The Chinese in America

by Iris Chang

  However, the Empress Dowager Cixi recognized that these reforms, crucial as they were to China’s survival as a country, also gravely threatened her own position. A proven master at court intrigue, she staged a coup d’état that placed her nephew the emperor under house arrest and forced Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao to flee China in fear for their lives. In exile from their homeland, they organized in Canada the Protect the Emperor Society, also known as the Chinese Empire Reform Association or Baohuanghui, and gained a wide following among the Chinese in the United States. Chapters of their organization swiftly spread across the continent and to Hawaii. Their supporters began to train cadets in preparation for a military campaign in China. Homer Lea, an eccentric Caucasian strategist with grandiose fantasies about his role in China, founded a short-lived Western Military Academy in California for this purpose.

  Before long, however, many Chinese immigrants grew so disgusted by the corruption within the Manchu regime that they lost interest in restoring the emperor to power. Instead, soon after the turn of the century, they threw their support behind a new movement, one intent on deposing the government entirely and establishing a new democratic republic in China. The leader and hero of this revolutionary movement was Sun Yat-sen, who, like Kang Youwei, had been born in Guangdong province, an anti-Manchu stronghold. But unlike Kang, an accomplished scholar from the gentry, Sun came from a peasant family with no vested interest in supporting the status quo. His early background, marked by ambition and a desire for upward mobility, resembled that of many other nineteenth-century Chinese who ultimately emigrated to America. Sun grew up in a rural coastal village near Canton, from which many of his relatives had gone to America to seek better opportunity; two of them died in California during the gold rush. Other family members had settled in Hawaii, and in the early 1880s Sun moved there as well, where he studied at a mission school, became a Christian, and learned the concepts and workings of Western democracy.

  For years, Sun Yat-sen drifted in search of his place in society. He studied at a medical college in Hong Kong, but the British considered him unqualified to be a doctor and barred him from practicing medicine. At the same time, the Manchu government ignored Sun’s eager offer to help them build up their national defense. In 1894, an angry and frustrated Sun created a secret organization in Hawaii called the Revive China Society, whose purpose was to oust the Manchu regime. The society worked closely with tong organizations, which, despite their illegal activities in China and the United States, were increasingly committed to the political goal of destroying the imperial government. Conspiring with other secret societies near Canton, Sun planned a poorly funded, ill-conceived military operation that was quickly discovered and crushed by local Qing officials. Many of the rebels were executed, but Sun managed to escape to Japan. Sun was now what Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao would soon become: an activist without a country, a fugitive from the law.

  Then came an attempt on Sun’s life that changed the course of China’s history. In 1896 in London, he was abducted by Qing authorities, who intended to ship him back to China. Eloquent even in dire circumstances, Sun convinced a watchman to transmit a message to a friend, who helped free him. The botched kidnapping turned Sun into an instant hero. The Western media reported the sensational story of his capture and miraculous release, which gained world sympathy for his cause. Sun’s new celebrity enabled him to relaunch his movement on a different level. In the United States, his public appearances drew thousands of eager supporters, and the Chinese American community raised enormous sums of money to help him overthrow the imperial government.

  Sun’s revolutionary alliance was eventually successful, and on October 10, 1911, a mutiny of army officers ended more than two and a half centuries of Manchu rule. The rebels declared the birth of a new government, the Republic of China, and elected Sun Yat-sen as provisional president. Adopting American democracy as their model, the revolutionaries called themselves the Kuomintang (National People’s Party), also known as the KMT or the Nationalists. In the United States, the KMT began to establish local chapters in cities with great concentrations of ethnic Chinese, and the influence of American culture on Sun’s new republic was plain from the beginning. His Three People’s Principles—nationalism, democracy, and people’s livelihood—was originally written in English, and was inspired by Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and its dedication to a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

  Sun’s Republic of China, however, was doomed to an early demise. In 1912, to avoid civil war, Sun resigned in favor of Yuan Shikai, a powerful military leader from north China. However, although the Kuomintang was the dominant party in parliament, Yuan quickly undermined the fledgling republic by arrogating dictatorial power, purging the Kuomintang, silencing the press, and liquidating thousands of his enemies. His dream of democracy for China in tatters, Sun was forced to flee the country. With Yuan’s death in 1916, the central government splintered into many fiefdoms, leaving China in the control of feuding warlords.

  While bloodshed and chaos reigned in China, thousands of Chinese immigrants fought their own quiet battles in the United States—namely, the daily struggle to make a living. During the early twentieth century, it was still unclear which career paths would lead to opportunity, and which to dead ends.

  Many soon learned that it would be a hard road to travel if they remained in agriculture. In California, any Chinese who aspired to be landowning farmers found their dreams thwarted by a state law called the 1913 Alien Land Act, which barred aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning land, even if they could afford to buy it.17 Without the right to purchase and own land, some Chinese were forced to become migrant farm laborers. In an oral history interview, émigré Suen Sum provides us a glimpse of this nomadic lifestyle. Arriving in the United States as a paper son, he had settled in Locke, California, a rural community in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta with an all-Chinese population. Drifting from farm to farm, he washed toilets, chopped wood, picked fruit, tended gardens. “The whites treated us Chinese like slaves,” he recalled. Though he possessed some education—the ability to read and write in his native language, and a high school degree from China—he made barely enough money to live on: ten to twenty cents an hour, ten hours a day. At these wages, Suen Sum could not afford to marry, or do much of anything except work. There were days when he lacked money to buy food. “Every year it was the same. You work year after year, from youth to old age, and I still haven’t saved any money.”

  Where landownership was allowed, a few notable Chinese prospered in agriculture, but they were generally the exception rather than the rule. On the Hawaiian islands, Lum Yip Kee, a Cantonese émigré, dominated the poi market with his plantations and processing factory, earning the title of “Taro King.” Another Chinese immigrant to Hawaii, Chun Afong, became a millionaire thanks to his sugarcane holdings, his life inspiring the Jack London short story “Chun Ah Chun.” In California, some Chinese profited by leasing land or by processing the harvests faster than their competitors. A few even managed to purchase land, in spite of the 1913 Alien Land Act. Thomas Foon Chew became known as the “Asparagus King” of San Francisco. In Alviso, California, he owned the Bayside Canning Company; the first cannery to preserve green asparagus. It grew into the third largest cannery in the world (after Del Monte and Libby’s). Chin Lung, a near invalid in his Cantonese childhood, began his career by working in the reclamation of the tule lands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta, a job that left his hands and feet bloody and caused him to cry himself to sleep every night. He saved enough money to lease land across the delta, eventually emerging as the “Chinese Potato King” in the region.

  For most Chinese immigrants, however, better opportunities could be found in small towns and cities, not in rural America. Over time, Chinese workers left the ranches altogether, their places taken by migrant Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican laborers. Many gravitated toward industries that had become virtual Chinese monopolies. />
  As always, restaurants remained a popular place to work. By 1920, roughly a quarter of all Chinese workers in the United States worked in restaurants. Most of these were tiny mom-and-pop enterprises, in which the owner worked as cook and dishwasher and his wife—if he had one—as the waitress and cashier. A few Chinese with sufficient capital rented their own buildings, installed expensive Asian decor, and hired battalions of chefs, waiters, and hostesses.

  Regardless of the size of the operation, many Chinese sensed that profits could be made not by offering authentic cuisine from their homeland, but instead dishes that looked Chinese but appealed to the American palate. Chow mein (“fried noodles”), for example, was invented when a Chinese cook accidentally dropped a handful of Chinese pasta into a pot of simmering oil. When the crisp, golden-brown result delighted his customers, he added the item to his menu. It was an instant hit with his American patrons, and other Chinese restaurants quickly added the new concoction to their own offerings. David Jung, who opened a noodle company in Los Angeles in 1916, is credited with creating the fortune cookie. (Contrary to popular myth, the fortune cookie is not an ancient Chinese dessert, nor is it customary to insert messages in Chinese pastries. While it is true that during the Yuan Dynasty, rebels baked secret messages into Moon Festival cakes, outlining plans for an attack—the uprising overthrew the Mongolians and established the Ming Dynasty—the concept of slipping words of wisdom into fried cookies is completely American.) Chop suey, a fried hodgepodge of vegetables and meat, enjoyed an enormous following among Caucasians and became an icon of mainstream culture by the early twentieth century, when Sinclair Lewis mentioned it in his novel Main Street (1920). It varied greatly by region, as chefs tailored their food to suit local tastes. On the East Coast, some Chinese restaurants even offered chop suey sandwiches.

  Some émigrés drew on their knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine to establish herbalist businesses. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, California suffered from a severe lack of adequately trained Western doctors, prompting patients to try alternative medicine. After Western doctors pronounced them incurable, in desperation many Caucasians turned to Chinese healers. One herbalist, Tan Fuyuan, noted that “as a rule Caucasians have been unwilling to consult us until they had tried every other form of medical treatment within their reach. Therefore, it may be said that all of the cures which we have made have been cases given up by other doctors.”

  The ability of some Chinese herbalists to diagnose and cure their patients created a huge demand for their services. Though these herb doctors served people within their own community, most of their clientele were non-Chinese.18 By the late nineteenth century, every Chinatown in the West had at least one herbalist business, some as many as three or four. In 1913, the International Chinese Business Directory of the World listed the names of twenty-eight Chinese herb doctors in Los Angeles (the real number may have been considerably higher), even though only two thousand Chinese lived in the city at that time.

  Like other Chinese enterprises, Chinese herbal shops were typically family-run businesses. Historian Liu Haiming has portrayed the daily routine of Chang Yitang, who arrived in the United States in 1900. The family lived upstairs in Chang’s house in Los Angeles, while the ground floor served as the doctor’s office, pill factory, pharmacy, and teahouse. In his office, Chang would take the patient’s pulse, then dole out advice and medicine. In the kitchen, his wife, Nellie, would steep herbs into tea, which his nephew, Yee Pai, would serve with crackers to patients in the waiting room. The family also made herbal pills from scratch, an exhausting job that required the efforts of several people. Using their feet or knees, they would grind the medicine into a fine powder beneath a heavy iron device they called a “rocking boat,” as it resembled a boat with handles on the side. The powder was sifted through a sieve, mixed with honey, steamed, shaped into tiny balls, dried in the oven, and packed into bottles, to be sold later through the Chang family’s thriving mail-order business.

  Some herbalists owed their success more to marketing than medical knowledge. Tom Leung, who operated a booming herbal business in Los Angeles in the 1910s and 1920s, was particularly gifted at publicity. Though he claimed to be descended from a famous line of physicians in China and trained at the Imperial Medical College of Peking, his daughter, Louise Leung Larson, believes he invented those credentials. Leung advertised frequently in the Los Angeles newspapers, mailed Christmas cards to his patients, and gave away calendars and rulers with “T. Leung Herb Co.” printed on them. Along with a prosperous local practice, he conducted a national mail-order business, sending clients herbs after they filled out questionnaires detailing their ailments. One of his most popular products was Thousand Wonders Oil, which Leung used for “countless” problems ranging from toothaches to insect bites, billing it as “one of the most valuable and inexpensive remedies in the world.” As his reputation spread, Leung’s practice flourished, and soon he was wealthy enough to afford a mansion, decorated with expensive Chinese art and staffed with maids, cooks, and private tutors for his children.

  The American medical establishment, viewing practitioners like Leung as serious competition, conspired with authorities to drive them out of business. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Chinese herbalists were frequently fined or imprisoned for practicing medicine without a license. Tom Leung was arrested more than a hundred times, but he took the situation in stride; recognizing that his success required defiance of the law, he accepted trouble with the authorities as part of the cost of doing business and incorporated the arrests into his regular schedule, developing a system so that his secretary would call the bank to arrange bail the moment the police arrived. The raids actually provided a windfall benefit: free publicity. “The [more] he was arrested, the more business he got,” his wife recalled.

  A far less controversial Chinese business was retail trade. During the early twentieth century, the most famous Chinese department store owner was Joe Shoong, a former immigrant laborer. In 1903, he opened a tiny store in Vallejo, California, which he expanded into National Dollar Stores, a major chain recognized by 1920 as the largest Chinese business in the United States. Though the employees (and virtually all the customers) were white, the managers and stock-holders were Chinese. Within a few decades, his empire, which provided Shoong with the second highest income in the state of California, included more than fifty stores in the western states, and prompted Time magazine to describe him as “the richest, best-known Chinese businessman in the U.S.”

  Of course, most Chinese-owned stores were very small. In the South, where the Chinese controlled much of the grocery industry, the typical store contained a large room in front for displaying merchandise and greeting customers, and a small room in back, where the owner ate and slept. Ray Joe, a Chinese émigré who arrived in the Mississippi Delta in the early 1920s, lived and worked in one such tiny store. During the day, he sold groceries, pies, cakes, and hot dogs, and at night, “I sleep on two trunks pulled together for bed. My brother pulled four stools together, he slept there—we tried as hard as we can to try to fight it out and make men of ourselves.”

  Opening a grocery store in the South posed distinct risks for a Chinese would-be merchant; his lack of English skills and local connections left him vulnerable to unscrupulous suppliers, complaining customers, and thieves. Nonetheless, the Chinese émigré also enjoyed certain advantages. His kinship ties and Guangdong background gave him immediate access to capital and business experience, as clans often pooled their resources to pay for a relative’s emigration journey and to launch his overseas enterprise. Even more important, the southern Chinese grocer met virtually no competition. Apparently, his willingness to work long and hard hours for a thin return did not invite emulation by the locals.

  One unexpected consequence of plantation slavery was that it left blacks and whites alike ill prepared to compete in a capitalist economy. As James W. Loewen, author of The Mississippi Chinese, points out,
southern whites suffered from a precapitalist, almost feudal mindset. Many avoided service industries because they required waiting on customers, a practice the culture viewed as servile and demeaning, even when profitable. Meanwhile, most blacks were too intimidated by the white ruling class to open their own stores. Black business success in and of itself could be interpreted by whites as rebellious and “uppity,” an act of defiance against the system.

  Thus the caste system installed and rigidly enforced in the Jim Crow South left a void in the retail economy that the Chinese sought to fill. Because of the social stigma attached to trade, whites did not view the Chinese grocers as a threat. And black customers preferred to patronize Chinese-owned rather than white-owned businesses, where Chinese grocers would not harass, assault, or kill them if they forgot to call them “Mister” or “Sir.” Chinese grocers also provided social services for blacks that often did not exist elsewhere. Serving in an informal banking role, the local Chinese grocery stores would often extend to black sharecroppers the credit and loans denied them by white institutions.

  So severely had slavery weakened the entrepreneurial spirit in the South that even the lack of English skills did not hinder the Chinese grocers, who found nonverbal ways to conduct business. Most kept a stick in their stores for customers to use to point to the items they wanted. Chinese shopkeepers also saved the last one of each item that needed to be reordered so that they could show it to wholesale representatives. As a group, the Chinese grocers not only survived, but prospered even by white standards. In some areas, such as the Mississippi Delta region, they would eventually earn on average twice the white median income.

  But the most popular business of all was the laundry, in many areas an almost exclusively Chinese enterprise since the gold rush days. According to the 1920 census, almost 30 percent of all employed Chinese worked in laundries: out of a total of 45,614 Chinese workers, 12,559 were laundry people. Opening a laundry appealed to many immigrants because it was a fast way to establish one’s own business. It required almost no start-up capital—just a scrub board, soap, and an iron—and operating costs were low since the laundry owner usually saved rent by living in his shop. It also required no special training. “In the old days, some of those fellows were really ignorant though,” one laundryman told historian Paul Siu.