CHAPTER SEVEN
By the time of the 1870 census, 63,199 Chinese were living in the continental United States, 99.4 percent of them in the western states and territories, with a clear majority—78 percent—in California. It was only a matter of time before the Chinese emigrants crossed the Rocky Mountains, then the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Some found themselves clear across the country, on the Atlantic coast, while others, with the help of labor contractors, would end up in the American South. All of them would face a post-Civil War America grappling with the politics of race, and with the question of where certain ethnic groups would fit within a new social hierarchy.
One of the strangest episodes in the history of the Chinese in America concerned workers who signed labor contracts that in essence rendered them substitutes for former black slaves on postwar southern cotton plantations. Fortunately, it was a story with a reasonably happy ending for the Chinese. For while many southern plantation owners initially saw the arrangement as a match made in heaven—they had had heard wonderful reports about the industrious and cooperative nature of Chinese worker—they would quickly learn, however, that in addition to their diligence and accommodating nature, most Chinese workers understood a contract and expected its terms to be fully honored by both sides.
Relatively speaking, few Chinese laborers took field jobs in the South, for no one living in the country during the 1850s and 1860s could have been completely unaware of the consequences of slavery based on race. Southern plantation owners, accustomed to laborers who had no rights whatsoever, were unlikely to be beneficent, or even fair, employers, especially to people who had agreed to pick up the work of former slaves. These owners had lived most of their lives believing that the way to increase productivity was to have overseers whip grown men into total tractability. Why would they suddenly view a labor contract with a member of another race as an arrangement between parties sharing equal rights?
As it turned out, the Chinese in America would not acquiesce easily to white efforts to relegate them into a permanent underclass, in the South or elsewhere. In a culture that viewed blacks and Native Americans as having sprung from an inferior culture, the Chinese quickly recognized that anyone associated with these other two races was likely to be abused. In 1853, when a California judge barred a Chinese man from testifying against whites on the premise that the Chinese should be considered part of the same race as Indians and blacks, the Chinese community took greater offense at the comparison than at the exclusion. In an outraged letter widely circulated throughout the San Francisco business community, one Chinese merchant wrote that his people enjoyed thousands of years of civilization. How dare white Americans “come to the conclusion that we Chinese are the same as Indians and Negroes... these Indians know nothing about the relations of society; they know no mutual respect; they wear neither clothes nor shoes; they live in wild places and in caves.” Not surprisingly, such attitudes aroused bitter resentment from other minority groups, who believed that the Chinese should not be exempted from the unfair treatment they endured from the white population. When the Grass Valley Indians in central California were being shunted onto reservations, King Weimah, their chief, pointedly objected to the Chinese remaining free in the United States while his own people were being rounded up and isolated from American society.
Until the Civil War, racial injustice was legally codified in most states, and only after the war did the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee all citizenship rights, including the right to vote, to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” while the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race, color, or previous servitude. But during the post-Reconstruction era, southern states resorted to a variety of ruthless Jim Crow tactics, ranging from poll taxes to outright violence, to keep blacks away from the ballot box.
While southern racists were widely regarded in the North with righteous scorn, it should be noted that western politicians were equally unwilling to see the Chinese gain the right to vote. They feared, as California Republican senator Cornelius Cole warned, that “If the Chinese were allowed to vote,” it would “kill our party as dead as a stone.” Those who feared that the Chinese immigrants would start applying for naturalization, and once they had citizenship be guaranteed the right to vote, won a victory when in the 1870s Congress and a federal court decision withheld from the Chinese the right of naturalization, declaring them aliens ineligible for citizenship. But the Fourteenth Amendment, written to ensure that African Americans were given the full rights of citizenship, extended the right of birthright citizenship to all those born in the United States, and as a consequence to the American-born Chinese population as well. So while Congress denied Chinese immigrants the right to become naturalized citizens, the Reconstruction amendments precluded both the federal and state governments from denying American-born children their citizenship rights. It would be a distinction the Chinese would not ignore.
Before the 1870s, only a handful of Chinese had lived in the old South, a few working as physicians, and many more as merchants, storekeepers, or cooks. Some had made their homes in southern port cities such as Charleston and New Orleans. But with the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of the black slaves, southern planters, hearing of the exemplary work habits of the Chinese and knowing they had no rights of citizenship, wanted to use them as field hands. Unlike the ruling class in the West, which feared the Chinese as competition, white southerners had no difficulty with the idea of importing hordes of foreigners, in this case to pressure their former black slaves to return to field labor under conditions that had prevailed under slavery. “Emancipation has spoiled the Negro, and carried him away from the fields of agriculture,” editorialized the Vicksburg Times. “Our prosperity depends entirely upon the recovery of lost ground, and we therefore say let the Coolies come, and we will take the chance of Christianizing them.” No doubt, one of the first Christian traits they would have the Chinese learn was to turn the other cheek when abused. But clearly the intent was not to save the souls of the Chinese, but to use them as leverage against the emancipated blacks. A planter’s wife wrote, “Give us five million of Chinese laborers in the valley of the Mississippi and we can furnish the world with cotton and teach the Negro his proper place.”
To this end, the southern elite organized a conference to discuss strategy. In 1869, hundreds of delegates arrived in Memphis, Tennessee, for the nation’s first Chinese labor convention. Tye Kim Orr, a Chinese Christian who had established a Chinese colony in British Guiana before moving to Louisiana, addressed the delegates in Memphis on the second day of the conference, assuring his audience that the Chinese were docile, obedient, and industrious—in short, a race amenable to easy exploitation. The conference whipped up considerable excitement in the press, especially with the appearance of Cornelius Koopmanschap, the country’s best-known importer of Chinese workers, who had helped supply the Central Pacific Railroad with Chinese labor. He captivated his audience at Memphis by promising that the Chinese would be willing to move to the South from San Francisco for about twenty dollars a month, or from China on five-year contracts for as little as ten dollars a month.
Anticipating the prospect of a new South rising on the backs of coolie labor, the delegates agreed to raise a million dollars to further Koopmanschap’s plans; they also appointed a committee to bring five hundred to one thousand Chinese immigrants to the South.
After the conference, the South went about actively recruiting Chinese labor. A few, brought from Cuba in 1866, were already working in sugarcane fields. To help lure more workers to the region, American clipper companies distributed handbills in south Chinese ports. “All Chinese make much money in New Orleans if they work,” one of these asserted. “Chinamen have become richer than mandarins there.” Some of the advertisements promised the Chinese that on their passage to the United States they would find “nice rooms and very fine food. They can play all sorts of games and have no work.” The handbills urged the Chinese to hurry. “It is a nice country. Better than this. No sickness there and no danger of death. Come! Go at once. You cannot afford to wait. Don’t heed the wife’s counsel or the threats of enemies. Be Chinamen, but go.”
These aggressive efforts netted the arrival of about two thousand Chinese in the South in 1869 and 1870. Some went to work on the plantations and shrimp farms of Louisiana. Others replaced black labor in the cotton fields of Mississippi and Arkansas. Still others toiled on railroads. In December 1869, some 250 Chinese men came as employees of the Houston & Texas Central Railroad. The following August, a thousand arrived in Alabama to build track toward Chattanooga.
By the middle of 1871, however, there appeared signs of serious conflict and, on both sides, disillusionment. On one plantation, the Chinese staged a strike to protest the whipping of a Chinese servant. On another, a Chinese labor gang attempted to lynch a Chinese agent who had given them false information about their life in the South. There were cases of plantation owners who shot and killed Chinese workers who rebelled against oppressive conditions.
The primary issue was that plantation owners, accustomed to absolute control over their workers, viewed their relationship with the Chinese as master and slave rather than employer and employee. In contrast, the Chinese considered their relationship to the planters as a capitalistic, not feudal, transaction and expected their employers to adhere to the terms of their contracts. Time had left the southern employers behind, and the Chinese laborers, unlike black slaves, now enjoyed decided advantages.
First, the Chinese worked under labor contracts and, to the dismay of the southern elite, proved to be shrewd and litigious negotiators. To spell out every detail of their contracts, they hired bilingual interpreters, men who served not only as translators but as surrogate agents and lawyers. Their job was to haggle over the terms of the contract, communicate worker grievances to employers, and secure new employment for their clients if they were dissatisfied with their jobs. When planters violated their contracts, the interpreters filed lawsuits on behalf of the Chinese.
Second, the Chinese in the South could sue or press charges against their employers. For example, in 1871, Chinese workers took their case to court after a skirmish with an overseer left one Chinese dead and two others wounded. The local judge not only permitted their testimony to be delivered in Chinese but later ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. In this respect, the Chinese enjoyed greater protection under the law in the South than in California, where state law specifically barred them from testifying against Caucasians.
Third, Chinese workers were protected by a postwar federal government deeply suspicious of southern efforts to exploit people on the basis of race. As early as August 1867, U.S. authorities halted Chinese labor recruitment in the South until they received testimonials and certificates from the Chinese stipulating that they had migrated to the South voluntarily and signed labor contracts of their own free will. This governmental vigilance made it difficult for southern plantation owners to hold Chinese workers in bondage.
For the southern oligarchy, the experiment with Chinese labor, begun with such high hopes, proved to be a disaster. Within a few years, most Chinese had walked away from their contracts and accepted other jobs at better wages. Many gravitated toward cities like New Orleans, where they opened their own stores. Some simply ran away, and most planters lacked the resources to pursue them. By 1915, scarcely a single plantation still employed Chinese labor.
If the southerners thought that they could import Chinese labor to discipline their former slaves, the North thought it could exploit Chinese labor to discipline its white workers. The northern attempt came during the “Gilded Age,” as Mark Twain called it, a showy, counterfeit epoch, its gilt veneer barely hiding underlying corruption. It was a time when ruthless capitalists, known as “robber barons,” ascended to positions of enormous power, not through exemplary hard work a la Horatio Alger, but through wholesale bribery, collusion, and intimidation. It was an age of contrasts, of conspicuous consumption by the wealthy juxtaposed against a backdrop of deep despair and disillusionment within the working class.
This yawning gap between rich and poor, which widened further during the second half of the nineteenth century, was already apparent during the Civil War, when men like J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and James Mellon eluded military service by paying less privileged men to act as their substitutes. Many of the rich grew richer selling shoddy equipment to the government for use by the Union armies. Class differences grew more distinct in the postwar era, especially during the presidency of U. S. Grant, a legendary Civil War general but a spectacularly incompetent public official. In an administration wracked by scandal, federal officials consistently protected the interests and ignored the excesses of those willing to pay them off. The robber barons engaged in an orgy of confiscatory expansion, first wounding and then gobbling up competitors, all with the connivance of the courts and the help of the legislatures they purchased. Financiers and railroad moguls watered down stocks, used strong-arm tactics to bully employees into submission, and bought off federal, state, and city politicians to create their empires. Washington spent millions of taxpayer dollars to bail out Wall Street after a failed conspiracy by stock speculators to corner the gold market.
Against this background of greed, the frustration of the American worker mounted. Those who had loyally risked life and limb to fight in the Union armies were cast adrift after the war. Returning to crumbling, disease-ridden tenements in the cities, they had to compete with thousands of others for work, including even more desperate European immigrants—men and women willing to endure unhealthy and even dangerous conditions in factories for minimal wages. Others seeking work were farmers forced off the land when they found that they could afford neither the expensive equipment required to make agriculture profitable, nor the exorbitant shipping rates charged by powerful railroad monopolies. There were riots in the coal mines, strikes in mills and factories, accompanied by literal starvation in the streets. In an effort to defend themselves against their corporate employers, white employees started to organize unions to fight for decent working conditions and fair wages.
A new method of control had to be found quickly, a new source of labor that would demonstrate that union members were expendable, and eastern industrialists began to consider the Chinese as that source. In 1870 at North Adams, Massachusetts, the workers of a ladies’ boot and shoe factory went on strike, demanding an eight-hour day, a wage increase, and the right to review the company’s account ledgers. The owner, Calvin Sampson, fired them, but since the strikers belonged to the Secret Order of the Knights of Saint Crispin, the largest and possibly the most powerful union in the country, he was unable to hire replacement white workers. Still, Sampson rejected the demands of his workers, and after reading a newspaper article praising the efficiency of Chinese workers in a San Francisco shoe factory, he signed a three-year contract with the emigration firm of Kwong, Chong, Wing & Company under which seventy-five Chinese laborers would be sent east from the West Coast. Sampson was the first manufacturer in American history to transport Asians east of the Rockies to end a strike.
A crowd gathered at the North Adams train depot to gape at the arriving strikebreakers. Some spectators came out of sheer curiosity, as most New Englanders had never before seen an Asian person, but many were there to harass and even intimidate the Chinese. “A large and hostile crowd met them at the depot, hooted them, hustled them somewhat, and threw stones at them,” The Nation wrote. Thirty police officers escorted the Chinese to the factory dormitories, where they were protected by locked gates and guards. Later, someone scrawled “No scabs or rats admitted here” on the factory wall, but no violence broke out.
Sampson’s decision to hire Chinese labor proved a success. Harper’s New Monthly reported that “there can be nowhere a busier, more orderly group of workmen.” Within a few months, the Chinese were outperforming the Crispins, producing shoes at a brisker rate than the more experienced strikers had done. Scribner’s Monthly pointed out that the Chinese “labored regularly and constantly, losing no blue Mondays on account of Sunday’s dissipations nor wasting hours on idle holidays.” The magazine estimated that the Chinese had saved Sampson $840 a week, or almost $44,000 annually, which, if applied to the rest of the shoemaking industry, would result in national savings of $3.5 million a year.
Widely reported in the press, the North Adams experiment inspired other East Coast capitalists to try Chinese labor. Three months after Sampson imported his Chinese workers, James B. Hervey, owner of the Passaic Steam Laundry in Belleville, New Jersey, brought Chinese laborers from San Francisco to replace his Irish female employees, whose frequent strikes were cutting into his profits. The arrival of these Chinese laborers panicked white workers throughout the eastern states. James Hervey received several threatening letters, one warning that he would be murdered if he did not fire his Chinese employees. When a cutlery factory in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, brought in more than a hundred Chinese, some of the town’s citizens petitioned Congress, complaining that the use of Chinese labor “shows a manifest attempt to revive the institution of slavery.”
Unreasonable panic at what tomorrow might bring was exactly the effect that many capitalists sought to instill in their white workers. Soon after Sampson’s success in North Adams, a number of companies convinced striking white workers to return to their jobs—at a 10 percent wage reduction.
But the Chinese were not as docile as the white capitalists had expected. To Hervey’s chagrin, his new Chinese workers turned out to be just as militant as the Irish women, and he complained the Chinese were becoming “more and more like their white neighbors.” Eventually he lost his enthusiasm for Chinese laborers and in 1885 his assistant discharged all of them.
Hervey could not have foreseen that his decision would plant the seeds of future Chinatowns along the East Coast. Many of his former Chinese employees moved to New York City or to Newark, New Jersey, and from there wrote their relatives, inviting them to join them in opening laundries of their own.
Up to this time, the number of Chinese in New York had been tiny. Some, including former sailors who worked in a variety of occupations, from peddling and candy making to cigar rolling and operating their own boarding houses, had migrated directly from China to the East Coast. According to the 1880 census, 748 Chinese lived in Manhattan, a miniscule number for an urban center with more than 1.2 million people, yet still the largest Chinese community east of the Sierra Nevada. But within just a few years after Hervey let his Chinese workforce go, some two thousand Chinese laundries were operating in metropolitan New York.
The early history of the Chinese on the East Coast was not exclusively one of exploitation and strikebreaking. Early in the nineteenth century, a very different pattern had begun, eventually running parallel to the struggle for economic survival being played out by Chinese workers elsewhere in America. A handful of Chinese intellectuals were admitted to the eastern seaboard’s great centers of learning, its preparatory academies and ivy-decked universities. The education these students acquired would later lend them a disproportionate influence on the futures of both the United States and China.
Christian missionaries were instrumental in opening the schools’ doors to the Chinese. They not only held Sunday school classes to teach immigrant factory workers the English language, but also followed up by sponsoring programs to help Chinese youths attend eastern high schools and colleges. Even earlier, between 1818 and 1825, a generation before the arrival of the first gold rush Chinese in California, five Chinese youths had come to the United States to study at a mission school in Cornwall, Connecticut. One of the five, Ah Lum, would later become a translator for Commissioner Lin Zexu, who was renowned for burning stockpiles of British opium before the Opium Wars.
Perhaps the most famous nineteenth-century Chinese intellectual who enjoyed missionary patronage was Yung Wing. His story exemplifies the experience of the Chinese emigre scholar, who readily assimilates into American society but always struggles with his identity, especially as his desire to create a stronger China is thwarted by a growing sense of alienation from his people and his homeland.
Yung Wing was born in 1828 in the Chinese village of Nam Ping, a few miles away from the Portuguese colony of Macao. When he was seven, his father enrolled him in a new English missionary school in Macao. His parents, he later wrote, observed that “foreign intercourse with China was just beginning to grow,” and anticipated that this might “assume the proportions of a tidal wave.” In 1840, when his father died, leaving Yung Wing’s mother with four children and no means of support, Yung’s education came to an abrupt halt. To help his family, he hawked candy in the streets, labored in the rice paddies, and folded papers in a printer’s shop. This might have been the pattern for the rest of his life had not a medical missionary, dispatched by his old school, invited him to study at the Morrison Education Society School in Macao. At Morrison, Yung was befriended by the Reverend S. R. Brown, the American founder of the school, who offered him and a few other students the opportunity to resume their education in the United States. In 1847, Yung and two other Chinese boys arrived on the East Coast and enrolled at the Monson Academy, a renowned preparatory school in southwestern Massachusetts.
In America, Yung resolved to acquire the knowledge he would need to help his homeland. The trustees of the academy offered to fund his college degree if he pledged to become a missionary after graduation, but Yung, both ambitious and stubborn in his convictions, refused to make that commitment. “I wanted the utmost freedom of action to avail myself of every opportunity to do the greatest good in China,” he later wrote of his decision. “To be sure, I was poor, but I would not allow my poverty to gain the upper hand and compel me to barter away my inward convictions of duty for a temporary mess of pottage.” Remarkably, he prevailed. Thanks to his friend Reverend Brown, Yung found several financial patrons in Savannah, Georgia, and with their support enrolled at Yale in 1850. There he impressed his peers by winning first prize in English composition during two collegiate competitions. In 1854, Yung successfully completed his studies and became the first Chinese graduate of a major American college.
He returned to China and, driven by a sense of his own destiny—and by a certain amount of self-importance—told his mother, “Knowledge is power and power is greater than riches. I am the first Chinese to graduate from Yale College, and that being the case, you have the honor of being the first and only mother out of the countless millions of mothers in China at this time, who can claim the honor of having a son who is the first Chinese graduate of a first-class American college. Such an honor is a rare thing to possess.” But as he would soon learn, one man’s American college degree was not enough to bring about massive reform in China.
Readjusting to life in China proved much more difficult than Yung Wing had expected. While living with a missionary in Canton, he witnessed firsthand some of the abuses and corruption of the Qing regime. In the summer of 1855 Yung saw the gory result of Manchu suppression of a local rebellion. The viceroy Yeh Ming Hsin had ordered the decapitation of seventy-five thousand people, most of them innocent, and Yung Wing lived only half a mile from the execution grounds. “But oh! What a sight,” he recalled. “The ground was perfectly drenched with human blood. On both sides of the driveway were to be seen headless human trunks, piled up in heaps, waiting to be taken away for burial.”
His idealism and independence of spirit, no doubt enforced by his exposure to American culture, made it almost impossible for Yung Wing to hold down a full-time job in China. To support himself, he worked first as a secretary to an American, then as a court interpreter in Hong Kong, but later claimed that the British attorneys had conspired to drive him out: “If I were allowed to practice my profession [in law], they might as well pack up and go back to England, for as I had a complete knowledge of both English and Chinese I would eventually monopolize all the Chinese legal business.” After a short time, Yung left the snake pit of legal politics in Hong Kong to move to Shanghai, where he worked for the Imperial Customs Translating Department, only to resign again, after just four months. Disgusted by the systematic bribery at every level of the organization, he decided to leave public service altogether. Soon he became a successful tea merchant.
In 1863 he left his prospering tea business to help Tseng Kuo-fan, a powerful imperial viceroy, with industrial plans to mechanize China. He assisted Tseng in creating the Kiangnan Machine Works near Shanghai and journeyed back to the United States to purchase equipment for it. The viceroy was so impressed by the results Yung had achieved that he promised to help him realize his dream of a Western-style education for the Chinese. With the viceroy’s support, Yung persuaded the Qing government to send Chinese students to the United States for advanced education and training.
Evolving into a cultural ambassador of sorts, in 1872 Yung became the deputy commissioner of the Chinese Educational Mission, the first officially sponsored exchange program between the two countries. While serving in this capacity he also became China’s associate minister to the United States, one of the first official diplomatic links between the two countries. The Chinese Educational Mission brought 120 young Chinese males to America, to study at imperial expense, and these youths, ranging in age from ten to sixteen, boarded in private homes and enrolled in schools throughout New England.
The original plan, as formally proposed by two Chinese viceroys to the Qing court, was to have these boys study in the United States for about fifteen years, preferably at military academies such as West Point and the Naval Academy, and then to have them return to China by age thirty—“the best time to serve their homeland.” But what the Qing government did not recognize until much later was that these American-educated students would be internally transformed. Instead of the students returning with Western knowledge that might help China, the reverse occurred: China lost some of its best and brightest minds to the United States.
It was only natural that youths transplanted to a new environment during the most formative years of their lives would be irrevocably changed by the experience. And in the case of the 120 mission students, the change would be profound. These Chinese wasted no time in adapting to New England life. They replaced their scholarly Chinese silken gowns and round caps for Western suits and blue flannel trousers. They tucked their queues out of sight under shirt collars, or sheared them off entirely. They played American sports8 and went to parties, dances, and church socials. Many converted to Christianity. As their friendships with white Americans deepened, some, inevitably, dated and married white women.
In 1881, Qing officials abruptly shut down the educational mission, ostensibly because they were insulted by West Point’s refusal to consider Chinese applicants, but perhaps even more significantly because they rightly feared that the students were forsaking Chinese values for American ones. But in the end, it was impossible to hold back the currents of change. China’s increased exposure to American concepts of freedom and democracy would eventually inspire future revolutionaries to bring about the Qing’s downfall, and afterward, in the new Republic of China, the Chinese Educational Mission graduates would assume important positions in government, such as in the diplomatic service and the transportation, naval, and mining bureaus. Just as the Qing had originally intended, the students would bring back their Western knowledge to assist China9—though, ironically, their education would benefit the regime that supplanted the Qing. One student, Tang Guoan, would become the first president of the prestigious Qinghua College in Beijing, while another, Tang Shaoyi, would serve as the first premier of the Republic of China in 1912. A third student, Zhan Tianyou, would apply his training at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School to the design and construction of China’s railroads, pioneering an entire industry in his homeland.
For many émigrés, the journey across the United States became a journey of the soul, during which they crossed the invisible line from being Chinese in America to becoming Chinese Americans. The story of their dispersing across America rather than returning to China is not so much a catalog of the jobs they held as a tale of the subtle changes within them, the gradual shifts in attitudes, the decisions to adapt their ancient, well-established culture in order to put down roots in the United States. This transformation occurred across class lines, from manual laborers to merchants to intellectuals. When the Chinese first came to America, virtually all of them settled in California and worked, either directly or peripherally, in the mining industry. Later, when they moved apart, dividing into smaller groups—and increasing the geographical distance between both individual Chinese people as well as between the subgroups—the change was accelerated, and was often more profound.
Compared to those in the western states, the Chinese communities in the South and Midwest were tiny. In many regions, there simply weren’t enough Chinese to form their own Chinatowns, prompting the émigrés to interact more with people of different races. In southern cities, such as New Orleans, the limited number of Chinese made them less threatening to local whites, enabling them to escape the oppressive segregation inflicted on the African American population. The Chinese lived undisturbed with urban whites in southern boarding houses—though it should be noted that many of their neighbors were European immigrants, not native-born Americans. Similarly, in the Midwest, the Chinese did not live in concentrated ethnic neighborhoods like the Italians, Poles, or blacks. Instead, the Chinatown that evolved in Chicago served mainly as a social center for the Chinese spread throughout the city or in smaller towns nearby.
As with all immigration stories, the transformation within each traveler creeps up so gradually that it is difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint the precise moment in his life when the ultimate change occurred. It usually starts small, such as the decision to use an Anglo name in the United States. (Late-nineteenth-century census data reveal that along the East Coast, some Chinese immigrants had adopted Western first names and even altered their last names.) But the revelation that the change is far more profound than a name scrawled on paper typically arrives during a visit to the ancestral homeland. In America, it is jarring even for people who have moved out of state to visit their hometown after an absence of only a few years. Cherished landmarks have disappeared, family members have aged, a once familiar town of friends is now filled with strangers. The Thomas Wolfe title, You Can’t Go Home Again, conveys the sense of dislocation. The experience of returning home from another country can be even more startling.
Relatives and old friends are often just as shocked that the émigré is no longer the man who once lived among them. His new habits, his new values, the different way he carries himself, his occasional utterance of English in conversation, are viewed with suspicion. The experience of Lue Gim Gong is particularly instructive. In 1868, Lue left Toishan at the age of ten, first to work in San Francisco and later at the shoe factory in North Adams, Massachusetts. There he befriended Fanny Burlingame, a Sunday school teacher and cousin of the famous diplomat Anson Burlingame. Impressed by his intelligence, Fanny adopted him as her son. Upon her death he inherited $12,000 and two houses in Deland, Florida, in the center of the state’s citrus region. In Florida he devoted his life to horticulture, creating the Lue Gim Gong orange, an award-winning orange that could withstand both frost and shipment over great distances without spoilage; the frost-resistant Lue Gim Gong grapefruit; a new kind of sweet apple; the cherry currant; and a greenhouse peach that could be cultivated to ripen before Thanksgiving. Though he achieved acclaim in the United States, Lue found himself in a kind of cultural limbo when he returned to visit his home village. His neighbors viewed him with animosity, baffled by his obsession with conducting agricultural experiments. When Lue pumped water uphill to sustain some orange trees, local farmers destroyed the grove, complaining that the trees blocked their feng shui, literally, “wind water,” the practice of an ancient Chinese philosophy of design that seeks harmonious balance in the environment. To make matters worse, Lue’s parents insisted on marrying him off at this point and selected a suitable bride for him. Against his wishes, his family proceeded with the wedding plans.
On the morning of the scheduled ceremony, Lue fled the village and headed back to the United States, never to return, leaving behind relatives so outraged that they struck his name from the family register—the social equivalent of an American family blotting out the name of a prodigal son from the family Bible.
For many Chinese, the decisive moment when they first recognized that their future lay in America, not China, came when they married outside their race. It was not uncommon for Chinese immigrants to wed non-Asian women in the South. “With few or no Chinese women available, the first and succeeding generations blended through intermarriage with previously recognized ethnic groups,” notes historian Lucy Cohen, author of Chinese in the Post-Civil War South and herself a child of Chinese-Jewish intermarriage. She points out that marriage between whites and Chinese was more acceptable in the South than marriage between whites and blacks, largely because of the ambiguity of Chinese racial status: no scheme of racial classification had evolved for the Chinese, and as a result they became “a truly ‘mixed nation.’ ”
Interracial marriage was also popular among Chinese intellectuals on the East Coast. Yung Wing married a Caucasian, Mary L. Kellogg, in 1875, and several students in his educational mission violated Chinese government regulations by marrying white women and settling permanently in the United States. (One reason the Chinese government terminated Yung Wing’s Chinese Educational Mission was that many Qing officials disapproved of these interracial unions.) During the late nineteenth century, the city of New York also showed a discernible pattern of interracial marriage between Irish women and Chinese men.
Unlike other European immigrants, Irish women often migrated alone, without their families, and sometimes outnumbered Irish male arrivals two to one. It was natural, then, for these women to form relationships with those of an immigrant population that suffered a serious shortage of women. As early as 1857, Harper’s Weekly took note of the marriages between Chinese cigar vendors and Irish apple peddlers in New York. By the end of the decade, the New York Times noted that most owners of Chinese boarding houses were married to either Irish or German women.
A great deal of racial antagonism is an expression of sexual anxiety. This goes back to humankind’s earliest days, when tribal conflict often ended with the men of the victorious tribe carrying off the women of the defeated tribe. So it is not surprising that some newspapers took to depicting Chinese men as lascivious creatures preying on innocent, impoverished white girls. Such was the tone of warning underlying a New York Times article on December 26, 1873, which described a “handsome but squalidly dressed young white girl” in an opium den. The Chinese owner allegedly told the reporter, “Oh, hard time in New York. Young girl hungry. Plenty come here. Chinaman always have something to eat, and he like young white girl. He! He!”
More frequently, Chinese-white relationships were ridiculed rather than described portentously. In New York, the comedy of actor/theater manager Edward Harrigan featured stereotypical characters like Mrs. Dublin, the Irish washerwoman, and Hog-Eye, the Chinese laundryman. Store windows displayed mechanical toys of Chinese men dancing with Irish women. In March 1858, Yankee Notions ran a cartoon on its cover ascribing the following dialogue to a Chinese-Irish couple:
MRS. CHANG-FEE-CHOW-CHY (the better half of the Celestial over the way): Now, then, Chang-Mike, run home and take Pat-Chow and Rooney-Sing wid ye, and bring the last of the puppy pie for yer daddy. And, do ye mind? Bring some praties of your mother, ye spalpeens. (To her husband) How be’s ye, Chang Honey?
CHANG-HONEY: Sky we po kee bang too, mucho puck ti, rum foo, toodie shee sicke.
Despite these caricatures, the Chinese-Irish marriages seemed to work well. When a New York World reporter told two Irish women they should be married to whites, not Chinese, one retorted that their Chinese husbands were as “white” as anyone, even “whiter” than most of their neighbors. Some Chinese husbands were studying English at night, to move up in American society. A writer for the New York Sun described his visit to a Chinese clubhouse and his exchange with a “young and pretty Irish girl, scarcely over eighteen”:
“Today we had a nice dinner, chickens and such things, and the men and their wives are now smoking and drinking sour wine. The wives are all Irish girls. I’m married.” “What, married to a Chinaman?” “Certainly,” she answered proudly, “married two weeks today.” Then laughing outright she went on to say that the Chinamen were all good “fellows,” that they work hard, go to night school, and are devoted to their wives.10
Originally, many Chinese immigrants did not plan to fall in love with non-Chinese women. Take the example of Charles Sun, who arrived in California in 1878 and later moved to a small Illinois town to work for his cousin, a laundryman called Fook Soo. While delivering freshly washed clothes, Fook Soo met the daughter of a rich white family and maintained a secret, two-year romance with her. When she became pregnant he skipped town and returned to China to marry a native woman. Feeling compassion for his cousin’s abandoned lover (her family immediately disowned her, then grudgingly took her back), Charles Sun offered her financial support, then marriage. Eventually they reared four children together. “It was hard for me to refuse her,” he later told an interviewer. “She was so pitiful! I was really in love with her at that period already, even though I had no intention that I should marry a white woman... [or spend] my whole life in that little town.”
Some Chinese men already had wives back in the old country, because their families had taken the precaution of marrying them off before they left for Gold Mountain. And no doubt some loved the Chinese wives they had left behind, and were loyal enough to send them regular remittance checks, year after year. But in time, some Chinese emigres met other women in America, women who could easily compete for affection with the fading memories of those first wives back in China.
Having a relationship with a non-Chinese woman was often the tipping point in the assimilation process, the point where the emigre first started saying “back in China,” rather than “back home.” Some men who took American girlfriends, and even some who took new wives, continued to send funds back to their China families, and some didn’t. The people in the home villages would carefully make note of this, for though they were thousands of miles apart, they kept tabs on their Gold Mountain men with newsletters and gazetteers. An unspoken agreement soon evolved. As long as the money kept arriving, the village would tolerate infidelity from the men, but not their wives. Even if they wed other women in the United States, the first wives were expected to remain “Gold Mountain widows” if the husband continued to support his children in China. However, if the money flow stopped, the reverse applied—the village was willing to look the other way if the wives chose to remarry.
As the Chinese dispersed across the United States, many left behind mixed-race children. Unfortunately, no systematic studies have traced the lives of these children; indeed, few reliable statistics exist on any of the early Chinese, let alone their descendants. California was the only state in the union to list the Chinese as a separate group in the 1860 U.S. census. In most states, the census counted only whites, blacks, and mulattos, and the Chinese were often classified as either “white” or “black.”
Occasional glimpses of these children can be found in scattered newspaper and magazine accounts. “It is very curious to hear the little half-breed children running about the rooms and alternatively talking Irish to their mothers and Chinese to their fathers,” one New York reporter noted. And as these children grew older, they made their own choices about their identity. Some—perhaps most—passed for white and adopted the values of the local community, like the southern-born children of the famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker. But others embraced the Chinese half of their heritage, such as the two sons of Yung Wing, both of whom graduated from Yale, moved to China, and married Chinese women.
In the South, where Chinese men married white, black, Indian, or Creole women, the ethnicity of offspring was fluid. Their descendants chose to be “white” in certain settings, and “colored” in others; for them, race was not socially mandated, but was rather an individual choice. Lucy Cohen interviewed the grandson of a Chinese settler whose multiracial heritage permitted him access to stores with “Whites only” signs—but who also fit himself into the “Mexican/ Indian” category, so he could “pass for what he wants.” Cohen also met the mixed-race granddaughter of a Chinese immigrant who recounted that some of her family members passed for white, either denying or forgetting their heritage, while others retained the memory of their Chinese ancestry. The granddaughter recalled the day her son was called a “nigger” by a distant relative who was even darker-skinned than he was. “That made me angry, and I told him: ‘My daddy and your daddy are first cousins, you half-white b—. Our grandparents were Chinese and Creole.”
What was the range or depth of emotions these descendants experienced as they came of age? Were some happy with their ability to defy racial pigeonholing—to be accepted by more than one ethnic group? Or were they tormented by a lifelong confusion over identity? Only hints of their feelings can be traced. One of the first to document the psychological turmoil of the mixed-race Asian in America was Edith Maud Eaton. Born in England in 1865, the daughter of a British father and a Chinese mother, Eaton grew up in Canada and later moved to the United States, where she wrote under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far. An early pioneer of Chinese American literature, Eaton wrote not only about the struggles of the Chinese in the United States against white hostility, but also of her own conflicted feelings about being half-Chinese. Her books are a poignant blend of racial pride, celebration, and despair. In the autobiographical Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian, published in 1909, she wrote:
I have come from a race on my mother’s side which is said to be the most stolid and insensible to feelings of all races, yet I look back over the years and see myself so keenly alive to every shade of sorrow and suffering that it is almost a pain to live. Mother tells us tales of China. Though a child when she left her native land she remembers it well, and I am never tired of listening to the story of how she was stolen from her home. She tells us over and over again of her meeting with my father in Shanghai and the romance of their marriage. I glory in the idea of dying at the stake and a great genie arising from the flames and declaring to those who have scorned us: “Behold, how great and glorious and noble are the Chinese people!” Whenever I have the opportunity I steal away to the library and read every book I can find on China and Chinese. I learn that China is the oldest civilized nation on the face of the earth and a few other things. At eighteen years of age what troubles me is not that I am what I am, but that others are ignorant of my superiority.
“Why is my mother’s race despised?” Eaton agonized, in a question that was to be shared by generations of other mixed-race children. “I look into the faces of my father and mother. Is she not every bit as dear and good as he? Why? Why?”