The Chinese in America

by Iris Chang

  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 seven
ty-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 inhe
rited $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.