Some prostitutes may have arrived earlier, but it is clear that by 1854, tongs had established brothels throughout the Southern Mines as well as in Stockton.66 It was during that year that newspapers began to report on a variety of largely unsuccessful attempts to close or at least regulate houses of prostitution. Fire companies in Stockton and Sonora, for example, did the job by turning fire hoses on Chinese brothels. The sexual and racial symbolism of such ejaculatory attacks could not have been lost on participants. Indeed, one such hosing in Stockton—itself an act of destruction and intimidation—provoked a wider anti-Chinese riot during which white men assaulted Chinese women. So violent was this event that newspapermen who earlier had winked at “the cold water remedy” now denounced fire hosing and upbraided those men who had perpetrated “indecent attacks upon frightened prostitutes.”67 By the late 1850s, fire itself had become a metaphor for Chinese sexual commerce, and Chinese houses of prostitution, in turn, came to stand, in Anglo minds, for the troubling persistence of Chinese settlement in the diggings. In 1857 and 1858, for example, costly conflagrations consumed parts of Columbia and Mariposa. In both cases, newspapers blamed the blazes on Chinese residents, claiming that the fires began in Chinese brothels. After Columbia’s calamity, a correspondent telegraphed the San Joaquin Republican to report that the fire—which, it was said, created several hundred thousand dollars worth of damage—“was caused by an opium smoker” at a house of prostitution. A later report detailed the losses suffered by white people in Columbia, and the list of sufferers read like a who’s who of the town’s middle class: Marcellus Brainard, merchant and husband of Clementine, lost $8,000, for instance, and Joseph Pownall, TCWC official and new husband of the former Mary Harrison Newell, lost $2,500.68 In newspaper articles such as these, Chinese communities became hotbeds of drugs and desire, threatening to engulf the self-control, industry, and sobriety of the Anglo American middle class.
Efforts to contain or curtail Chinese prostitution were ongoing in the 1850s. As early as 1854, Sonora’s town council, for example, passed a “stringent ordinance for the suppression of Chinese houses of ill-fame.”69 To the north in Jackson, town fathers took yet another approach. There the marshal began collecting a licensing fee of twenty dollars a month from those who managed Chinese brothels. This practice did not last long. Within months, an Amador County grand jury indicted Jackson’s trustees for pretending that they “had the legal right to levy a Tax upon Chinese houses.” In case anyone missed the point, grand jury members defined such establishments as “houses of ill fame kept for purposes of public prostitution and occupied by Chinese whores.” One trustee indicted was Armsted Brown, the attorney and landlord who would soon set his sights on property claimed by the dance hall manager Isabel Ortis, and whose home would one day become the county’s historical museum.70 Again, white men’s ambivalence about the commercialization of sex—a process in which they might find pleasure or profit or both—limited attempts at reform.
All in all, fire hoses, town ordinances, and license fees had little lasting impact on Chinese sexual commerce in the Southern Mines. No doubt such tactics increased the daily risks of prostitution, but not to the extent of eliminating brothels as workplaces for Cantonese-speaking women. In 1856, for example, a Sonora grand jury indicted “Chinaman John” and “John Doe a Chinaman,” two different men, for keeping houses where women sold sex for cash, though the local law prohibiting such establishments was already two years old. In 1858, a white woman in Amador County filed for divorce, accusing her husband of sleeping with a woman at a “Chinna Brothel” in Sacramento as well as “various women of the chinese race” elsewhere in the diggings. And later that year, under the title “Americanizing,” an Amador County editor reported that two Chinese prostitutes had “astonished and amused the people of Volcano by appearing on the streets in American colors—hoops and all!”71 Chinese sexual commerce itself was no longer astonishing to white people, only the sight of Chinese prostitutes walking the streets in American-style clothing. For some—no doubt especially for white men—that sight was a source of amusement.
It was amusing for two reasons. First, it confounded racialized gender categories in ways reminiscent of the early years of the Gold Rush in the Southern Mines, when white men did domestic work, danced with each other, and developed new hierarchies of gender and race to accommodate the presence of Mexican, Chilean, French, and Miwok women. It must have reminded such men of the “world upside down” created in the Sierra Nevada foothills after 1848. But now ten years had passed, and a new social order had taken hold in the diggings, brought about in part by an influx of Anglo American women. So the sight of Chinese prostitutes promenading in “American” garments could amuse white men for another reason: it did not threaten that social order. There is no evidence that Chinese women who labored as prostitutes in the Southern Mines were able to achieve anything like the limited financial independence Mexican, Chilean, and French women gained by owning, managing, or even just working in leisure establishments. Historians have identified a tiny handful of Chinese women elsewhere who were able to profit from sexual commerce, such as Ah Toy and Suey Hin in San Francisco.72 But no such women emerge from the historical record of the Southern Mines in the 1850s; there are no tongue-in-cheek newspaper accounts, no revealing court records, no white women’s diaries filled with fears about the relative affluence of Chinese working women. For most white men, the world by 1858 was turning right side up, and Chinese women in hoop skirts were a curiosity, not a symbol of a world gone crazy.
For the promenading prostitutes, wearing hoop skirts must have meant something else altogether. The meanings these women attached to the act, however, are lost in a historical record generated by people who knew little and cared less about the inner lives of Chinese prostitutes. There is no way to know for sure, for example, who decided what these women would wear the summer day they appeared on the streets of Volcano. Higher-status prostitutes in San Francisco, who served a Chinese clientele, often wore elaborate and expensive clothing. But mining town prostitutes were generally of a lower status, and they served a multiracial clientele. One historian contends that prostitutes in the diggings endured especially harsh treatment—that banishment to a mining town brothel was a way to punish women who defied established controls in the city.73 Thus it seems likely that a brothel owner, rather than the women themselves, decided on the hoop skirts and then sent his charges out walking, perhaps to drum up business. There was every reason in the summer of 1858 for a businessman to dream up new ways to attract customers: it was in the spring of that year that gold was discovered at the Fraser River in British Columbia, drawing thousands away from the California diggings and depressing the local economy. Just days after the women walked the streets in “American colors,” the same newspaper complained about all those who had “left Amador county and gone to Frazer river.”74 But even if a brothel owner hit on the idea of dressing Chinese women in “American” finery, it was not he but they who promenaded two abreast in skirts that took up a good deal of ideological as well as physical space. The flavor of that emotional experience is lost to the historical record, but one can imagine that appropriating symbols of ladyhood, whiteness, and morality provided an unexpected feast for women whom most other Gold Rush participants meant to starve. It was a rich joke in a poor world. It was a mockery of gentility, that great reservoir from which white, middle-class women drew so much of their social, cultural, and economic power. As one scholar has argued, Chinese women could take courage in knowing that their sale or indenture into prostitution helped their struggling families back home in the Pearl River Delta.75 Perhaps courage could come as well in a hoop-skirted march through the dusty streets of a town like Volcano.
Local newspaper reports on Chinese women, of course, reveal more about the discursive and social practices of Anglo American, middle-class men than about the lives of Cantonese-speaking women. But in the absence of documents generated by the women themselves, such obdurat
e reports must be forced to yield every shred of evidence they contain about the ways in which Chinese women were able to maneuver in a tightly circumscribed social and discursive world. Along with the account of the promenading prostitutes, a handful of newspaper references to Chinese women in 1857 and 1858 suggest that some such women pushed at the boundaries of that world to good effect. The writer of one report, for example—tellingly titled “An Honest John Chinawoman”—was astonished to discover a married Chinese woman who had helped her husband build a house and who worked alongside him mining a nearby creek bed. There is no way of knowing if this woman accompanied her husband to California or if she bought her way out of a brothel and married a suitor, though the latter is more likely. The writer’s account of this house-building, gold-mining woman is drenched in his own arrogant understandings of race, gender, beauty, and morality. “The Celestial ‘beauty,’” the editor gibed, “wields the pick and shovel with the air of a miniature Amazon.”76 Wring his report out, however, and there emerges an immigrant woman who with her own hands forged a different sort of life for herself in late Gold Rush California. Life with a pick and a shovel, a house and a husband improved on a servitude that might end in death.
Likewise, a second report reveals how a Chinese woman tried to use a countryman’s earnings and perhaps the local court system to gain her freedom. She had been brought to California by another Chinese woman—perhaps the famous Ah Toy herself—“as a slave for any purpose.” The enslaved prostitute, in turn, borrowed $400 from a Chinese man in Amador County to purchase her freedom, “giving him a written mortgage of herself to secure the payment of the money.” The Chinese man, the newspaper recounted, then “endeavored to enforce his lien,” perhaps by insisting on free sexual services or by forcing the woman back into prostitution. Someone—it is not clear from the report whether it was the woman herself—then charged this man with abduction and took him to court. The man who had lent the woman money failed in his attempt to enforce what he thought was his lien on her person. The judge in the case informed him that “persons could not be restrained of their liberty for evil purposes, even if they had originally agreed to it.”77 The account does not reveal what became of the woman who borrowed and bought her way out of bondage. But the act itself spoke volumes about her aspirations.
It was not only Chinese women who became workers in the world of leisure that had evolved in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada since the discovery of gold in 1848. Unwittingly, hundreds of Cantonese-speaking men became bit players in spectacles attended or at least anticipated by hundreds of white men, who seemed as hungry for the blood of Chinese men as for the bodies of Chinese women. These Cantonese-speaking men were participants in pitched battles waged among opposing groups of Chinese in the diggings during the mid-1850s. Such battles were not unique to the Southern Mines. Indeed, the most famous fight, which became known as the Weaverville War, took place in 1854 in the Shasta-Trinity diggings far to the northwest.78 But the Southern Mines saw their share of actual and expected warfare. Major conflicts occurred in 1854 near Jackson, in Amador County, and in 1856 near Chinese Camp, in Tuolumne County. In 1856, a similar battle threatened in Mariposa County, and smaller skirmishes erupted at San Andreas, in Calaveras County, and at Knight’s Ferry, near the border between Stanislaus and Tuolumne counties.79
The lack of Chinese-language sources describing these events in the Southern Mines and similar fights elsewhere in the diggings has left scholars unsure about the causes and meanings of militarized conflict among Chinese immigrants in the 1850s. English-language sources are concerned primarily with what white men saw as the entertainment value of the battles. Such accounts usually identify the opposing factions in fights among groups of Chinese as “Cantons” and “Hong Kongs.” These divisions do not correspond to what scholars of Chinese America describe as the major bases of social organization in California’s earliest immigrant communities. Chinese men who immigrated from the three counties closest to the port city of Canton (known in Cantonese as Sam-yap, in Mandarin as Sanyi, and in English as “Three Districts”) did form a district association that was known both as the Sam-yap Company and as the Canton Company. So it is possible that battle participants whom English-speakers called Cantons hailed from Sam-yap. But there is no such logical relationship between those called Hong Kongs and any identifiable group of Chinese who emigrated in the 1850s. On the other hand, Canton and Hong Kong were the most widely recognized Chinese place-names among English speakers in the midnineteenth century, since the cities those place-names represented were sites of extensive British and American incursion in China. It seems likely, then, that English speakers simply attached as monikers to opposing “armies” the two Chinese terms they knew best.80
This lettersheet depicts many Anglo American preoccupations during the Gold Rush, including the place of white male prospectors in the polyglot diggings, the labor of native peoples, and the battles between groups of Chinese miners that became a spectator sport for Anglo men.
Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
In fact, various groups labeled “Cantons” and “Hong Kongs” in battles that erupted across hundreds of miles over a period of several years probably represented a broad array of opposing interests among Chinese men. These opposing interests may have originated in local, California-based enmities as much as in the social ruptures of South China in the 1850s, which included clan feuds, ethnic conflict, secret-society warfare, and small- and large-scale revolutionary movements, such as Guangdong’s short-lived Red Turban Revolt (1854–55) and the calamitous Taiping Rebellion (1851–64), which almost ended the Qing dynasty.81 Some sources suggest that Chinese battles in California were rooted in the disparate district origins of immigrants. In the case of the Weaverville War, for example, a white observer called one of the warring factions the “Young Woes.”82
Unlike other English-language appellations, this was a clear reference to the geographic origins of participants: the Yeung-wo Company was a district association created by immigrants from Xiangshan County, in the vicinity of Macao. Not only did men from Xiangshan organize a district association separate from that formed by men from the Canton area; they spoke a different Cantonese dialect as well. In addition to bringing memories of tremendous strife in South China, then, immigrants also spoke different dialects and called different places home, and these differences had profound social meanings.
That struggles among Chinese men in late Gold Rush California so often turned into armed conflicts comes as no surprise. The diggings, established as they were by a variety of immigrants committed to the pursuit of quick riches, long since had been a place of violence for opposing social groups. In addition, Chinese came into this cultural milieu from a situation in Guangdong in which foreign incursion and social upheaval had spawned widespread militarization. Ever since the Opium War (1839–42), local militia had flourished there, and young men who emigrated to California had grown up surrounded by warfare.83 These are among the circumstances that gave rise to the battles English speakers described between groups of Chinese.
Whatever the origins and meanings of armed conflict among Chinese immigrants to California in the 1850s, their troubles quickly became a spectator sport for white men. In late May of 1854, a local newspaper reported that Chinese men in and around Jackson were employing area blacksmiths to forge weapons for an impending fight, which the author hoped would unfold as “a Chinese version of the renowned battle between the Kilkenny cats.” Another writer added that the event “was a rich ‘nut’ for the white citizens who were extremely anxious that the affair should come off.” The conflict that did ensue, though it produced “about a dozen broken heads,” disappointed white spectators, who hoped at least a few Chinese would fall in battle. One subsequent newspaper account, entitled “Great Chinese Battle at Jackson—0,000 Killed,” mocked the struggle, complaining that the Chinese settled their differences “without the loss of a single life.”84 Repo
rts of later battles in the Southern Mines took a similar tone. When a fight was brewing among Chinese men at Bear Valley early in 1856, white miners in Mariposa County eagerly headed in that direction hoping, according to a correspondent, “to see the ‘Menagerie.’” The writer lamented that the miners “were obliged to come back unsatisfied.”85 Ten months later in Tuolumne County, white men got their wish, when two armies of some four hundred Chinese men each faced off, fortified with spears, clubs, and muskets. This battle, which erupted in October near Chinese Camp, was no doubt the largest such conflict in the Southern Mines. Newspapers reported that two or three Chinese men died in the struggle. According to one account, a “large number of Americans were present from all the mining camps in the vicinity, for the purpose of seeing how the moon-eyed contestants conducted warfare.” The county sheriff was among the spectators; his horse was “shot out from under him by a random shot.”86
It had come to this, then. Once, white men had worried for their own safety when non-Anglos shouldered weapons in the diggings, assuming that Anglo camps would be the target of truculence. Now white miners feared for their livelihoods, not their lives. A Chinese man-at-arms, like a hoop-skirted Chinese woman, was not a danger but rather a diversion, titillating and ridiculous all at the same time. This was so in part because Anglo American dominance was now reasonably well assured in the Southern Mines. In establishing that dominance—which was never complete or uncontested—white people had succeeded in renaturalizing the boundaries of gender and race that characterized their own lives. Chinese women and men stood outside those boundaries, and this is why hoop skirts and deadly weapons on their persons looked so comical to so many white observers. To stand outside bounds of gender and race was, in effect, to stand outside the bounds of humanity. Thus it was that Anglos who anticipated trouble among Chinese men at Bear Valley or Knight’s Ferry hurried to see a “menagerie” and hoped the fight would “terminate like the Kilkenny cats.”87 For white men in the mid-1850s who made spectacles out of Chinese battles, watching human heads break and human blood flow seems to have been the moral equivalent of watching a bull-and-bear fight back in the boom years of the Gold Rush. Then, animals stood in for human hostilities, particularly hostilities between Mexicans and Anglos.88 Now white men watched with hilarity as people stood in for animals, and human flesh gave way to spearheads and musket balls. This was the arrogance of Anglo America. One wonders, then, how random the shot was that killed the county sheriff’s horse during the autumn battle in 1856. Perhaps the blast was a brutal, eloquent rebuke to the dehumanizing gaze of white miners.
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