One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  Through such defensive efforts to maintain their culture and beliefs, the huiguans in San Francisco began to respond to external pressures in America in a way parallel to their Shanghai counterparts’ engagements with the French. As in Shanghai, the more outside pressure the huiguans faced, the greater their willingness to speak out became. Legislative actions against the Chinese soon expanded beyond mine taxes, targeting explicitly Chinese norms and practices. Bans on the long braids traditionally worn by Chinese men, and even against carrying parcels with poles, as was Chinese custom, were enacted in 1870s. Perhaps most insulting to a people for whom sending the remains of the dead home was a religious duty, the state legislature even instituted a ten-dollar tax on the shipment of corpses from its ports. Such legal attacks on Chinese rights contributed to an environment in which they were openly attacked on the streets of the city. In April 1876, the leadership of the Six Companies wrote to H. H. Ellis, Chief of Police of the City and County of San Francisco:

  Sir:—We wish to call your attention to the fact, that at the present time frequent and unprovoked assaults are made upon our Chinese people while walking peacefully the streets of this city. The assaulting party is seldom arrested by your officers, but if a Chinaman resist the assault, he is frequently arrested and punished by fine or by imprisonment. Inflammatory and incendiary addresses against the Chinese, delivered on the public streets to the idle and irresponsible element of this great city, have already produced unprovoked and unpunished assaults upon some of our people, and we fear, that if such things are permitted to go on unchecked, a bloody riot against the Chinese may be the result. Regretting that the Chinese are so obnoxious to the citizens of this country… we simply ask to be protected in our treaty rights.

  Respectfully submitted,

  The Six Companies

  The treaty to which the Six Companies leadership referred, the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, protected both American citizens living in China and Chinese living in the United States, and made explicit mention that people “of every religious persuasion… shall enjoy entire liberty of conscience and shall be exempt from all disability or persecution on account of their religious faith or worship in either country.” It was against the violation of these rights of conscience that the Six Companies most strongly protested.

  When the U.S. government took the ultimate steps of first restricting Chinese immigration through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and then through the Geary Act of 1892 (calling for all Chinese already within the United States to carry certificates of residence at all times), the Six Companies encouraged nonviolent civil disobedience along the lines of what would later be seen in the Civil Rights Movement. In response to the Geary Act, the Six Companies called upon Chinese in California not only to refuse to carry the certificates but to contribute their wages to the fund that would fight the act in the courts. It was in response to the Chinese Exclusion Act, however, that the Six Companies engaged in its most brazen act of civil disobedience, by actively smuggling Chinese into the country across the Canadian and Mexican borders. Faced with being cut off from their homeland, the Six Companies simply flouted the law in order to maintain their connection to the community’s source of spiritual sustenance.

  As a founder of one of these original San Francisco huiguans, Norman Assing was there at the beginning of the movement for Chinese civil and religious rights in America. He, too, was suspected of various extralegal activities, and was in fact a near-constant presence in the San Francisco courts. His role in most proceedings, however, was not as defendant but—like the Six Companies personified—as a go-between and a fixer; he was someone well known as a member of the Chinese community who could make problems go away. A typical entry in a local newspaper’s court report:

  A-he, a Chinaman, was brought up on a charge of larceny, having stolen ten dollars. Norman Assing testified that he was a crazy man, and that he had had him locked up in one of his rooms for several days, and that he broke out and escaped. The money was taken from a gaming table in the New World saloon on Long Wharf. He was discharged, Norman Assing promising to send him to China.

  Not only was Norman Assing trusted to send his countryman home, it was apparently accepted without explanation that he would take it upon himself to lock up a thief in one of “his” rooms. He was at once a promoter of Chinatown’s religious life and an enforcer of its own moral code. Even as the state and federal authorities cracked down on the Chinese in California, they relied on men like Assing and the huiguan he represented to keep order in a community in which the usual mechanisms of government held little sway.

  Through subtle and not so subtle influence, the huiguan system slowed the rate of assimilation of the Chinese in San Francisco and elsewhere. Yet in the process it created what has become a crucial part of the American experience: the urban enclave of new arrivals and their descendants, a hothouse where the culture brought across the ocean could not only survive but flourish. This was a process replicated across America as the Six Companies opened affiliates in New York City (1883), Seattle (1892), Boston (1923), and eventually in twenty other cities throughout the United States.

  Paradoxically, it was thanks in part to the restrictive laws passed against them that the Chinese in America were able to establish themselves wherever they went according to their own religious vision, building their own unique version of the city on a hill. And, as with the Puritans, theirs was a vision that would have unexpected influence on all those around them.

  The correspondent for the San Francisco Whig need not have worried that Christian proselytizers were missing out on a ripe field of potential converts in Chinatown. The missionaries were in fact already there. In the Presbyterian and Methodist churches, especially, it was not uncommon by the mid-nineteenth century for evangelists to spend some time in China, and then, after they had returned to the United States, to look for a mission field where they could make use of their newly acquired cultural and linguistic knowledge closer to home. For obvious reasons, San Francisco was the prime destination. As they had from their Far East outposts, the missionaries to California wrote detailed travelogues of their expeditions. Yet whereas the earlier evangelical literature had related tales of impossibly distant places, this new generation of missionary writers began to tell stories of the exotic Orient in locales that were becoming more accessible by the day.

  Both the Methodist Otis Gibson and the Presbyterian William Speer were in San Francisco during the boom years of Chinese immigration, and both left remarkable records of their time there. Gibson walked his readers attentively through the sights, sounds, and smells—he was particularly taken by the smells—of Chinatown, which provided, he wrote, an experience of “China, as it is.” Following a description of the people one might see (“Chinamen and a few Chinese women dressed in Chinese fashion, the men with shaven crown and braided cue, walking with a Chinese shuffle or a Chinese swagger”), Gibson provided a lengthy discourse on the meaning of the signs hanging in the windows of various businesses: “It is not customary with the Chinese to give the names of the parties composing the firm as the firm name, but some fanciful, high-sounding phrase is selected. Here, for instance, is this butcher-shop called ‘Man Wo, Ten Thousand Harmonies.’ Such phrases are peculiarly pleasing to the Chinese mind, and are suggestive of good luck.”

  Speer meanwhile saw the arrival of the Chinese in both religious and practical terms. “The Creator has prepared a treasury of labor in that empire from which those lands and islands can draw without danger of exhaustion. This only we can now foretell, that the handful of Chinese now on this continent is but the trickling of the rivulet which will swell into a river that will spread over all the New World.” As he understood it, God intended the Chinese to cross the Pacific for the purpose of building America—with their tireless labor and their unimaginable numbers—into the great Christian nation it was meant to be. “The stream which begins to set in from China to the New World does not remain in California,” he wrote. “It flows
wherever a channel is open for it by the discovery of new mines, by the opening of new opportunities of trade or by the requirements for human labor. It is supposed that fifty thousand Chinese are distributed over other Pacific States and Territories. Half of these are in Montana and Idaho; a fourth of them are in Oregon and Nevada; the remainder are distributed along the lines of railroad eastward and in Colorado and Utah.… As the number increases, they will press on into all the States.”

  All of this would be for the good, Speer supposed, if this river was converted as it flowed. Representatives of the mainline Protestant churches became unlikely supporters of the rights of the Chinese in America, but it was understood by all sides that this support came with strings attached. Christian Chinese should be welcomed, the missionaries asserted, but those who frequented temples such as the one dedicated on Telegraph Hill would be seen primarily as potential converts.

  Although Speer and others undoubtedly had some success in their conversion efforts, the missionary influence in Chinatown also had unexpected consequences. Once again this was a moment when religious influence proved to be not a stream moving in only one direction but an estuary in which a number of different sources combined, each challenging and changing the composition of the other. Combined with the huiguan system’s establishment and support of the religious life of Chinatowns, the new crop of missionaries telling intriguing tales of the Chinese brought about an unexpected side-effect that would have surprisingly broad influence: spiritual tourism.

  Huiguan temples in China had been strictly members-only affairs. But in America an unexpected thing began happening. Mainly thanks to the efforts of community spokesmen like Norman Assing, Chinese temples—and Chinatowns generally—became the subject of intense interest among non-Chinese. In Sacramento, for example, one could stop into the shop known as Tobin & Duncan’s and purchase all manner of Chinese exotica. Postcards depicting the inside of Chinese worship houses showed well-dressed Anglos looking quite out of place: the nation’s first religious sightseers. Newspapers began to fill with offers of entertainments that promised entry into exotic “Oriental” worlds.

  In the short term, many more Westerners began to frequent Chinese temples. Gibson clucks disapprovingly about the abodes of “gods many and lords many” visited by former churchgoers. “One of the principal Chinese ‘joss-houses’ is called the Eastern Glorious Temple,” he writes. “This temple is largely owned and controlled by Dr. Lai Po Tai, a Chinese quack doctor, who is said to have accumulated a large fortune practicing medicine among a class of weak-minded, easily duped Americans, both men and women.” Gibson had come to Chinatown eager to bring souls over to his side of the spiritual divide, only to find, with some discomfort, that many of his fellow citizens were going there for the purpose of moving in the opposite direction: not away from “heathen” practices but toward them.

  In the longer term, journalistic explorations into the spiritual lives of the Chinese followed in the missionaries’ wake. The temple dedication report that appeared in the San Francisco Whig was but the first entry in a genre that would regularly feature the religious gatherings of Chinatown well into the twentieth century.

  To combat the work of evangelists like Speer and Gibson, the Six Companies in 1876 brought the Confucian revivalist Fung Chee Pang from China to deliver a series of lectures on traditional Chinese ethics, ritual, and religion. Dr. Pang, as Gibson deigned to call him, was interviewed at length in the San Francisco Chronicle, which used the lectures as an opportunity to reflect on the culture then making itself at home in the city. When “John Chinaman” arrived in America, the Chronicle wrote, “he brought his rice, his chopsticks, his language, his peculiar and disgusting habits, and now, to make the thing complete, he imports his religion and literature, and whisks them fairly in the faces of our men of letters with the remark that it is more authentic and as old as the everlasting hills.”

  To give its readers “some idea of what they might expect from the advent of this new and yet old religion,” a reporter from the Chronicle had a “literary pow-wow” with the Chinese scholar. When asked to explain the content of his teachings, Fung Chee Pang expounded upon “The Great Learning”—the text cited by the Shanghai temple as the reason for the creation of the huiguan system. Shrewdly, in inviting Dr. Pang, the leaders of the Six Companies were fighting fire with fire, using missionary techniques not to convert their people but to prevent them from converting—to remind them, in other words, that they, too, were a people of the book. This strategy was not lost on the reporter from the Chronicle: “For a long time our celestial residents have been keeping a suspicious eye on the inroads the Christian religion has been making in their ranks,” he wrote. “They noted with alarm the capture of some of their brightest young men by the irrepressible missionaries, and to stay the progress of Christianity, and at the same time fix the love of country firmly in the mind of the heathen horde, the Six Companies have inaugurated a series of protracted meetings of the most approved fashion; but, instead of the Bible, the law and gospel as laid down is taken direct from the musty volumes of the great Confucius.” In this, the reporter grudgingly notes, Dr. Pang was “stirring up quite a revival among the almond-eyed horde.”

  While much of the coverage of Chinese religion was dismissive, other times it showed signs of a surprising pluralism, as in a short item titled “Religious Freedom” that appeared in the Los Angeles Herald in 1875:

  Nowhere in the civilized world is there such perfect religious freedom as on the Pacific Coast. The worshippers at every shrine, the champions of every creed known among civilized men, reside together in the most perfect harmony. Whether the citizen of California be a follower of Confucius, or a disciple of Jesus Christ, his rights are respected, and the fullest liberty accorded him. Jew or Gentile, Christian or Infidel, Catholic or Protestant, worship according to the promptings of their own hearts, and there are none so hardy as to gainsay their privilege. While Europe is still struggling under the curse of religious persecutions either open or silent, while Canada is intolerant, and religious hatred still bitter over most of the United States east of the Rocky mountains, absolute freedom prevails in California. The general spirit of tolerance everywhere visible in this section is witnessed nowhere else in the world. Nor does it spring from irreligion, for our people are individually as zealous in their worship as their more bigoted brethren in other parts of the world. The church steeple rises in every valley and upon every hill and every Sabbath the sun looks down upon the eager thousands wending their way to the houses of prayer.

  Still other engagements between the American press and the growing Chinese community displayed an ambivalence indicative of the simultaneous suspicion and curiosity the residents of Chinatown inspired. Perhaps the best example of this is a poem by the American writer and editor Bret Harte. Harte had arrived in San Francisco as a teenager not long after the dedication of Norman Assing’s temple, and so he came of age around the sights and sounds of Chinatown. As the editor of the Overland Monthly magazine, he regularly published sympathetic explorations of Chinese culture, including a long essay on the benign role of the Six Companies in 1894.

  Harte’s greatest success as a writer, however, also became his greatest regret. In 1870, just as an economic downturn created more competition for jobs than ever before in California, Harte published a satiric poem—“Plain Language from Truthful James”—that lampooned the racism of white laborers who blamed the Chinese for their woes. The poem follows two dishonest gamblers, the narrator James and his belligerent friend Bill Nye, as they attempt to cheat a “heathen Chinee,” an immigrant laborer called Ah Sin, out of his wages in a game of cards. As the verses progress, Harte shows the two card sharks at first confident they will easily fool the man with a “smile that was childlike and bland,” but they are in for a surprise.

  The hands that were played

  By that heathen Chinee,

  And the points that he made

  Were quite frightful to
see.

  When Ah Sin wins the next hand, an enraged Bill Nye cries, “[W]e are ruined by cheap Chinese labor,” and then attacks. The reader does not directly learn of Ah Sin’s fate, but Harte describes the cards strewn portentously on the floor “like leaves on the strand.”

  Harte’s point was clear enough: The gamblers had lost at their own game and so resorted to racist justifications for their violent response. Yet when the poem began to be reprinted far and wide, retitled as “The Heathen Chinee,” much of Harte’s wit was lost. Underscoring the fact that the prejudice faced by the Chinese was both racial and religious, “Heathen Chinee” became a popular slur for Chinese immigrants across America—and a rallying cry for those who identified with the bumbling thugs in the poem. Since the earliest days of Chinese immigration, nativist politicians and newspaper editors had warned of the “yellow peril” that Asian newcomers represented to the United States; now the exclusionists had their own unlikely poet laureate. To Harte’s chagrin, his words were reprinted in offensively illustrated editions far outside the highbrow context of the Overland Monthly, which had initially made his intentions obvious. Years later he would declare, “Plain Language from Truthful James” was “the worst poem I ever wrote, possibly the worst poem anyone ever wrote.… I was almost ashamed to offer it,” though as historians including Ronald Takaki have noted, he never publicly protested the almost universal misreading of his work as it was making him famous.