notorious than either the various associations or the guilds, however, were the tongs (or tangs), which cut across common geographic origins and kinship ties. Although in Chinese tong meant simply "hall," in the American West of the nineteenth century, the word came to mean a fraternal organization whose members were bound by secret initiations and brotherhood oaths. Among the Chinese, the best-known tong was the Chee Kung Tong, or Zhigongtang, whose roots lay in secret Chinese societies formed to overthrow the Manchu dynasty and restore the Ming (Han) dynasty. Most Chinese scholars call these secret mainland Chinese revolutionary groups Triads, a number of which participated in the Taiping Rebellion before the Manchus suppressed it in 1864. Many Triad members escaped to Southeast Asia, Hawaii, and the Pacific Coast. By the 1870s, there were dozens of tongs in different parts of the United States, including some in Hawaii, and the former Triads attracted especially the declassé among the immigrant population with the beliefs, rituals, and antiestablishment organizations they had brought from China. Soon the groups were being called "fighting tongs" by American newspapers. Using "hatchetmen" to murder their rivals, the tongs battled for control over the profits to be made in Chinatowns from gambling, opium dealing, smuggling (after Chinese exclusion), and prostitution. Enough money was to be had that not a few formerly respectable merchants joined the tongs.
Tong control was especially onerous for the Chinese women, who, in the early years, formed a small proportion of immigrants. During the early decades, most of them had come to the United States alone. Many of them were prostitutes, forcibly transported from China by white slavers and the Chinese tongs or by their parents who sold them into the trade. Some went into debt peonage to cover their passage to America and became prostitutes under contracts that stipulated the house of ill repute where they would work, the number of years--usually around five--they would be required to stay, the amount of the advance--usually around five hundred dollars--they would be given, and other conditions and considerations. It was a hard life, whether the young women wound up in the high-class Chinatown brothels of San Francisco, Marysville, and Sacramento or worked in the run-down houses or four-by-six-foot barred-window cribs of mining outposts, railroad camps, and small farming towns. A good number of them became opium addicts and not a few committed suicide by taking an overdose of drugs or throwing themselves into San Francisco Bay. Some prostitutes did escape the life and forgot their past in happier and safer times. Many paid their debts and went free. Some fled to the Presbyterian Mission in San Francisco's Chinatown. A number of them found husbands among the lonely bachelors of Gam Saan, who bought their freedom and brought them into Chinese society, where they lived full and productive lives. In the 1870 census, 61 percent of the 3,536 Chinese women in California listed their occupation as prost itute.
The fact that so many Chinese women were prostitutes adversely affected the lives of the slowly growing number of Chinese women who were not. The latter seldom appeared on the streets of Chinatown alone for fear that they would themselves be kidnapped and forced into slavery or that local Chinese men would assume they were prostitutes and press unwanted attentions. This legacy of exploitation combined with white prejudice to last for decades. The United States attempted to bar Chinese women from the very beginning, and San Francisco officials tried again and again to close brothels staffed by Chinese women. Both the California legislature and the U.S. Congress passed laws against female immigration on the assumption that most, if not all of them, would take up prostitution. The Page Law of 1875, prohibiting the entry of Asian contract laborers, felons, and prostitutes, was used primarily to keep Chinese women out of America. Chinese women arriving in Western ports were detained and subjected to humiliating searches and brutal treatment regardless of their reasons for coming to America. Women who left the country to visit their families in China were required to prove they were married to Chinese men on the mainland or the daughters of Chinese families born in the country during lengthy and draconian questionings, and then they were frequently denied entry anyway on the smallest of pretexts. When the Chinese fought up to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of twenty-two women denied entry by the California immigration commissioner, they were rudely rebuffed by the judges in Chy Lung v. Freeman (1876). Only some 1,340 Chinese women entered the United States legally between 1875 and 1882. When a Chinese exclusion law seemed imminent in 1880, 50,000 Chinese rushed into the country over the next two years, but there were only 219 women among their number. By 1890 there were twenty-seven Chinese men for every Chinese woman on the mainland, and the number of Chinese children, which was around 500 in 1870, reached a mere 9,000 in 1900, fifty years after the Chinese had first begun immigrating to the United States. Only in 1940, after almost a century of settlement, would the American-born people of Chinese ancestry outnumber the foreign-born.
Those Chinese who remained in the country after exclusion continued to live mostly in the West and primarily in Chinatowns. While millions of European immigrants found jobs in the growing industries of the East and Midwest, the Chinese (and other Asian Americans) worked in the fields, orchards, private homes, laundries, and restaurants of the trans-Mississippi West. Their experience separated them from the European immigrants and resembled in many ways that of all the West's "peoples of color"--African Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans Americans. Although recent scholarship on Chinese Americans is beginning to fill in the picture of the neglected years between World War I and World War II, most historians still believe that, with exceptions, the majority of the Chinese were limited to noncompetitive jobs and--once the waves of anti-Chinese violence had passed--basically ignored by whites except as domestics and ethnic curiosities in narrative fiction and movies. Certainly, the Chinese were isolated from and rejected by the culture surrounding them until at least World War II, when China became an ally of the United States. During the war, the perceptions of many mainstream Americans toward China changed, and the United States repealed all anti-Chinese exclusion laws. This in turn allowed Chinese Americans to make important political, legal, and social gains and begin to find acceptance--even frequent admiration and recognition--in a country that once seemed so adamantly opposed to their very presence.
-- Phillips, Charles
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