CHAPTER SIX
By 1869, twenty years after the first Chinese workers stepped tentatively onto the piers at San Francisco harbor, tens of thousands of Chinese men were now living in America. Many were no longer young. Some had worked in the United States for more than a decade, some for close to two decades, and for too many of them, these years had been long, hard, and lonely, with scant respite and meager reward. At an age when most men relied on the companionship of wives and the joys of children to temper the harshness of life, these men were left to soldier on alone in a foreign land. Perhaps most tragic, unable to afford the fare back to China on any sort of regular basis, or just too embarrassed to return as failures, some learned only from letters how the sons and daughters they had sired before their departure for the United States had come of age. Had it been worth it?
Surely those who spent their lives drifting from job to job, never quite getting ahead, would answer no. Perhaps those who fared worst were the ones who continued to search for gold. A couple of decades after the discovery of gold, opportunity shifted from the lone prospector with a sieve, a pan, and a burro, to large corporations able to afford expensive machinery and battalions of cheap labor to extract gold deposits from hard rock quartz. If a Chinese stayed in mining, he most likely ended up a low-paid employee of a large organization in a wage system stratified by race (whites were paid seven dollars a day, the Chinese two dollars or less.) Working not only in quartz but in coal and quicksilver mines, some inhaled toxic mercury fumes from the quicksilver and grew deathly ill, becoming in due course “shaking, toothless wrecks.” For such men, their early, youthful visions of an American El Dorado had vanished forever. The only vision that remained was the angel of death coming to them in an alien world.
While it is true that thousands of Chinese workers who came to America were simply used up and spit out, never catching hold of their piece of the American dream, this experience is neither the only one nor is it even the most typical. A lucky few found exactly what they had sought on Gold Mountain—some as prospectors but many more as industrious entrepreneurs—and, as planned, returned to Guangdong province, never to return to America. For this group, getting to America served as a means to an end. Their story, as least in terms of the Chinese in America, ended on a happy note. With their new affluence, some bought land in China, built country estates, and fulfilled their dreams of spending the rest of their lives as wealthy men of leisure. They had stories to tell their grandchildren of San Francisco and the California gold mines and perhaps of other parts of the American West Coast as well—a snapshot of Gold Mountain at one moment in time, destined to fade over the years.
A second group of workers did well enough in America to allow brief periodic returns to China, reconnecting with their families but always returning to America. For even at the reduced wages of a Chinese laborer in America of the mid-nineteenth century, the money they made changed the lives of their families back in China. And from this flowed a less well-known consequence of Chinese emigration to America.
At this time in the nineteenth century, one week’s pay in America was equivalent to several months of wages in China. Thus, from the meager earnings of many Chinese in America emerged a new class of aristocrats in Guangdong province. Thanks to favorable exchange rates, as well as the willingness of their relatives in America to work long, hard hours, many “Gold Mountain families,” as they had now become known, enjoyed a level of prosperity previous generations could only dream of. With those hard-earned foreign wages, they built family homes and summer vacation homes, hired tutors for their children and sent these children to universities. And soon a new mindset emerged and spread—with such rich relatives in America, why work at all?
In Toishan county, for example, where the remittances flowed the heaviest, the once austere Chinese work ethic all but disappeared within a couple of decades. One by one, formerly thrifty Gold Mountain wives who once maintained taut households, or who had painstakingly fashioned handicrafts to sell at the local markets, now delegated their manual tasks to servants. The sons, brothers, and nephews of Gold Mountain men, many of whom had once been industrious farmers, hired laborers to do the work for them, or even neglected their fields and irrigation systems entirely to import food from other regions. It was only a matter of time before Toishan would depend so heavily on foreign rice purchased by foreign remittances that a local wag noted, “when the ships occasionally cannot [sail,] fires in kitchens immediately stop burning.” Within a few decades, Toishan, a region once renowned as one of the most entrepreneurial in China and which had supported itself in the mid-1850s, was fast becoming a welfare state, with family after family living on the backbreaking labor of a Chinese husband working round the clock half a world away.
Even more debilitating than the gradual loss of skills and drive was the acquisition of expensive tastes. For a growing number of Gold Mountain families, the pursuit of pleasure became an obsession. Women acquired rare artwork and jewelry, while men gambled away fortunes, smoked opium, and bought new concubines. A Chinese historian complained that the Toishan region, once “simple, reverential, and thrifty” because of its poor soil, changed drastically after so many of its young men went overseas to earn money: “In a flash, clothing and food tend toward Chinese American, the business of marriage becomes especially contentious, wasteful, and excessively extravagant.”
While some families had the foresight to save, others spent recklessly. Because the flow of money from overseas seemed endless, there was no incentive to question these new lifestyles. Fortunately, not all this money was squandered on private indulgences. Many Gold Mountain families donated generous sums to create new schools, colleges, libraries, and other public works. By the late nineteenth century, a Toishan gazetteer commented that “various charities are everywhere,” observing that vast sums of overseas money had funded local hospitals, lecture halls, orphanages, and land for the poor. But it also noted, “The customs of the people are gradually becoming wasteful. Capping ceremonies [a coming-of-age ritual in which a father honored his son on his twentieth birthday] and wedding banquets required the expenditure of several hundred gold pieces. Fields lie barren and infertile and cannot be restored to their original state.”
And there was another problem, one of even greater concern. Just when the traditional Toishan personal and familial values, derived from Confucianism, were degenerating, social unrest increased. The mid-nineteenth century was a time of spontaneous uprisings congealing into outright rebellions in this part of China. One of those, the Red Turban rebellion, an outgrowth of the Triads’ secret criminal network, plotted the overthrow of the Manchu government. For years, Triad bandits had been terrorizing rural villages, pressuring peasants to join their movement, extorting protection money from towns. Then in 1853, the local Triads, calling themselves the Red Turbans, ran amok in Guangdong, forcing villagers to arm and defend themselves. The Turbans were suppressed by the government two years later, with a bloody reprisal that beheaded some seventy-five thousand suspected participants.
Another bitter conflict was the Punti-Hakka feud, the roots of which predated even the founding of the Qing dynasty in 1644. In the thirteenth century, the Cantonese-speaking Punti had settled into richer, more fertile farms in the lowlands of Guangdong, while the Hakka—known as the “guest people” because they arrived later—were forced to move to poorer regions in the hills. Thus began a furious ethnic rivalry, in which the Puntis and the Hakkas fought not only over land, but also for government positions through the imperial examination system. The Hakkas performed so well on the tests that the Qing imposed strict quotas against them, which only increased their resentment. In the 1850s, in the aftermath of the Red Turban uprising, the hatred between the Puntis and Hakkas erupted into new violence. Villages that had armed themselves against the Red Turbans now had the weaponry to fight each other; between 1854 and 1867, clashes killed two hundred thousand people.
The money sent home from America apparently exacerbated the situation. Through most of the twenty years of mass Chinese emigration to America, the province of Guangdong roiled with banditry, as the unemployed came to believe China was so corrupt that no one could succeed by playing it straight. Looting, kidnappings, and armed robberies increased dramatically. The Gold Mountain families, now firmly entrenched as the local gentry, became a highly visible and tempting target, leading to an even greater demand for overseas money—to hire bodyguards, to purchase arms, to build fortresses and walls against invaders. Ironically, the peace and security that the Chinese émigrés sought to purchase for their families with hard labor in America became more elusive than ever.
This may explain why one group of Chinese emigrants to the United States returned to China with a very different purpose in mind. Some arrived home to encourage their sons, nephews, or brothers to join them in America, to assist in the running of successful businesses they had established there. For them, America, with all its racism and discrimination, remained a land of opportunity, if only in relative terms. Rather than looking back longingly at what they had left behind, they looked forward to a time when they might be able to bring all their family members to a new life in America. Yes, the United States had its faults, and it was certainly not the welcoming haven the Chinese once thought it would be. But these men had crossed a line: with each visit to China, they became a little less wedded to their Chinese past and a little more to their American present. Their families recognized it even before they did. Anecdotes relate how baffled villagers watched the returning relatives drink coffee, wear American hats, or accidentally intermingle English with Chinese in casual conversation.
Only years later, looking back on old memories, did the workers themselves recognize how much they had changed. Huie Kin, who established a Protestant mission in New York, remembered that as a boy in Guangdong province he had heard that Caucasians were “red-haired, green-eyed foreign devils with ... hairy faces,” people who were “wild and fierce and wicked.” Later, as an American of Chinese descent, he was amused at how wholeheartedly he had once believed these myths.
Even those Chinese who had not started out with such wild notions remembered their surprise at the little things. “[A]s we walked along the streets the Americans and their dress looked very funny to us, and we all laughed,” one nineteenth-century Chinese émigré recalled of his first day in San Francisco. Some found it astonishing that white men wore close-fitting suits, since everyone knew that Chinese gentlemen preferred loose robes. “It was a long time before I got used to those red-headed and tight-jacketed foreigners,” Yan Phou Lee noted in his autobiography, When I Was a Boy in China. “‘How can they walk or run?’ ” Meanwhile, others thought it hilarious that white women wore long, wide, flowing gowns that mopped up dirt from the streets. Zhang Deiyi, an interpreter for the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, noted with amusement the “barbarian women” with unbound feet, who enjoyed “trailing long skirts on the ground like the tails of foxes.”
Other bizarre American customs provoked even greater amusement. What could be more absurd than people who ate with metal utensils instead of chopsticks, which made a “cacophony of dingdang noises” as they dined? And then there was the decidedly American tradition of shaking hands, which left Zhang Deiyi’s wrist sore, and of exchanging cards and autographs, which was “a great bother.” But perhaps nothing could compare with the kiss—the “ritual of touching lips together,” as Zhang put it. A Chinese popular magazine was almost at a loss for words when trying to describe it to its readers. The way to kiss, the editors had heard, “requires making a chirping sound. Those who do not know how to translate say the sound is like a fish drinking water, but this is wrong.”
Over time, however, the Chinese emigrants made the transition from Old World to New, such that there would come a point in each man’s life when during a visit back to China, his own relatives would suggest that his behavior no longer seemed Chinese.
The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 threw thousands of Chinese men out of work, work they needed not only to support themselves but also to provide the funds they had to send home. New work had to be found. Although they had proved themselves energetic and innovative workers, most traditional jobs remained closed to them solely because of their race. Nonetheless, the Chinese immigrants applied ingenuity and willing diligence to the problem and made their way by accepting opportunities that others found squalid or dangerous.
As the transcontinental railroad made it profitable to ship fresh produce to other regions in the United States, many of the swamps and valleys of California were turned into farmland, which in turn created a demand for farm labor. To exploit the situation, some of the more entrepreneurial Chinese arrivals established themselves as labor contractors. Their ability to speak Cantonese enabled them to recruit and manage large crews of migrant laborers, while their familiarity with American ways allowed them to cut a good deal for themselves with the white farmers.
These Chinese middlemen collected at both ends, charging the Chinese workers fees for finding them jobs and charging the farmers for placing workers. The middlemen also charged the Chinese for the provisions they needed. While we do not know if they actively recruited new workers from China, or simply used the pool of laid-off railroad employees, we do know that they served a real, necessary function by acting as the gateway between capital and labor. Many white landowners were eager to use Chinese labor because it was both inexpensive and self-sufficient. Under contracts worked out with the farm owners, for instance, the Chinese farmhands did their own cooking or paid for the services of a professional cook. They also slept in their own tents or under the open sky. Before long, they dominated the ranks of field labor: in 1870, only one in ten California farm laborers was Chinese; by 1884, it was one in two; by 1886, almost nine in ten.
These Chinese formed the backbone of western farm production. They sowed crops, plowed the soil, and ended up producing about two-thirds of the vegetables in California. Thanks to Chinese sweat, fruit shipments soared—from nearly two million pounds in the early 1870s to twelve million a decade and a half later. As the Chinese poured into farm work, grain swiftly surpassed mining as the largest source of revenue for the state. By the 1870s, California had become the wheat capital of the United States.
All these contributions paled, however, compared to the Chinese reclamation of the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta. Every spring, the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, the two major rivers in California, flooded their common delta for hundreds of square miles. The rotting tules, or bulrushes, decayed into a rich, fertile layer called peat, but to exploit this nutrient-rich soil, farmers had to drain, clear, and plow the delta as well as construct numerous levees and dikes to protect crops from future floods. Because horse hooves sank straight into the slushy bottom, humans were needed to complete these tasks, but few white men wanted to wade knee- or sometimes waist-deep in these mosquito-infested swamps. Only the Chinese were willing to do what was needed—to work in the muck, slashing their knives through miles of rotten tules, and build by hand a series of gates, ditches, and levees to create a giant labyrinthine network of irrigation channels.
The exact number of Chinese who died from disease, infection, or overwork as they restored five million acres of boggy delta swamp-land was not recorded. Some landowners valued Chinese life less than that of their animals; in the flood of 1878, as Chinese workers, covered with mud and weighted down with sandbags, struggled to shore up levees, some farm owners dispatched boats upriver to rescue their stock but left the Chinese behind to scream at passing ships for help. But we do know what the Chinese did for the landowners: they not only reclaimed the land, an achievement that would have been impossible without their stubborn dedication to the task assigned them, but they also invented the “tule shoe” during the project, so that horses could be used in this environment. And after their work was done, a surveyor estimated that the land, which the owners had purchased from the federal government for as little as two or three dollars an acre, the land on which the Chinese had worked for about ten cents per cubic yard of soil moved, was now worth seventy-five dollars an acre. The combined value of Chinese labor on the railroads and tule swamps, two projects essential to California’s growth, ran in the hundreds of millions.
The sea also provided work opportunities for the Chinese, though its dangers rivaled or even surpassed the brutality of the delta reclamation. Some Chinese labor contractors cut a new kind of deal with the salmon-canning factories of the Pacific Northwest, in which the canneries paid contractors for the volume of work produced, while the contractor paid the laborers a fixed wage. The incentives of such an arrangement ensured a negative outcome. The Chinese labor contractors became harsh taskmasters, and conditions in the canning industry grew notoriously bad. The horror of the job began even before arrival at the work site. On board vessels sailing to Alaska, the Chinese received no water for washing, so their living quarters swarmed with lice and fleas; when inspecting the “Chinatown” section of his vessel one shipmaster wore rubber boots as protection against parasites. By the early 1880s, canneries in the region employed more than three thousand Chinese, who labored under such shocking conditions that Rudyard Kipling, visiting one such cannery, wrote, “Only Chinese men were employed in the work, and they looked like blood-besmeared yellow devils, as they crossed the rifts of sunlight that lay upon the floor.” One observer remarked that the scene in a cannery was “not so much like men struggling with innumerable fish as like human maggots wiggling and squirming among the swarms of salmon.”
There were two ways the middleman could increase his profit—pay the workers a minimal sum, and force them to work faster. A Bureau of Fisheries investigator reported that the contractors drove workers “as with the whip,” noting that “the work of canning exceeds in rapidity anything I have ever seen, outside the brush-making establishment in the East.”
Their speed was indeed stunning. One Chinese Columbia River butcher could behead and debone up to two thousand fish, or eighteen tons, a day. History does not record how many Chinese men, reduced to the level of human machinery, died from accidents or disease in canneries of the Northwest. Decades later, the invention of a fish-butchering machine reduced the need for workers from dozens to only two operators. In a twisted acknowledgment of the enormous work capacity of these immigrants, the manufacturer named it “the Iron Chink.”
Not all Chinese entrepreneurs succeeded by exploiting their compatriots. Many had grown up within or near villages along the Guangdong coastline, or along the Pearl River, and they saw opportunities in the rich California coastal waters. The nets of Chinese fishermen were cast all along the West Coast, from the state of Oregon to Baja California. Hundreds of Chinese moved to Monterey, California, building cabins on the beach, laying abalone meat on rooftops and railings to dry.
They failed, however, to anticipate the strength of the white fishing lobby. Just as white miners had convinced the state of California to impose special taxes on their Chinese competitors, so did white fishermen succeed, in 1860, in getting the government to impose a special four-dollar-a-month fishing license on the Chinese.6 In addition, throughout the 1870s other immigrant groups-Greeks, Italians, and Balkan Slavs—organized to force through legislation limiting the size of Chinese nets, and thereby their catch. At one point, in 1880, California decided to withhold fishing licenses from aliens ineligible for naturalization, which meant, of course, all Chinese and only Chinese. Although the courts later declared this regulation unconstitutional, while the cases were pending, the impact devastated the Chinese fisheries.
At this same time, another very different entrepreneurial trend was developing among the Chinese in America. They were becoming increasingly an urban population. To earn their living, some decided to service the needs of local farm workers and miners by creating tiny Chinatowns in rural California communities, such as Sacramento (called Yee Fou, or “Second City”), Stockton (Sam Fou, or “Third City), Marysville, and Fresno. Others gravitated toward Los Angeles, formerly a way station for prospectors, a ranch town supplying wagons, equipment, and beef. Los Angeles, a lawless city, teemed with gamblers and prostitutes, and the Chinese moved there to open their own casinos and stores. Still others moved to fast-growing cities in the Pacific Northwest, like Tacoma, Portland, and Seattle, where they ran restaurants and laundries as well as businesses to assist the fishing industry. None of these Chinese communities, however, could compare in size or importance to the San Francisco Chinatown, which by 1870 was home to almost a quarter of all of the Chinese in California.
A Chinese man returning two decades after entering through the port of San Francisco in 1849 would not have recognized the city.
During the gold rush, San Francisco had been a filthy jumble of rough frame buildings, shacks, and tents, its beaches strewn with suitcases, trunks, and shovels. But the new San Francisco, the San Francisco of the 1870s, was tall, handsome, dignified. Muddy wagon trails had given way to paved streets that wended their way from the harbor up into the hills; along them rose stately buildings of stone and brick, designed in Gothic, Italian, and other classical architectural styles. Where unshaven, unkempt miners in plaid shirts and denim trousers had once roamed, there now walked refined, serious men in broad-cloth suits and top hats, emerging from banks, hotels, and offices. One immigrant who had remembered San Francisco as “narrow, revoltingly dirty, its squares filled with filth and the remains of animals,” was astounded to find it “no longer recognizable ... a great and beautiful city.”
But this transition, miraculous and sudden to the eyes of an outsider, had not been easy at all. The gold rush boom had been followed by bust times, poverty, and a series of devastating fires. Fortunately for San Francisco, local entrepreneurs always found methods to turn disaster into profit. The smoldering piles of scrap iron left by the periodic infernos led to the beginning of the city’s foundry industry, which supplied much-needed metal supplies for ship repairs and quartz mining equipment. Then, once the transcontinental railroad was finished, factories sprang into being, churning out goods of all kinds for export across America. Some processed food for the rest of the country—they milled wheat into flour, or salted and packaged meat. Others shipped out nonperishable products like tobacco and textiles. By the 1870s, San Francisco had grown into one of the major manufacturing centers in the United States.
The Chinese in San Francisco adapted to this change. Though Chinese vegetable peddlers continued to walk the streets with baskets suspended from each end of a shoulder pole, and Chinese washermen, numbering in the thousands, still controlled the city’s laundries, many others entered the new world of mass production. Most of those who made the transition did so as workers. By 1870, the Chinese constituted nearly half the labor force in the city’s four major industries: shoes and boots, woolens, cigars and tobacco, and sewing. Moreover, they represented about 80 percent of the workers in woolen mills, and 90 percent of the cigar makers in San Francisco.
But now, for once in America, their employers were likely to be Chinese. And something else was also new for the Chinese immigrants. In China, those who engaged in trade had been traditionally reviled, relegated to the bottom of a Confucian-defined social hierarchy that valued the scholar, the official, and the farmer, but not the merchant. But in the United States, financial success in business was worshipped. This new attitude would have far-reaching consequences, both within the Chinese community and outside it.
By the 1870s, San Francisco had five thousand Chinese businessmen, many of whom were highly successful and posed to local whites a formidable economic threat. In 1866, these Chinese had owned half the city’s cigar factories, and by 1870, eleven out of twelve slipper factories, most of which employed Chinese labor almost exclusively, were in Chinese hands. This elite of five thousand included vendors and middlemen in agriculture, the retail sector, and hydraulic quartz mining, as well as the labor contractors. Unafraid to flaunt their wealth and success, many lived in opulent apartments in San Francisco gleaming with crystal, porcelain, and ivory, staffed with servants. Their lives were a far cry from those of their employees, fellow Chinese who lived and worked in tenement factories, rolling cigars, sewing shirts, making boots and slippers. For these piecemeal laborers, the line between work and home often disappeared. “It is no uncommon thing to find in an apartment fifteen feet square three or four branches of business carried on, employing in all at least a dozen men,” one observer wrote of the world of the San Francisco Chinese worker. “In apartments where the ceiling is high, a sort of entresol story is fitted up, and here a dozen are to be seen engaged in various avocations, eating and sleeping upon and beneath their work benches or tables.”
Just as thousands of European immigrants endured atrocious conditions in the ghettos of New York, so did many Chinese cope with expensive, substandard housing in San Francisco. To save rent, they packed into crowded rooms where virtually every inch of space was used. J. S. Look, a Chinese émigré who arrived in the city during its manufacturing era, recalled that “there were so many of us that we had to sleep on the floors as there were not enough beds in Chinatown for the people that lived there.”
Because many Chinese could not afford furniture, they used crates found on the street as tables and cabinets. Because beds were scarce, they slept in shifts, or nailed bunks to the wall, one above another, like shelves, until their apartments resembled army barracks. The most unfortunate lived in squalid underground cellars where, one observer noted, “scarcely a single ray of light or breath of pure, fresh air ever penetrates. These rooms are filled with bunks like the rooms for passengers on ships and steamers, and by the dim, flickering light of a little oil lamp the poor wretches who den there crawl into their miserable couches.” When contemplating how they were able to tolerate such conditions, two factors must be kept in mind. The first is that their sacrifices were providing better lives for their families back home. The second is that many no doubt believed their discomfort to be temporary and refused to see the conditions in which they found themselves as the long-term reality of their lives.
The new economics of Chinatown—the elaborate terracing of wealth and position—soon found expression in an informal but all-encompassing power structure. At the foundation was a tier called the clans, who addressed the basic daily needs of Chinese laborers, such as housing. One level up, the clans of each district were organized into civic associations. Finally, at the pinnacle, ruled six powerful district associations, at the time known as the Chinese Six Companies, and later as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of America. The Six Companies anointed themselves the supreme power in Chinatown, with the ostensible purpose of resolving disputes, protecting members, and guarding the welfare of the entire community. So powerful were they that before the first Chinese consulate appeared in the city during the 1870s, the Six Companies served as unofficial ambassadors of China, acting as the voice of the Qing imperial government in the United States.
The Six Companies had evolved out of the need of the emerging Chinese business elite for order. The white man’s government had demonstrated that its mission was to suppress, not protect, Chinese interests. Chinese businessmen may have organized their own guild in San Francisco as early as 1849, and certainly by 1850 a number of immigrants from Guangdong had formed the Kong Chow Association, literally, “Pearl River Delta,” one of the first Chinese American organizations in America. When tensions arose between Cantonese people of different dialects and districts, the association split into two groups, which became the first two of the Six Companies. Later, four additional organizations appeared in the 1850s, with offices in prominent neighborhoods in San Francisco.
The Companies’ influence on a new Chinese worker began the moment he arrived at the docks. Representatives would be there to load the new arrival’s luggage onto a wagon and bring him into Chinatown, ostensibly to find him food, lodging, and work, but also to make sure he joined one of the associations, explaining that his dues would be more than offset by the social services the Six Companies provided. The Six Companies did in fact provide services. In San Francisco they created a safety net for the Chinese workers, lending them money when necessary and helping out when they were sick. They settled disputes between members, opened a Chinese-language school, maintained a Chinese census, and channeled remittances for their members back to their home villages through the district associations.
Their services extended into the spiritual realm as well, supporting joss temples, which were places of peace and meditation. During that era, a Chinese émigré could identify a house of worship by the tinsel on its balcony or the dragon figures on its balustrades. Stepping inside, he could ponder his fate in darkness, inhaling the aroma of burning incense, listening to prayers chanted to the music of gongs and drums. The decor within the temple-the idols sculpted from wood or plaster, the red and gold calligraphy, the glass lanterns filled with oil, the carved art from Chinese myths—transported the worshipper into a world that seemed to transcend both America and China.
The Six Companies also lavished attention on funerals, which could be huge, almost theatrical productions. Beginning typically at the home or store of the deceased, a Buddhist priest in a satin robe would chant prayers, and bang his bell and cymbals. Then a procession would head for Lone Mountain Cemetery, where each of the Six Companies had fenced off its own area. Along the route, white-clad mourners would weep and toss strips of brown paper, symbolizing copper coins needed for the passage to heaven. The entrance to the graveyard lot was usually marked by a canopy, beyond which lay a brick furnace, table, and headboard with Chinese characters. There, friends would burn paper near the body—Chinese messages, paper servants, paper money—gifts for the deceased in the afterworld that disappeared with his spirit in flame and smoke. Instead of the corpse being buried, the flesh would later be scraped off and the bones laid out to dry in the sun before being bundled into white muslin and shipped back to China. The return of these bones represented a final act of patronage, a commitment by the Six Companies to protect their members and send them back safely to their home villages, even after death.
While the Six Companies had their dark side—their social system may have unintentionally reinforced the image of the Chinese as foreigners, not melting-pot Americans—the real threat to Chinese émigrés came from a very different group: those who belonged to the secret societies known as the tongs.
Tong members tended to be outcasts who either lacked clan ties or had been expelled by their associations. They modeled themselves after the Triad societies in China, an underground fraternity in Guangdong province dedicated to the overthrow of the Manchu government. Representing the interests of the poor and the oppressed, the Triads drew into their ranks legions of impoverished peasants, embittered tenant farmers, people who had failed the civil service examinations—in general, those angry enough at the system to organize against the landlords and the imperial Qing elite. They invented elaborate initiation ceremonies, passwords, and coded hand signals, and swore blood oaths to pledge eternal brotherhood: “Tonight we pledge ourselves before Heaven that the brethren in the whole universe shall be as if from one womb, as if begotten by one father, as if nourished by one mother, and as if they were of one stock and origin.”
But unlike the Triads, the tongs had no clear political motives driving their actions, and very quickly they became involved in the extremely lucrative business of importing thousands of Chinese women and girls to America to service the Chinese bachelor population. Most of these women did not come by choice but were forced into degradation.
Prostitution and enslavement had a long history in China. In times of famine, a Chinese family on the brink of starvation might sell the youngest daughter to keep the other members of the family alive. The Qing dynasty officially sanctioned the practice, noting that the survival of one in ten families depended on a daughter’s being prostituted. Of course, many parents did not sell their daughters outright but nevertheless sealed their destiny by selling them as mui tsai, a Cantonese term for “little sister.” As children, mui tsai worked as indentured servants for another family, ostensibly to be freed by marriage at age eighteen. While a fortunate few might be treated kindly, many others were abused, raped, and sold into brothels. Some mui tsai ended up in America to service the army of Chinese male laborers who had no prospects for female companionship in a white world.
Because they tended to be illiterate and born into the poorest levels of Chinese society, most of these women left no memoirs. Several poignant stories survive as oral histories, however, recorded by missionaries and journalists. Ho-tai remembered that her mother had been determined not to sell her, even though the family faced starvation and “death was all around them.” But one night, when her mother was away from home, her father sold her for several pieces of silver. As she sailed away, she caught one last glimpse of her frenzied mother, “her dress open far below her throat, her hair loose and flying, her eyes swollen and dry from over-weeping, moaning pitifully, stumbling in the darkness, searching for the boat but it was gone.”
Lilac Chen, a former prostitute, recalled that her father gambled away all his money, leaving the family destitute. When Lilac was six years old, her father told her he was taking her to see her grandmother, whom she adored. She eagerly boarded the ferry, but then felt something was amiss: “Mother was crying, and I couldn’t understand why she should cry if I go see Grandma. When I saw her cry I said, ‘Don’t cry, Mother, I’m just going to see Grandma and be right back. [Then] that worthless father sold me on the ferry boat. Locked me in a cabin while he was negotiating my sale.” Lilac kicked and screamed, but when she was finally let out her father had disappeared and she was on her way to America.
Some women were deceived by pimps who bamboozled unsuspecting girls and their families with stories of the incredible wealth and leisure to be enjoyed in the United States. One nineteen-year-old girl, Wong Ah So, agreed to emigrate when a stranger posing as a rich laundryman offered to take her to Gold Mountain as his bride. On the journey she was thrilled that she was headed for a “grand, free country, where everyone was rich and happy.” Upon arrival in San Francisco, however, Wong was horrified and heartbroken to learn that she would be forced to work as a prostitute.
Western authorities at the treaty ports were charged with detecting and preventing such trafficking in women and children, but pimps easily bribed their way through the inspection process. During the journey, traffickers coached women to give proper answers on arrival, ordering them to memorize key phrases in case they were interrogated by officials seeking to ascertain whether they had traveled to the United States of their own free will. Some traffickers warned the women that if they failed to answer correctly, they would be locked up and left to rot in a “devil American prison.” Quick-witted girls managed to escape their fate by creating a commotion upon arrival, either on the ship or the docks—shrieking for help, crying that they had been kidnapped, begging passersby to save them. Thus a few were rescued and later given passage back to China, but most of the new arrivals had no chance to win either freedom or sympathy, especially in the early years of San Francisco’s rough-hewn, male-dominated frontier society.
Gripped by terror and confusion, these young women were locked in barracoons, stripped and inspected, and then auctioned off to the highest bidder, their sale price determining their place in the city’s hierarchy of prostitution. Though California was not officially a slave state, it tolerated the sale of female flesh during the antebellum period; slave auctions of Chinese women were held openly and brazenly on the docks, before large audiences that included police officers. By the 1860s, however, a stricter code of morality disapproved of such public transactions. The auctions didn’t stop but simply moved to Chinatown and then indoors—for instance, to a Chinese theater or even a Chinese temple. At these auctions, the youngest and most beautiful were usually sold as mistresses or concubines to Chinatown’s wealthy elite—merchants, tradesmen, and business owners. Relatively speaking, they were the lucky ones, though as property they had no rights and could be sold or disposed of at whim. Other women—the next tier—were acquired by exclusive “parlor houses,” where, elegantly dressed and perfumed, they were expected to entertain men in luxurious apartments of teak, bamboo, and embroidered silks. Most girls ended up in low-class brothels, or “cribs,” tiny shacks no larger than twelve by fourteen feet, facing dim, narrow alleys and sparsely furnished with a washbowl, a bamboo chair, and a bed. These loungei (literally, “woman always holding her legs up”) were forced to service, often in rapid succession, laborers, sailors, and drunks for as little as twenty-five cents each, drawing in customers with their plaintive chants: “Two bittee lookee, flo bittee feelee, six bittee doee!”
Chinese prostitutes shipped to mining camps on the western frontier were deterred from escape by the wilderness itself. One woman fleeing from her master in Nevada was later found half-dead in the hills, with both feet frozen and requiring amputation. In the hinterlands, they faced an even greater male-to-female ratio than in San Francisco’s Chinatown. They also endured insults and abuse from white miners, who called them “Chiney ladies,” “moon-eyed pinch foots,” and “she-heathens.”
At the same time, the prostitute-trafficking tongs were battling incessantly among themselves for control over territory and profits. Before such a war would erupt, the tongs often contrived a public excuse for the pending hostilities, such as a slap in the face or a stolen prostitute. In outbursts of Chinese tong warfare on the western frontier, some prostitutes were kidnapped and held for ransom; others died in the crossfire between rival gangs. In one notorious case, tongs seized four women in the Comstock Lode; only one victim was found alive—nailed shut inside a crate that had been shipped from San Francisco to Reno.
By the 1860s, the tongs almost entirely controlled the sex trade, leaving little room for independent operators. For prostitutes on the lowest level, there was no respite from work: many were doubly exploited by San Francisco brothel owners, who leased them out to local garment factories to sew by day, then sold their bodies by night. There was no respite from abuse: most were routinely beaten with clubs, threatened with pistols, burned with red-hot pokers. If they failed to make enough money, the madam “beats and pounds them with sticks of fire-wood, pulls their hair, treads on their toes, starves them and torments and punishes them in every cruel way.” One prostitute had acid thrown in her face by a Chinese actor who resented having to share her with other men. Some women chose to escape their unbearable lives by committing suicide, often by swallowing opium or flinging themselves into San Francisco Bay.
For some Chinese women taken into prostitution, the only escape was death. Those who tried other methods found themselves up against a corrupt system comprising not only the tongs and their network of opium dealers and gambling houses, but also the police, the courts, and even the Six Companies. Since prostitution was so lucrative—in 1870 the average brothel employed nine women, each of whom brought in an average net annual profit of $2,500 (compared with the $500 average annual income of the Chinese male laborer)—the tongs jealously guarded their golden-egg-producing property, hiring “highbinders”—associations of Chinese thugs—to monitor the women. They also paid $40 in insurance for every Chinese prostitute brought into the United States, as well as weekly or monthly fees to hire special policemen for surveillance. Brothel owners forced women to sign contracts penalizing them if they fell ill or were unable to perform their duties because of menstruation or pregnancy, virtually guaranteeing deeper bondage for these women. The following agreement is typical:
Yut Kum consents to prostitute her body to receive company to aid Mee Yung for the full time of four years. When the time is fully served, neither service nor money shall be longer required. If Yut Kum should be sick fifteen days she shall make up one month. If she conceives, she shall serve one year more. If during the time any man wishes to redeem her body, she shall make satisfactory arrangements with the mistress Mee Yung. If Yut Kum should herself escape and be recovered, then her time shall never expire. Should the mistress become very wealthy and return to China with glory, then Yut Kum shall fulfill her time, serving another person.
By the 1870s, horrified Christian activists, mostly middle-class white Protestant women, established rescue homes for Chinese women. San Francisco had two sanctuaries: the Women’s Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, established by Reverend Otis Gibson, and the Presbyterian Mission Home, founded by the Woman’s Occidental Board. Soon a stream of prostitutes began slipping away from their cribs to beg admission. To bring them back, the brothel keepers sent emissaries to the mission, asking to interview the former prostitutes for just a few minutes. If an interview was granted, they would cajole the women, then threaten them if they refused to return, frightening them to tears. On occasion, the brothel owners even sent their attorneys with writs of habeas corpus.
To protect the women, the mission took to hiding them wherever they could—between folding doors or under floorboards. One resident of the Presbyterian Mission Home recalled how the tongs would “search the whole house, even dig into our rice bins to see if we put any [prostitutes in] there!” They harassed the director, Donaldina Cameron, by smashing the mission’s windows and planting sticks of dynamite on doorsills and against the foundation.
But the courageous Cameron would not be stopped in her cause. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, she struck upon a new, even more aggressive strategy. Rather than wait for the women to find her, she went looking for them. With the help of the police, she began paying daring surprise visits to bordellos, first ascending to the rooftops of adjoining buildings, crossing to the bordello’s rooftop, then climbing in through the building’s skylights. In an attempt to thwart this latest assault, the tongs established a sophisticated system of alarm bells to warn brothel operators of approaching police. Not surprisingly, these heroic efforts drew considerable press attention to Chinatown’s criminal element and greatly contributed to the demise of Chinese prostitution on the West Coast. In 1942, the Presbyterian Mission Home was renamed the Donaldina Cameron House to honor her life and work. Through her efforts and those of others it is said that eventually an estimated fifteen hundred Chinese women were rescued.
What did those women do afterward who were rescued or had broken free on their own? As surprising as it may seem, some went on to become madams and brothel owners themselves, using their own experience to exploit other Chinese women. The most famous was Ah Toy. She was possibly the first Chinese prostitute in America, a woman who had migrated “to better her condition,” mostly likely of her own free will. Arriving from Hong Kong in early 1849, she began her career as a loungei in an alleyway shanty. Soon she became San Francisco’s most successful Chinese courtesan, owning a brothel in a prestigious neighborhood and enjoying near-celebrity status. At the peak of her popularity, Asian and white men alike lined up for blocks and paid an ounce of gold just to “gaze upon the countenance of the charming Ah Toy,” as one man breathlessly put it. Part of her success derived from both her strong will and genius for self-promotion. The Chinese crime syndicates could not control her; she successfully fought the tongs that tried to extort money from her. Men who cheated her (such as one who paid her with brass filings instead of gold) found themselves hauled into court. Her name appeared constantly in the local newspapers. And unlike most women in her profession, Ah Toy lived a long life. She reportedly ended her days peacefully and died three months short of her hundredth birthday.
Then there was the case of Suey Him, first sold at age five by her father for a piece of gold, and then again at age twelve for three handfuls of gold. For a decade she worked as a prostitute, until she wed a poor Chinese laundryman who loved her. For eight years they scraped and saved to buy her freedom from the brothel keeper. But later her husband fell ill and died, forcing her back into the profession. This time, however, she returned as a capitalist, importing some fifty girls from China to work for her. She worked as a madam until she converted to Christianity and freed all her girls.
Other former prostitutes, however, joined mainstream society in substantial numbers as wives and mothers. (This is evident from statistics indicating that while the total number of Chinese women in the United States decreased during the 1870s, those keeping house grew from 753 in 1870 to 1,145 in 1880.) Many former prostitutes married Chinese laborers, and a few married Caucasians. The union of Polly and Charlie Bemis is one of the most famous love stories of the American West; it inspired the 1981 novel Thousand Pieces of Gold by Ruthanne Lum McCunn and a 1991 feature film of the same name starring Rosalind Chao and Chris Cooper.
Originally known as Lalu Nathov, Polly Bemis was born in 1853 to an impoverished farm family in China. After a severe crop failure and a raid on the village by outlaws, her father was forced to sell Polly to the outlaws for two bags of seed. Resold in the United States for $2,500, she became the slave and concubine of Hong King, a Chinese saloon owner in Warren, Idaho, until Charlie Bemis won her in a poker game. An educated man from a prominent New England family, Bemis granted Polly her freedom. She soon repaid his kindness: when a miner shot Bemis in the face, Polly performed surgery with a razor blade to save his life. After his recovery, Bemis asked her to marry him, and they spent the rest of their lives as ranchers at the bottom of a canyon on the Salmon River in Idaho. Polly Bemis, who used her knowledge of Chinese herbs to nurse sick children, became a much-beloved neighbor in the community.
Yet other women were never able to escape the world of prostitution. There are stories of women rushing into marriage to escape the brothel, only to discover themselves wedded to a new pimp. Their desperation for a better life made them easy prey for unscrupulous men with no qualms about forcing them back into the sex trade. Some former prostitutes married honest, loving men, only to be abducted by gangsters in their husbands’ absence. According to Donaldina Cameron, highbinders would hunt down and kidnap these married women even after they had moved to remote rural villages.7
In time, those who unable to leave the profession became outcasts, scorned by Chinese and whites alike. When they grew old and sick, many were treated like human refuse and simply thrown out onto the streets. The hospitals of the American West would not help them—white San Francisco physicians lobbied to exclude Chinese prostitutes from the hospitals—and few could afford the services of Chinese herbalists. Clan associations and the Six Companies established nursing facilities for former prostitutes, but they were tiny, dark, squalid rooms furnished with a few straw mats, referred to by some as “death-houses.” A visitor to one of these facilities described entering through a low door into a room dimly lit by a Chinese nut-oil lamp, and finding “stretched on the floor of this damp, foul-smelling den... four female figures . . . victims of the most fearful... loathsome disease.”
And what of those Chinese women who came to America as wives? In China, society mandated that a married woman’s life centered on the family, serving them from cradle to grave. According to one school of ancient Chinese philosophy, the “Three Obediences” dictated that she first obey her father, then her husband after marriage, and finally her eldest son when widowed.
Because the average worker could not afford to support a family in the United States, most Chinese women emigrants who were not prostitutes were wives of merchants. Most had grown up in modest but respectable families in small villages near Canton. They tended to be middle-class, because upper-class families would not allow their daughters to marry outside China, and because many Chinese merchants in the United States considered working-class women beneath them.
Having been raised in a protected, insular household, the typical merchant’s wife had never ventured far beyond her village until journeying to the United States. Even more problematic was the fact that the middle and upper classes in China practiced the nine-hundred-year-old tradition of bandaging a young girl’s toes under the ball of her foot, reducing the foot to a length of five or even three inches. Reflecting the same impulse as the Western fashion of warping the female ribcage with corsets, foot-binding existed primarily to symbolize a family’s wealth and power, advertising its ability to support a nonworking, purely ornamental human being.
For many of the wives, home in the United States was nothing more than a gilded prison, where they were jealously guarded as treasured possessions. Some Chinese immigrant women could easily count the number of times in their lives they had ever stepped outdoors. “My father traveled all over the world,” one Chinese American remembered, “but his wife could not go into the street by herself.” Only during holidays were some permitted to venture out, accompanied by a chaperone. A merchant’s wife in Butte, Montana, recalled, “When I came to America as a bride, I never knew I would be coming to a prison . . .”:
I was allowed out of the house but once a year. That was during the New Year’s when families exchanged New Year calls and feasts. We would dress in our long-plaited, brocaded, hand-embroidered skirts. These were a part of our wedding dowry brought from China. Over these we wore longsleeved, short satin or damask jackets. We wore all of our jewelry, and we put jeweled ornaments in our hair.
The father of my children hired a closed carriage to take me and the children calling. Of course, he did not go with us, as this was against the custom practiced in China. The carriage would take us even if we went around the corner, for no family women walked. The carriage waited until we were ready to leave, which would be hours later, for the women saw each other so seldom that we talked and reviewed all that went on since we saw each other.
Before we went out of the house, we sent the children to see if the streets were clear of men. It was considered impolite to meet them. If we did have to walk out when men were on the streets, we hid our faces behind our silk fans and hurried by.
No doubt many Chinese men felt they had good reason to keep their wives under lock and key. The scarcity of women in the West and the violence of frontier society posed a very real danger of kidnapping or molestation in the streets. A bound-foot woman could neither run from assailants nor fend off attacks. Indeed, with several toes rotted away from foot-binding, she could hardly walk—or even remain standing—for an extended period of time. The annals of nineteenth-century California recount many stories of helpless Chinese women being thrown down into the mud, dragged by the hair, pelted with stones, their clothes and earrings yanked off.
So perhaps staying indoors was safer, though less than stimulating. One wife whiled away the hours playing cards with her servant, looking after her son, gossiping with neighbors, or hiring a hairdresser or a female storyteller to entertain her. In her essay “The Chinese Woman in America,” Edith Maud Eaton, a Eurasian writer who used the pen name Sui Sin Far, offered a glimpse of these women’s lives:
Now and then the women visit one another. They laugh at the most commonplace remark and scream at the smallest trifle, they examine one another’s dresses and hair, talk about their husbands, their babies, their food, squabble over little matters and make up again, they dine on bowls of rice, minced chicken, bamboo shoots and a dessert of candied fruits.
In contrast, other Chinese wives did not enjoy the luxury of idleness. Some belonged to the laboring class, toiling long hours like their husbands. In the late 1870s, a few could be found as domestics or in intensive labor industries as seamstresses, washerwomen, shirtmakers, gardeners, and fisherwomen. In family-run operations, like laundries or grocery stores, the line between business owner and laborer blurred, and wives were often compelled to work alongside their husbands to keep their businesses afloat.
Difficult as her life could be, the typical Chinese wife had more power in the United States than she could have achieved in her home village. First and most important, she had escaped the tyranny of her mother-in-law. In China, a daughter-in-law lived with her husband’s family and endured her husband’s mother’s hazing until she gave birth to a son; bearing a male child validated her existence and earned her the respect of the family. Her power grew with each additional male child and climaxed when she became a mother-in-law herself, attaining the authority to perpetuate the tradition by bullying her sons’ wives.
In the United States, Chinese families were nuclear, not multigenerational, and wives were usually freed from this hierarchical scheme of abuse. In addition, they lived in a country where women who worked were not stigmatized as they were in China. In their home villages, a working woman was often viewed with derision or pity, her employment a sign that her husband or family could not support her. But in the United States, some merchant wives passed their time doing needlework in the privacy of their own homes, earning thousands of dollars by mending clothes for Chinese bachelors. A few even opened their own tailor shops. The labor of these working women was valued by their families, because the money sent back home could spell the difference between life and death for relatives in China.
Perhaps most significantly, the Chinese emigrant wives also mothered a tiny population of American children. In 1876, the Chinese Six Companies estimated that a few hundred Chinese families lived in America, and perhaps one thousand Chinese children. In the long run, these infants, the first generation born in America, would enjoy more rights and privileges in the United States than their immigrant parents. Most were too young then to know that heated racial discussions were under way in Congress and across the country, negotiations about civil rights that would profoundly affect their future.