One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  Another reason for the immediate impact made by the Chinese, with an influence perhaps broader but more difficult to trace, was the event that autumn morning on the western side of Telegraph Hill. Wherever they landed, the Chinese soon built centers of community and religious life, outposts around which to organize their collective efforts in a new land that was not always welcoming. Called “joss houses” by outsiders (a derivation of the Portuguese word for deity, deus, perhaps first applied by Jesuit missionaries in Macau three hundred years before), they were temples where Chinese immigrants could practice the many religious devotions they had brought with them: Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist, and most often a blend of these, along with a variety of practices local to the places they had come from. These latter practices, sometimes called Chinese folk religion or Shenism, are an indication of why regionally associated temples were so important to these recent arrivals. While it is common now to speak of “Chinese religion” as if it is a closed set of practices, neither the Chinese people nor their culture was anything close to monolithic in the nineteenth century. Re-creating precisely some small experience of their homeland—as the temple dedication sought to do—was the best way for immigrants to ensure that the same deities who watched over their families six thousand miles away would continue to protect them when and if they became Americans.

  The man responsible for the temple dedication, known to English-speaking residents of San Francisco as Norman Assing but to the Chinese as Yuan Sheng, had been in America since 1820, longer than most. California had only joined the Union two years before, and the city was fast filling with newcomers fresh off boats not just from China but Europe. One of the earliest Chinese in the United States, Assing had spent his first years in South Carolina. When gold fever hit the East Coast eighteen years later, he, like thousands of others, had made the journey west. Soon thereafter, he founded the Yeong Wo community association to welcome others who hailed from his region in China.

  If Assing felt lonely as the first from his nation in the boomtowns of gold country, it would not be for long. By the time of the temple dedication in 1852, there were four thousand Chinese immigrants settled in San Francisco alone. Unlike Assing, they had come east to reach their destination, making a journey by sea that took several weeks at best. As one contemporary writer noted enthusiastically of the clipper ship Challenge, “This splendid vessel has performed the quickest passage between the coast of China and North West America yet recorded in our annals of modern voyages,” transporting 553 passengers in “33 days time!” By the hundreds, they arrived mostly without restriction in a city that a few decades later became home to Angel Island, “the Ellis Island of the West.” This was where tens of thousands of immigrants from Asia would be detained for months before being admitted to the country or turned away. Also unlike Assing, most of these early immigrants did not come with the expectation that this would be a permanent relocation. The majority were brought by arrangement through mining companies, builders, and later the railroad. They were expected to work and then to return home.

  As a temporary solution to a labor shortage, the Chinese were at first warmly welcomed. “They were a novelty, a wonder, and a study, to which peculiar interest was attached,” the missionary Otis Gibson wrote, in The Chinese in America (1877). “Their coming to this country was regarded as the opening up of intercourse and commercial relations between our country and the Orient, which, in the near future, would be of incalculable benefit both to them and to us.”

  No less a San Francisco icon than Henry Huntly Haight said much the same. Though perhaps more famous now as one-half of an intersection that bears his name, he was governor of California from 1861 to 1867, and praised the arrival of “our elder brethren—the people of China” when he was still just a young lawyer with political ambitions. Without apparent concern that such a position would hurt his future prospects, he publicly declared in 1853, “We regard with pleasure the presence of great numbers of these people among us, as affording the best opportunity of doing them good, and through them, of exerting our influence upon their native land.”

  What Haight and Gibson perhaps failed to consider, however, was that the exertion of influence is almost always a two-way street. While the Chinese would be changed by their experiences in America, the American experience would also be transformed by their presence—and the religious transformation they brought would prove to some the most jarring of all.

  “The Chinese have opened their heathen temples, and set up their heathen idols and altars in this Christian land,” the missionary Gibson lamented, “and instead of our converting their temples into Christian churches, they have absolutely changed one of the first Protestant churches of this city into a habitation for heathen. One of these heathen temples, or an apology for one, is to be found in almost every place where any number of Chinamen have taken up their abode.”

  When it became clear that the Chinese intended not only to remain in the city but to remake it in their own image, their fellow Californians—many only recently arrived from other countries where news of the gold boom had also spread—grew more hostile. Chinese laborers generally worked for half the price of American and European workers, and when the boom times of the gold rush began to wane in the middle of the decade, the frustrations of many failed prospectors fell upon those displaying the most obvious differences. Just a year after Haight offered his warm words of welcome, the 1854 “Annals of San Francisco” noted: “There is a strong feeling, prejudice it may be, existing in California against all Chinamen, and they are nicknamed, cuffed about, and treated very unceremoniously by every other class.” In subsequent years, the California legislature followed the lead of this popular sentiment. To begin with, a fifty-dollar charge was levied on each Chinese immigrant who arrived by ship. A foreign miner’s tax was set at six dollars a month in 1855, and then increased by two dollars each month in 1856 and 1857. The unambiguous goal was to tax the Chinese population out of the gold business, out of the state, and ultimately back across the Pacific.

  As one of San Francisco’s most influential Chinese residents, Norman Assing did all he could to change public opinion in the face of these measures. Throughout 1852, he led contingents of Chinese to march in the city’s parades, including those commemorating George Washington’s birthday and the Fourth of July. (“Their display of numerous fanciful flags and banners of the finest workmanship of their people was the occasion of much favorable comment,” Gibson admitted.) Two years before, Assing had been the head of another group of his countrymen, marching to celebrate California’s newly proclaimed statehood beneath a banner that read “China Boys.” This was, apparently, the preferred designation within the community—at least among those who followed Assing’s lead.

  As early as 1850, Assing had sent a letter to San Francisco mayor John W. Geary “in behalf of the China Boys,” thanking him for including the newcomers in municipal events. “The China Boys feel proud of the distinction you have shown them,” he wrote, “and will always endeavor to merit your good opinion and the good opinion of the citizens of their adopted country.… Strangers as they are among you, they kindly appreciate the many kindnesses received at your hands.”

  Despite his promotion of patriotic activities and his efforts to ingratiate his community with the local government, Assing did not believe in assimilation at all costs. He wanted his new fellow Americans to know that there were elements of the old ways he and other Chinese immigrants were unlikely to leave behind. And so, he made the very American move of inviting the press to events like the temple dedication. Thanks to Assing’s hospitality and media savvy, a correspondent from the short-lived San Francisco Whig was in attendance to record his impressions.

  The dedication began, the Whig reporter wrote, when priests dressed in “the most gorgeous robes of embroidered satin and silk that can be imagined” placed three large tablets with bold Chinese lettering outside the door, so that all passersby might know whose temple this was. Two carve
d “josses,” as he called “the presiding deities of the place,” were then positioned on either side of the entrance.

  When all was in place outside the temple, explosions of firecrackers and “a most horrible discord from gongs, trumpets, cymbals, fiddles and screaming pipes” invited the devotees inside, where all watched as an assembly of priests delivered prayers before another carved divine image. This one was, in the reporter’s words, “a little doll, as we supposed, a young joss, indicative of the infant state of the new building.” The priests and the devotees danced around it, “waving their fans and shaking their horse-tail beards, the band in the meantime in full blast, while crackers were exploding outside the house.” After “an ear-splitting blast from the broken trumpet,” the Whig correspondent noted, “It seemed as if the Goddess of Discord had sent her favorite imps to blow this sorry strain as a grand finale of the winding up of the discordant sounds of the late political strife.”

  That “political strife” was in fact the first labor strike in San Francisco, which occurred when the Chinese workers constructing an all-granite building for the shipping magnate John Parrott—built out of stone cut and shipped from China—demanded higher wages. When the striking workers came out on top in this dispute in the summer of 1852, it was a signal to all that the clout of the Chinese was on the rise.

  Innocuous though it may seem at the distance of one hundred and sixty years, the temple dedication was the pressing of an advantage. If Chinese laborers could raise a building on their own terms with their own materials in the heart of San Francisco, there was no reason to think they could not also construct a permanent home of their own. While the labor dispute was a hopeful sign that Chinese workers might be treated as fairly as any others, the Yeong Wo temple was a sign that the religious traditions of the workers’ homeland would find a place in the city they were helping to build. As such, the temple was also potentially the cause for some alarm—a literal red flag: The crimson banner Assing and his associates hoisted to the top of their temple on the western slope of Telegraph Hill was a physical manifestation of the power the Chinese community seemed destined to attain in the city and perhaps beyond. Inevitably, it was seen by many as a spiritual threat in need of an answer.

  “These ceremonies were exceedingly novel and interesting,” the Whig correspondent wrote, “and we could not help thinking while there, if some of the zealous friends of the missionaries could have been present, they would have found that we have as ample a field for missionary labor in our midst, as to send them to the Sandwich Islands, and distant regions in the South Seas.”

  The Whig report was reprinted as far away as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s New England. However, though the Transcendentalists experimented with notions borrowed from the East, and occasionally played host to holy men for whom Christianity was the exotic faith of a peculiar people, here in California the East had arrived—not only in person by the thousands but in brick and granite, with gongs, trumpets, fiddles, and screaming pipes. Together with all this the Chinese brought their beliefs, which soon would spread to the rest of the nation.

  While contemporary news reports like that of the San Francisco Whig provide a full-color glimpse into the past, what may be most remarkable about this particular correspondent’s observations is the fact that, interesting though some of the details he recorded may be, he really had no idea what he was seeing. Not merely an isolated exotic location made interesting for a day with its fireworks and music, the Yeong Wo temple on Telegraph Hill was an example of an imported Chinese institution known as the huiguan, which even then was playing a significant role in shaping the future of nations on both sides of the Pacific.

  In traditional Chinese culture, the connection to one’s native place, as the former home and usually the burial place of one’s revered ancestors, trumped all other affiliations. Because many ritual actions mandated visits to family gravesites and the shrines of deities with whom the family had a long personal history, not only all politics but all religion was local. When Chinese found themselves far from the land of their birth, they banded together in community associations so that those from the same district who spoke the same dialect and worshipped the same local gods could feel that they had never left home. This system was seen in Beijing and Shanghai as early as the seventeenth century and was replicated in major cities across the country, mainly by the traveling merchant class. As Bryna Goodman, scholar of nineteenth-century China, has noted, “Immigrants separated from their native place were not merely nostalgic, they believed they suffered physically and spiritually from the separation.” The regionally affiliated temple known as the huiguan began as a kind of spiritual embassy, a homeland accessible wherever work or fate might take you. In the United States, huiguans like Yeong Wo would come to seem like native religious soil grafted to the top of Gold Mountain.

  While at first the word huiguan meant only “meeting hall,” it quickly came to have broader relevance. In neither China nor the United States did huiguans serve an exclusively spiritual purpose. As their use and prestige increased in cities like Shanghai, the system took on political significance. Following Confucian ideas of the proper organization of society, regional associations came to seem part of the system of concentric circles of affiliation and support outlined in “The Great Learning,” one of the principal texts of classical Chinese philosophy: “The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the world, first ordered well their own States. Wishing to order well their States, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts.” So too, according to one Shanghai huiguan’s founding document, could a nation be protected through the creation of associations encouraging regional solidarity:

  China is made up of prefectures and counties and these are made up of native villages, and the people of each make a concerted effort to cooperate, providing mutual help and protection. This gives solidarity to village, prefecture and province and orders the country.… Thus people from the same village, county and prefecture gather together in other areas, making them like their own native place. This is the reason for the establishment of huiguan.

  The growing sense of relationship between the local community and the country as a whole gave rise in the late nineteenth century to a nascent Chinese nationalism that often pitted huiguans against those who stood outside this system of belonging. Shanghai, which came under partial French control in 1849, particularly felt the effects of an outside presence, and the huiguans began to see themselves as the first line of defense. When French authorities attempted to appropriate huiguan-owned burial lands for the purpose of building a road, the outcry was immediate. Not only was this an assault on Chinese autonomy, but disturbing a cemetery in a culture in which the living regarded themselves as being in communication with the dead was an unimaginable religious insult. A riot soon broke out pitting dozens of French police against more than one thousand huiguan members. After two Chinese were killed, forty French buildings were burned to the ground. Such disputes between huiguans and foreign governments suspicious of their power raged through the second half of the nineteenth century. A Shanghai newspaper editorial summed up the situation following another such uprising:

  If we do not resist, the will of the [Chinese] people will appear weak and Westerners will make unlimited demands. In the future, if the people’s hearts… are as steadfast as this, this will show that even though the country might be weak and the officials might be controlled, the people cannot be bullied.

  Through the patriotic efforts of immigrants like Norman Assing, the California huiguans at first made every effort to show themselves to be part of American life. Yet when faced with pressures similar to those endured by their counterparts in Shanghai, they too could respond forcefully.

  The earliest huiguans in San Francisco banded together to form the Chinese Six Companies, which functioned as an association of immigr
ant assistance programs, each with membership based around shared dialect, district of origin, and ethnic affiliation. The Six Companies, which later became the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, quickly became a bridge between government and business interests in California and the explosively growing Chinese community. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Six Companies was regarded by many outsiders as a necessary evil: a corrupt institution that nonetheless local authorities and employers relied upon to communicate with a community living behind otherwise unbreachable walls of language and culture. The Six Companies organization was viewed with suspicion, often dismissed as a criminal syndicate (a charge that was not entirely unjustified). Yet such suspicions paid no regard to the fact that its most critical function was religious.

  As in Shanghai and Beijing, huiguans in San Francisco provided a place where those from the same region could worship the gods they shared, and assisted in the burial of these worshippers when they died. So central was the idea of native place to Chinese spiritual understanding that many immigrants planned to have their remains shipped back to China despite the expense. To make certain this happened, they relied on the Six Companies. If the remains of the dead could not be shipped back home (the Six Companies provided logistical support, but the expense was still shouldered by the family of the deceased), huiguans for the living established huiguans for the dead, creating burial areas where one could be laid to rest among those who had made a similar journey. In some cases, there were even huiguans for the gods. The necessity of returning to one’s native place, if only symbolically, was more than a mortal concern. Huiguans were essential in the maintenance of practices that might otherwise have been lost.

  The Six Companies also safeguarded immigrants from the religious milieu in which they found themselves. While Chinese culture generally is welcoming of a variety of beliefs and practices within the walls of its temples, the authorities of the huiguans were not so casual about certain kinds of religious difference. It was taken for granted in most huiguans that the beliefs and practices they would allow, no matter how diverse, would be Chinese beliefs and practices. The San Francisco huiguans actively opposed and prevented conversion to Christianity, using whatever forms of coercion that might prove effective. For example: It was a fairly common practice for workers to labor for a season in the gold fields and then, if they had earned enough, to return home. So common was this practice, in fact, that the Six Companies were given control over issuing return tickets to the Chinese. Taking full advantage of this, and not wanting to export any unwanted spiritual influences back home, the Six Companies began charging more to Chinese who had converted to Christianity than to those who had stayed true to the system of beliefs and practices offered by the huiguans.