Paradoxically, the Siyi were relatively isolated within China but had more contact with the outside world than much of the rest of the country. The nineteenth-century intrusion of Europeans and Americans into China transformed the Pearl River delta area quickly and profoundly. The region was the first to experience the far-reaching combined impact of foreign soldiers, merchants, and missionaries. The Cantonese resented the arrogance of the British in particular and generally disliked all the unruly foreign sailors, merchants, and adventurers from abroad who disrupted Chinese life and order. Large, violent riots and protests were already a regular occurrence in Guangzhou as early as the 1840s. Foreigners considered the Cantonese, because of the constant friction with Westerners, to be the most anti-foreign of the Chinese. They also became the most familiar with the foreigner.
Huie Kin’s account is markedly different from the experience of Chinese who migrated abroad on no initiative of their own under the “coolie” trade. Thousands of Chinese, he acknowledges, were taken as “slaves” to Cuba, “having been kidnapped and forcibly shipped there to work on the plantations.” The coolie trade flourished in the region around Guangzhou from the 1830s to the 1860s, when moral outrage began to shut down the abusive system. One careful tabulation taken in 1859 determined that from 1847 to 1858, more than 28,000 Chinese left for Cuba on board seventy-one ships, most of European origin. More than four thousand of them died in transit, the death rate ranging from almost 15 percent on British ships to almost 40 percent on Peruvian. The death rate on American ships ran at 12 percent.
These tragic numbers reflect a broad pattern of forced labor in the history of the Chinese diaspora. Although chattel slavery was ended by law in the British Empire in 1833, a system of indentured labor flourished throughout developing empires well into the nineteenth century in the form of the coolie trade. Pirates and brigands provided hundreds of thousands of men from China and India for work on plantations and in mines around the globe. Many were prisoners taken in ethnic wars; others were debtors or itinerants stolen off the land. From the 1840s to the 1870s, traders took as many as 500,000 Chinese to Peru, Cuba, and the Caribbean, most by way of Portuguese Macau. The word coolie may have come from a Tamil term related to work; perhaps it is no coincidence that in Chinese, a similar sounding word, kuli, means bitter labor.
The Qing court attempted to suppress the brutal trade and imposed the death penalty on those Chinese found guilty of trafficking in coolies. Scores in Guangdong were arrested by the authorities and executed, some on the spot where they were captured. A memorandum from the governor-general of Guangdong to Emperor Tongzhi reported that between 1865 and 1868, authorities arrested almost sixty traffickers for kidnapping, abduction, and other crimes including rape and murder. Scores were executed in the years that followed.
Huie Kin’s own journey, though touched by tragedy, appears fortunate compared to the experiences of many others who left China, especially under the murderous coolie trade.
In 1852 the Connecticut ship Robert Browne left Xiamen, in southern Fujian province, supposedly for California, with more than four hundred Chinese on board. Nine days into the voyage the Chinese revolted, killing the captain and several other officers and crew. They demanded that the remaining crew return them to China, but after the ship ran aground in the Ryukyu Islands, crew members regained control of the vessel and, with the help of British naval forces, hunted down Chinese who had escaped. Many were killed or captured. U.S. military authorities tried seventy of the Chinese and sentenced seventeen to death for piracy. After a lengthy investigation by Chinese authorities, however, the accused were transferred to local Chinese officials, who concluded, on the basis of interviews with those involved, that the ship’s captain had deceived the laborers. Instead of going to California as he had told them, he was taking them to Peru. The journey there and work in Peru’s notorious guano mines were virtual death sentences. They also reported that the crew had cruelly abused them, throwing the ill while still alive into the sea and beating others. They had no choice but to revolt. The Chinese officials set them free.
Another American ship, the Waverly, was on its way to Peru in 1855 with 450 Chinese when it stopped in the Philippines after the death of its captain. Reportedly the crew, fearing an outbreak of dysentery on board and trouble from the restless Chinese, forced them belowdecks, killing a number in the melee. The crew locked down the hatches on the hold and, after a day had passed, ventured below and found that three hundred of the Chinese had suffered gruesome deaths from injuries and asphyxiation.
Other cases in the 1850s revealed that many American ships were carrying hundreds of Chinese to foreign destinations that were not clear to the passengers, often without their full consent. Investigations and interviews with those on board frequently revealed that the laborers had been deceived or forced aboard against their will. In the case of the Messenger in 1860, for example, the American captain maintained that the more than four hundred Chinese on board were in fact merely “cargo.” He protested the efforts of Chinese officials to release them, saying that because he had properly paid his port dues in Guangzhou, he had acquired his “right” to them. He eventually succeeded in getting to Macao, where he fled to Cuba with his “cargo.” American officials in Hong Kong and China were deeply troubled by this and other cruelties and dutifully reported the tragedies to Washington. In his report on the Messenger, U.S. minister to China John Ward informed the secretary of state that a thousand Chinese had died in incidents involving American ships in the last year alone. It was a “disgrace,” he wrote, “upon our flag.” Even though there was no firm evidence that Chinese entering the United States or Canada in the mid-nineteenth century were indentured or had been coerced into involuntary servitude, Congress in 1862 still passed legislation that outlawed American subjects and American ships from engaging in the coolie trade. The U.S. consulate in Hong Kong now had to verify that Chinese going to the United States had left of their own free will.
After the tragedy of his cousin’s death, the remainder of Huie Kin’s voyage went uneventfully. He may even have experienced moments of beauty and joy, especially as his ship neared the California coast.
From the deck, if they were allowed topside, passengers might have seen great pods of dolphins racing alongside in the ship’s wake, clouds of seabirds, mountainous gatherings of sea lions on rocks, migrating whales, and vast schools of fish and other enormous collections of sea life. Large-scale exploitation of the natural treasures of the Pacific had only just begun. If the ship arrived in California waters on a clear day, the vista would have been magnificent: the coastline was massive and dark, unending as far as one could see to the north and to the south, and the Golden Gate, the gap in between the sheer cliffs along the Pacific and the entryway into the harbor, was simultaneously foreboding and welcoming to travelers. The rocky crags of the channel would have towered over the manmade vessel, while swirling currents in the waters below toyed with the ship.
Once through the opening, the view opened out to one of the grandest natural harbors in the world. From on board an arriving ship, one could barely see the untouched marshes, flatlands, and gentle hills that surrounded the protected waters of the bay.
The Chinese must have felt great relief after the long, fraught voyage but also new anxiety. What would they encounter when they descended the planks to the motionless pier, so unlike the rolling vessel where they had lived for weeks, even months?
Huie Kin recalled that he could hardly contain himself when he arrived at the dock. The destination was “the land of our dreams,” and the “feeling that welled up in us was indescribable.” He wondered whether the joy of entering heaven could surpass the “ecstasy” he experienced on landing. But beyond the emotion that overwhelmed him, Huie could recall little about what happened after disembarking. “Everything was so strange and so exciting,” he wrote, “that my memory of the landing is just a big blur.” Countrymen speaking his local dialect gathered him and others from his
district, cared for them for a few days, and then connected them with relatives who helped the arrivals find their way in the strange land. After two long months at sea, in September 1868 he had finally arrived in Gold Mountain.
2
Gold Mountain
May our dear neighbors
Be brave in journeying,
Making a fortune depends on luck,
Don’t be loath to depart now
When the chance comes,
Becoming rich from poverty is easy.
Returning home with much money
You will be smiling with happiness at the family reunion.
—NINETEENTH-CENTURY SOUTHERN CHINESE FOLK SONG
When Huie Kin and his two surviving cousins disembarked in San Francisco in 1868, they joined a historic procession of Chinese migrants to the United States that had begun decades earlier, and that would stretch, through fits and starts, up until the present day. Like the Chinese who worked on the Transcontinental, they found themselves on the shores of a growing nation, one whose hunger for labor would make a tenuous place for them, but whose racial prejudices would also keep them at its margins. Huie’s entry into the country mirrors the experiences of thousands of other Chinese migrants who would go to work on the Transcontinental, and sheds light on the fraught place of Chinese in mid-nineteenth-century America.
Arriving in this unfamiliar country left a deep impression on many Chinese migrants, who would vividly recall the experience years later. In 1882, J. S. Look, a fifteen-year-old from Guangdong, arrived with his uncle in San Francisco, and in the 1920s he reflected upon his experience. After he and the almost one thousand other Chinese passengers disembarked from their ship, Look remembered getting to Chinatown and finding “it crowded with Chinese . . . There were so many of us that we had to sleep on the floors as there were not enough beds in Chinatown.” Reversing the usual gaze, Look also observed “the Americans,” as he put it. They “and their dress looked very funny to us, and we all laughed at the way the Americans dressed.” But life was tough: “We were very poor at that time—many of the new arrivals had to go around and pick up cabbage leaves and vegetables and the culls of fruit at the various commission houses in order to obtain enough food upon which to live.” The jobs available to Chinese were “limited to railroad work, laundry work, cooking and employment in canneries.” Walking in the city was risky too, Look recalled, as “American boys would throw rocks at us.”
Such violence was simply the street manifestation of a broader pattern of racialized, legally sanctioned discrimination against all Chinese, including Railroad Chinese, which was pervasive in the mid-nineteenth century. Over the preceding years, a few persons of Chinese ancestry had received citizenship because of local administrative error or by virtue of having been born in the United States, but immigrant Chinese were officially denied naturalized citizenship by federal law. The Nationality Act of 1790 granted naturalization privileges to “free, white persons” only. People of color were excluded. After the Civil War, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1868, sought to ensure “birthright citizenship” to African Americans who had been born in America, but the 1790 act was not revised to address the naturalization of other non-whites.
As Look experienced when he arrived, scrutiny and mistreatment commonly greeted other Chinese newcomers upon their arrival in San Francisco. A veteran writer for the Boston-based literary journal the Atlantic Monthly, Albert S. Evans, vividly described one such moment in November 1869, about a year after Huie Kin stepped off his ship.
Reporting on the arrival of the Great Republic from Asia, Evans declared the scene “one of the most novel sights seen in America.” A side-wheel steamship almost four hundred feet in length, it was one of the largest passenger ships on the oceans at the time. From 1867, when it began operating in the Pacific, to 1879, when a Pacific storm destroyed it, the single ship alone transported an estimated ten thousand Chinese to the United States. In 1869, its arrival in San Francisco stirred great excitement and commotion in the city. The size of the ship was itself a marvel, but what the vessel held provoked even greater curiosity: five thousand tons of cargo from Asia and almost 1,300 Chinese, many likely coming for railroad work, in addition to a couple of hundred Europeans and Americans.
Crowds of gawkers, attendants, workers, detectives, and a variety of authorities and officers gathered on the pier before the ship even came along dockside. Immigration processing in San Francisco occurred right on the wharf at this time. The captain of the city’s police and his entire watch “armed with clubs and revolvers” stood by to keep order and inspect the arrivals. Up to a hundred Chinese merchants, “neatly-dressed and quiet, gentlemanly-behaved men,” were on hand to collect their “consignees,” as the Chinese under labor contract, were called. Almost all were Chinese males, according to the news report. The curious white spectators were not disappointed in what they were about to see.
After the ship pulled to the landing, Chinese men by the hundreds came up from steerage and crowded onto the main deck, “every foot of space being occupied by them,” as Evans described the scene. They stood “in silent wonder” at the “new land” before them, and then, after all the other passengers had left, the “living stream of the blue-coated men of Asia” began to disembark (below). For two hours they came ashore steadily without interruption and packed the dock as they waited patiently for processing. Evans’s detailed reportage provokes the imagination of the reader. The Chinese men, “all with the unusual and highly visible Manchu-imposed hair-style of shaved pate and queue hanging down to the waist, pour down the plank, with long bamboo poles across their shoulders, from which depend packages of bedding, matting, clothing, and things of which we know neither the names nor the uses.” Evans continued: “They appear to be of an average age of twenty-five years,—very few being under fifteen and none apparently over forty years,—and though somewhat less in stature than Caucasians, healthy, active and able-bodied to a man. As they come down upon the wharf, they separate into messes or gangs of ten, twenty, or thirty each, being recognized through some to us incomprehensible free-masonry system of signs by the agents of the Companies as they come, are assigned places on the long broad-shedded wharf . . . [for processing by] the customs officers.”
Evans surmised that all were of the “laboring class,” none being students, businessmen, or merchants. “They are all dressed in coarse but clean and new blue cotton blouses and loose baggy breeches, blue cotton cloth stockings which reach to the knee, and slippers or shoes with heavy wooden soles.” Their personal belongings were all in hand, and most carried “broad-brimmed hats of split bamboo, and huge palm-leaf fans.”
Agents of the so-called Six Companies (zhonghua gongsuo), a consortium of Chinese mutual assistance associations based on county of origin, which non-Chinese misconstrued as commercial organizations, greeted the arrivals. Their orderliness impressed Evans: each group of workers, he observed, waited “in patience and perfectly soldier-like order,” as customs agents and police searched for smuggled opium and other contraband. In contrast to the restrained Chinese, Evans describes the agents of authority in America as mean-spirited and brutal. He witnessed their “needless violence,” and their free and frantic use of their clubs against the Chinese, whom Evans described as the “most orderly and methodical people.” Without the unnecessary shouting and bludgeoning by the authorities, Evans said, the processing would have been completed in half the time. Eventually the Chinese were cleared and made their way along San Francisco’s streets to the not distant Chinese quarter already known as Chinatown. Some went in horse-drawn wagons, but most walked or ran, with their shoulder poles, in “Indian file.”
As much as the men fascinated Evans, he was captivated by the surprise appearance of several spectacularly attired young Chinese women, evidently the arranged brides for members of the Chinese merchant elite, who stood far apart from the male workers. One diminutive female
especially mesmerized Evans: she emerged from a cabin with her attendant, he wrote, her “blue-black” hair elaborately coiffed, her facial makeup “‘high art’ in its perfection”; her tunic “of sky-blue satin, embroidered with flowers in bright-colored silk”; her trousers a darker blue satin and similarly embroidered; her “dainty little feet” were “encased in slippers of blue satin with gold-bullion embroidery and thick white felt soles and thin bottoms of polished wood.” With dangling silver and precious stone jewelry from her hairpins to her anklets, she carried two fans to keep “her face hidden as far as possible from the public gaze.” Evans, who apparently stood not far from the woman, could feel her anxiety. Female handlers quickly whisked her away to a wealthy Chinese husband waiting for his new wife. A bit later, more than a dozen other young Chinese women, probably indentured prostitutes, came down to the wharf to be taken by their “purchasers,” as Evans called them, who placed them in the “charge of sallow old hags in black costume with bunches of keys in the girdles of their waists.” These brothel madams, known as laobao, “will hold them in terrible bondage and collect the wages of their sin.” The arriving women were dressed in simple “silk cotton tunics and trousers” and were “painted gaudily on cheeks and lips and wear on their heads the checked cotton handkerchiefs which are the badge of prostitution.” As they were taken away to Chinatown and the Barbary Coast, San Francisco’s red-light district, mobs of Chinese men nearly rioted along the streets. They shouted for female attention and lunged forward to try to touch or grab the women as they sat in the brothel wagons. What terror they must have experienced as they were led away into the strange engulfing city.
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