The Chinese in America

by Iris Chang

  As Hapas grow in number, they are asserting their freedom to celebrate the richness of their heritage, as are other multiethnic individuals. In the year 2000, for the first time in American history, the U.S. government permitted people to acknowledge their mixed-race heritage on the census by checking more than one box. When Cy Wong filled out his census form, he drew arrows to three boxes to emphasize his black, Chinese, and Native American lineage, and then wrote “Tri-ethnic and American” in the margin.

  These trends provoke new questions: What is racial identity? Who gets to decide it? The government? The experts? Or the people themselves?

  Though some find it convenient to see race as solid blocs of humanity, easily organized and controlled by bureaucracies on the basis of shared interests, the reality of individual life defies such neat compartmentalization. In reality, race is—and has always been—a set of arbitrary dividing lines on a wide spectrum of color, blending, almost imperceptibly, from one shade to the next.

  Perhaps one day we will rediscover a basic truth—that while identity may be shaped and exploited by the powerful, its essence belongs, ultimately, to the individual. America was founded on this concept, but has never achieved its ideal.

  Our founding fathers articulated a dream of creating a unique form of government, a democracy that would protect from the tyranny of the majority the rights of the minority, down to the individual. Unfortunately, this dream was, and continues to be, a far cry from the realities of American life. Despite their lofty rhetoric, many of the authors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights owned slaves and did not believe that their privilege of freedom extended to women, minorities, or even non-landowners. And tragically, over the past two centuries, this country—In its dealings with blacks, Native Americans, and other ethnic groups—broke faith with the promise of these founding documents. Consequently, the history of America, like the history of so many other countries, has been one long struggle with group identity, an ongoing struggle, with an ever-unclear outcome.

  The subjugation of individual rights to the group, leading inevitably to ultranationalism, has long been a cause and justification for war and genocide across the planet. It was to escape the oppression of group identity—the burden of racial antagonisms, inherited by blood—that thousands of Chinese and other immigrants abandoned the homes of their ancestors, for unknown futures in a strange land. Only time can tell if their journey will have been successful. This will depend entirely on whether America can continue to evolve toward the basic egalitarian concept upon which it was founded—“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” For it was the haunting, elusive dream that such a place really existed that first drew many of the Chinese to American shores.

  NOTES

  Chapter One. The Old Country: Imperial China in the Nineteenth Century

  For nineteenth-century eyewitness descriptions of China, see Mrs. J. F. Bishop (Isabella L. Bird), The Yangtze Valley and Beyond: An Account of Journeys in China, chiefly in the province of Szechuan and among the Man-Tze of the Somo Territory (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1899); Robert Fortune, A Residence Among the Chinese; Inland, on the Coast and at Sea (London: J. Murray, 1856); Robert Fortune, Three Years of Wandering in the Northern Provinces of China, including a visit to the tea, silk and cotton countries: with an account of the agriculture and horticulture of the Chinese, new plants, etc. (London: J. Murray, 1847); John Scarth, Twelve Years in China; The People, the Rebels, and the Mandarins; By a British Resident (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable and Company, 1860); Bayard Taylor, A Visit to India, China and Japan; In the Year 1853 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1862).

  13 60 million liang of silver: Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, translated by J. R. Foster (Cambridge, England, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 530-31.

  14 Lin confiscated 20,000 chests of opium: Gernet, p. 537.

  15 “Should I break his nose or kill him”: Paul Carus, “The Chinese Problem,” Open Court XV (October 1901), p. 608, as cited in Robert McClellan, The Heathen Chinee: A Study of American Attitudes Toward China, 1890-1905 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), pp. 88-89.

  17 Guangdong credit crisis in 1847: Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 25.

  17 a hundred thousand laborers found themselves unemployed: Ibid., p. 25.

  17 a Chinese resident in California wrote a letter: San Francisco Chronicle, July 21, 1878.

  19 “Swallows and magpies”: Marlon K. Horn, “Rhymes Cantonese Mothers Sang,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1999 (Brisbane, Calif.: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1999), p. 63.

  Chapter Two. America: A New Hope

  20 23 million people: Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O‘Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds., The Oxford History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 814.

  20 430 million: Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), p. 210.

  20 towns of more than 2,500 people: Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, p. 814.

  21 Population statistics for Paris and London: Adna Ferrin Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963), p. 450.

  21 a mere six cities in the United States had more than 100,000 people: Robert Sobel and David B. Sicilia, The Entrepreneurs: An American Adventure (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), p. 119.

  21 New York population in mid-nineteenth century: Adna Ferrin Weber, p. 450.

  21 Description of New York and Brooklyn: Ruth Barnes Moynihan, Cynthia Russett, and Laurie Crumpacker, eds., Second to None: A Documentary History of American Women (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 209.

  21 Information on Irish and German immigrants: Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), pp. 129, 146.

  22 Life expectancy data on China and the United States: James I. Lee and Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 54; Michael Haines, “The Population of the United States, 1790-1920,” in Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the United States (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996-2000), p. 159; Michael R. Haines, “Estimated Life Tables for the United States, 1850-1910,” Historical Methods 31:4 (Fall 1998).

  23-24 Life in American Midwest: M. H. Dunlop, Sixty Miles from Contentment: Traveling in the Nineteenth-Century American Interior (New York: HarperCollins, 1995); Catherine Reef, An Eyewitness History: Working America (New York: Facts on File, 2000), p. 7.

  24 “people were settling right under his nose”: Lillian Schlissel, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (New York: Schocken, 1982), p. 20.

  25 Statistics on American Indians: Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O‘Con-nor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, p. 175; Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present (New York: HarperCollins, 1999; first Perrenial Classics edition, 2001), p. 125.

  26 On the number of Chinese before gold rush: Him Mark Lai, “The United States,” in Lynn Pan, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 261.

  26 Information on Afong Moy; “monstrously small”: New York Times, November 12, 1834.

  27 Barnum exhibit; twenty thousand spectators: John Kuo Wei Tchen, “Staging Orientalism and Occidentalism: Chang and Eng Bunker and Phineas T. Barnum,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1996 (Brisbane, Calif.: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1996), p. 119.

  27 A “double-jointed Chinese dwarf Chin Gan”: John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chi
natown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 97.

  27 Details on Chang and Eng Bunker: John Kuo Wei Tchen, “Staging Orientalism and Occidentalism, pp. 93-131; Ruthanne Lum McCunn, ”Chinese in the Civil War: Ten Who Served,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1996; John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown, pp. 106-13, 134-42; Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace, The Two (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978).

  Chapter Three. “Never Fear, and You Will Be Lucky”: Journey and Arrival in San Francisco

  29 “Americans are very rich people”: Diane Mei Lin Mark and Ginger Chih, A Place Called Chinese America (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1982; Organization of Chinese Americans, 1993), p. 5.

  30 three-quarters of a million Chinese men: Robert J. Schwendinger, “Investigating Chinese Immigrant Ships and Sailors,” in Genny Lim, ed., The Chinese American Experience: Papers from the Second National Conference on Chinese American Studies (1980), p. 16. An estimated 250,000 Chinese were shipped to Cuba and 87,000 to Peru between 1847 and 1874, according to Laura L. Wong, “Chinese Immigration and Its Relationship to European Development of Colonies and Frontiers,” in Genny Lim, ed., The Chinese American Experience, p. 37.

  30 “without a danger of being hustled”: H. F. MacNair, Modern Chinese History: Selected Readings (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1927), pp. 409-10; Jack Chen, The Chinese of America (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 21.

  30-31 Description of coolie trade—the kidnappings and South American conditions: Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora (New York: Kodansha America, 1994), pp. 67-69; Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home, p. 34; John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown, pp. 49-50. Tchen describes how American shipbuilders created the slave ships used for the coolie trade, and that the guano harvested by the Chinese fertilized the topsoil of Maryland tobacco plantations.

  32 forty dollars in gold: Thomas W. Chinn, H. Mark Lai, and Philip P. Choy, eds., A History of the Chinese in California: A Syllabus (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1969), pp. 14-15; William Speer, An Humble Plea (San Francisco, 1856), p. 7. According to historian Haiming Liu, the trip cost $40-$60 and it took 35 to 45 days to travel from Guangdong to California. (Haiming Liu, ”Between China and America: The Trans-Pacific History of the Chang Family,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1996.)

  32 Travel conditions over Pacific: Jack Chen, The Chinese of America, p. 23; Sylvia Sun Minnick, Samfow: The San Joaquin Chinese Legacy (Fresno, Calif.: Panorama West Publishing, 1988), p. 8; Liping Zhu, A Chinaman’s Chance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1997), p. 24.

  32 “The food was different”: Lee Chew, “Life Story of a Chinaman,” p. 289, as cited in Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Little, Brown, 1989; reprinted by Penguin Books, 1990), p. 68.

  33 Libertad: Jack Chen, p. 23.

  34 Description of San Francisco before the gold rush: J. Hittel, A History of the City of San Francisco and Incidentally of California (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft and Company, 1878), pp. 398-400; Edward Kemble, “Reminiscences of Early San Francisco,” in Joshua Paddison, ed., A World Transformed: Firsthand Accounts of California Before the Gold Rush (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 1999), pp. 309, 315.

  34 Description of San Francisco in 1848: Christopher Lee Yip, “San Francisco’s Chinatown: An Architectural and Urban History,” Ph.D. dissertation in architecture, University of California, Berkeley, 1985, p. 11; Joshua Paddison, ed., A World Transformed: Firsthand Accounts of California Before the Gold Rush, p. 311; David E. Eames, San Francisco Street Secrets (Baldwin Park, Calif.: Gem Guides Book Company, 1995), p. 51.

  34 boom town of thirty thousand: David E. Eames, p. 44.

  34 46 gambling halls, 144 taverns, and 537 places that sold liquor: Ibid., p. 48.

  35 “worthy of an Empress”: Lucius Morris Beebe, San Francisco’s Golden Era (Berkeley, Calif.: Howell-North, 1960), p. 12.

  35 Women were scarce: David E. Eames, p. 44.

  35 92 percent of California was male: Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, The Oxford History of the American West, p. 815.

  35 “Every man thought every woman in that day a beauty”: Curt Gentry, The Madams of San Francisco: An Irreverent History of the City by the Golden Gate (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), p. 33.

  35 Information on brothels: Mary Ellen Jones, Daily Life on the Nineteenth-Century American Frontier (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 152.

  36 five murders every six days: David E. Eames, p. 66.

  36 “Committee of Vigilance” history: Ibid., pp. 68-78.

  36 Description of San Francisco culture: Ibid., p. 66.

  37 more than half of the San Francisco population was foreign-born: Julie Joy Jeffrey, p. 143.

  Chapter Four. Gold Rushers on Gold Mountain

  38 Information on Chinese costumes: Edward Eberstadt, ed., Way Sketches; Containing Incidents of Travel Across the Plains, From St. Joseph to California in 1850, With Letters Describing Life and Conditions in the Gold Region by Lorenzo Sawyer, Later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of California (New York, 1926), p. 124, as cited in Gunther Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States 1850-1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 114.

  39 “allow a couple of Americans to breathe in it”: Gunther Barth, p. 114; San Francisco Herald, November 28, 1857.

  39 wonderfully clean”: J. D. Borthwick, Three Years in California, 1851-1854 (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1857 [also Oakland, Calif.: Biobooks, 1949]), p. 44; Benson Tong, Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth Century San Francisco (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), p. 13.

  39 “They are quiet”: Vardis Fisher and Opal Laurel Holmes, Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1990), p. 272.

  39 “It was a mystery”: Ibid., p. 262.

  39 forty-pound nugget: Pauline Minke, “Chinese in the Mother Lode (1850-1870),” thesis, California History and Government Adult Education, 1960, Asian American Studies Library, University of California at Berkeley, p. 27. (Later published as book—San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1974.)

  40 240-pound nugget: Ibid., p. 27.

  40 friendly Shoshone and Bannock Indians: Liping Zhu, A Chinaman’s Chance, p. 28.

  40 water wheel: Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretative History (New York: Twayne Publishers [imprint of Simon & Schuster], 1991), p. 29.

  40 Tin mining: David Valentine, “Chinese Placer Mining in the United States: An Example from American Canyon, Nevada,” in Susie Lan Cassel, ed., The Chinese in America: A History from Gold Mountain to the New Millennium (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Alta Mira Press, 2002), p. 40.

  40 Yuba River: Isaac Joslin Cox, Annals of Trinity County (Eugene, Ore.: John Henry Nash of the University of Oregon, 1940), p. 210, as cited in Pauline Minke, p. 26.

  40 irrigation ditch from the Carson River to Gold Canyon: Origins & Destinations: 41 Essays on Chinese America / A Joint Project of Chinese Historical Society of Southern California and UCLA Asian American Studies Center (Los Angeles: Chinese Historical Society of Southern California and UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1994), p. 113; Jack Chen, p. 256.

  40 “wailings of a thousand lovelorn cats”: Charles Dobie, San Francisco’s Chinatown (New York and London: D. Appteton-Century Company, 1936), p. 42, as cited in James L. Boyer, “Anti-Chinese Agitation in California, 1851-1904: A Case Study on Traditional Western Behavior,” master of arts thesis, San Francisco State College, p. 112.

  41 “About every third Chinaman runs a lottery”: John Hoyt Williams, A Great and Shining Road: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroad (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 99.

  41 “We don’t
know and don’t care”: Vardis Fisher and Opal Laurel Holmes, Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West, p. 262.

  41 “He assaulted me without provocation”: Diane Mei Lin Mark and Ginger Chih, A Place Called Chinese America, p. 6.

  41 Information on Joaquin Murieta: Pauline Minke, Chinese in the Mother Lode, pp. 34-35.

  42 “their presence here is a great moral and social evil”: Diane Mei Lin Mark and Ginger Chih, p. 32.

  42 “tide of Asiatic immigration”: Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), p. 35. Original citation: John Bigler, Governor’s Special Message, April 23, 1852, p. 4.

  42 Commutation tax: Charles J. McClain, “California’s First Anti-Chinese Laws,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1995 (Brisbane, Calif.: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1995), p. 91.

  42 Taxes: Otis Gibson makes reference to a 1876 statement by the Chinese Six Companies which complained that the Chinese paid taxes on personal property, the foreign miner’s tax, $200,000 in annual poll taxes, and more than $2 million in duties to the Custom House of San Francisco. Otis Gibson, The Chinese in America (reprint edition, New York: Arno Press, 1979; original published in 1877 by Hitchcock & Walden in Cincinnati), p. 321.

  42 barred from the city hospital: Robert J. Schwendinger, “Investigating Chinese Immigrant Ships and Sailors,” The Chinese American Experience: Papers from the Second National Conference, Chinese American Studies (1980), p. 21.

  43 Information on foreign miner’s tax: Cheng-Tsu Wu, ed., “Chink!” A Documentary History of Anti-Chinese Prejudice in America (New York: World Publishing Company, 1972), pp. 4, 11; Charles J. McClain, “California’s First Anti-Chinese Laws,” p. 91; Chen-Yung Fan, “The Chinese Language School of San Francisco in Relation to Family Integration and Cultural Identity,” Ph.D. dissertation in education, Duke University, 1976, p. 44.