While Harte would later lament his most significant, and unfortunate, contribution to American race relations, the sympathetic interest he and other writers of the day showed to the people and practices of Chinatown would have other, more positive, effects. Harte was, for example, a founding member of the Bohemian Club, a San Francisco association of journalists, artists, and businessmen. In 1882, the same year the Exclusion Act was passed, members of the Bohemian Club constructed a seventy-foot-tall Buddha at Bohemian Grove, their camp outside the city. Given that the benefactors of Bohemian Grove were well-heeled San Francisco businessmen of just the sort seen in postcards depicting the rise of spiritual tourism in San Francisco, there can be little doubt where they had seen their first images of the Buddha. Bohemian Grove later would become the storied home to gatherings of political and cultural leaders, but it drew some of its early inspiration from the margins of San Francisco society.
The Bohemian Grove Buddha may be dismissed as mere esoterica with little long-term influence, but Chinatowns around the United States only grew in their cultural impact as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. By then Chinese communities had been established, as the missionary Speer predicted, in dozens of states, gradually introducing images and ideas first imported from Asia into the mainstream of American culture. Just as the Transcendentalists had prepared the way for the arrival of Hinduism in the person of Swami Vivekananda, the presence of Chinatowns in major American cities prepared the American public for the arrival of ambassadors of Taoism and Buddhism. Indeed, at the same Parliament of the World’s Religions where Vivekananda received his rapturous welcome, contingents of Japanese and Sri Lankan monks offered thoughts that perhaps would not have been so warmly received were it not for the role Chinese immigrants had played in making familiar the variety of spiritual expressions that could be found in Asia.
It was not just self-styled intellectuals who were exposed to new religious ideas in this way. Beginning in the late 1890s, images of Buddhas, robed monks, and Chinese temples began to filter into public consciousness through dime store detective novels that were the mass-market entertainment of the day. The Secret Service series of novels, for example, jumped between Chinatowns in California and New York, and even featured a wisecracking missionary’s daughter who was likely the first Mandarin-fluent Western woman in American literature. When the plot of more than one involved the intrepid father and son private eyes and their Chinese-speaking gal Friday sneaking into a “joss house” or Chinese secret society, it was proof that the huiguan system that had begun among merchants in seventeenth-century Beijing had become fully a part not only of the cities Chinese immigrants had helped build but of popular culture as well.
As surely as a semaphore tower spread news of the arrival of ships at port to even those who could not see the bay, the construction of a network of temples on U.S. soil safeguarded the religious ideas of the local community they served and allowed those ideas to be broadcast into the distance. Two further scenes of life in San Francisco’s Chinatown illustrate just how far those signals could travel, and how great the interference was that they overcame.
The first scene occurred a little more than fifty years after the dedication of the temple on Telegraph Hill. It was then, during the earthquake of 1906, that nearly everything the Chinese had built over the preceding five decades was reduced to rubble. Yet even in that moment of utter disaster, the Chinese of San Francisco found ways to continue the practices they had preserved against all odds.
On a spring morning in the aftermath of the earthquake, twenty Chinese men and women arrived at the ruins of what had been the most prominent temple in the city. Military guards had formed a wide ring around the devastation that extended beyond the formerly crowded confines of Chinatown to the wrecked mansions of Nob Hill. Yet the Chinese, emboldened by their rising status in the city and determined to salvage what they could, found a city police officer to escort them as they sought permission to approach the spot where their temple had stood.
After the last tremors, a fire had raged through the neighborhood, reducing the fallen walls to timbers and ash. It was only after some digging that the Chinese contingent found what it was looking for. At the sight of a charred wooden image, they dropped to their knees in the soot. As the smoke from their burning incense sticks mingled with the still smoldering embers of a scene the local press referred to as a “holocaust,” the faithful knelt and offered silent prayers. Lying before them was the carved image of the temple’s presiding deity, blackened by fire but still sacred. The temple members performed their usual rites with careful attention to detail, undaunted by the catastrophe. The twenty Chinese left San Francisco that evening, sent by circumstances across the bay to Oakland as they had once been sent across the sea; but they would return to rebuild. This American place had become their own native holy ground.
Some fifty years later still, exactly a century after the dedication of the temple on Telegraph Hill, the groundwork laid by Norman Assing and other organizers of the Chinese Six Companies continued to serve as a foundation for Chinese immigrant life, which began anew to spread its influence through the curiosity of outsiders. Following in the footsteps of earlier chroniclers drawn to the fully American yet foreign-seeming streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown, the writers of the Beat Generation in the middle of the twentieth century knew nothing of the politics that had made the place what it was—but still they came to experience the exotic close to home. In his autobiographical novel The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac recounts meeting up in Chinatown with his friend the poet Gary Snyder. Snyder was usually credited as the member of the Beat Generation most responsible for introducing Kerouac and the poet Allen Ginsberg to Buddhism. At the time of Kerouac’s arrival on the West Coast, Snyder was studying Asian languages at Berkeley, preparing himself for a trip to Japan to deepen his knowledge of Zen meditation.
After wandering around the streets where Assing and his China Boys had marched to prove their patriotism, the two young writers sat together “in the Sunday morning grass” of a Chinatown park.
“Across the street was the new Buddhist temple some young Chamber of Commerce Chinatown Chinese were trying to build, by themselves,” Kerouac wrote. No longer immigrants, these were the children and grandchildren of immigrants, building temples in what was now their native land. “They were young Sinclair Lewis idealistic forward-looking kids who lived in nice homes but put on jeans to come down and work on the church,” Kerouac went on, “like you might expect in some midwest town, some midwest lads with a bright-faced Richard Nixon leader, the prairie all around. Here in the heart of the tremendously sophisticated little city called San Francisco Chinatown they were doing the same thing, but their church was the church of Buddha.”
Kerouac does not mention the name of this temple, but it is now known as the Buddha’s Universal Church—the largest Buddhist temple in the United States, built from the rubble of the 1906 earthquake that destroyed Norman Assing’s huiguan.
For all his curiosity about the East, Kerouac noted, Snyder was strangely uninterested in the Buddhism of San Francisco’s Chinatown—“because it was traditional Buddhism, not the Zen intellectual artistic Buddhism he loved.” But for Kerouac it was all the same, all of it part of a culture and system of beliefs he felt strongly enough about to help build that church of Buddha himself. “One night I’d come by there,” he said, “and, drunk, pitched in with them with a wheelbarrow, hauling sand from outside in.”
“From outside in” was precisely how the religious life of the nation had been formed. Kerouac and Snyder are often credited with introducing the religious ideas of Asia to the American counterculture of the decade that followed. From there, they became mainstream enough that Buddha statues can now be found in the gardening section of your local big box hardware store. This was a process that did not begin in the rucksacks of beatniks, however. It began with the courage of a few immigrants who dared to raise a red flag to the top of their temple, s
ending a signal to all that they and their gods were here to stay.
Bhagat Singh Thind, Sikh veteran of the U.S. Army, 1917.
CHAPTER 15
“Go Ahead, Keep Your Whiskers”
1907–1923
Even as they saw their door kicked in, they did not draw their knives. It would have been so easy: Each man among the small group gathered around a single rice pot in the dirt-floor shack was armed with a small dagger kept discreetly within his clothing. The blades were not very sharp, but curved and pointed, like the horn of a bull—certainly adequate, if brandished in sufficient number, to the task of keeping a mob at bay.
They had not come to this country to fight, however. They had come to work. Two days after seeing the other residents of Bellingham, Washington, celebrate Labor Day, they might have wondered if laborers were as valued as the holiday declared.
They wore their kirpans, as they called the bejeweled ceremonial knives tucked at their waists, not for self-defense but to remind themselves that they were engaged in a larger struggle, one that could not be won with brute force. The kirpan was one of the so-called Five Ks—panj kakaar—of their faith, the five external markers every male Sikh was expected to carry with him at all times. According to the code of conduct known as the Rehat Maryada, the others markers were kesh, their own uncut hair, symbol of the divine requirement to do no harm to the body; kachhehra, the ritual undergarment that stood for self-control; kanga, the wooden comb that spoke of the virtues of hygiene and discipline; and the steel bracelet they called the kara, worn as a constant reminder that one’s very hands were a gift from God. To do wrong with them was to wrong the giver of all things, and so to wrong oneself.
It was perhaps this knowledge that kept the Sikhs from fighting as the white men burst into the weather-beaten shack and kicked their simple dinner to the ground. It stayed their hands when excited schoolboys, following their fathers’ cruel example, pulled the foreigners by their beards, knocked the turbans from their heads, and went wide-eyed at the great lengths of raven hair concealed beneath. This was the knowledge, the belief, that ensured that even when their pockets were emptied and they were shoved toward the street to be beaten in full view of a crowd of hundreds squalling approval—even then the Sikhs did not unsheathe their blades.
Like the kirpan itself, refusing to misuse it was a symbol of the need to stand for righteousness in the face of injustice. Faith, too, could have a cutting edge. As a prayer of the seventeenth-century Sikh spiritual leader Guru Gobind Singh expressed it: “I bow with heart and mind to the Holy Sword.… The sword cuts sharply, destroys the host of the wicked… is very sharp and its flash pales the radiance of the sun. The sword brings peace to the saints, fear to the evil minded, destruction to sin, so it is my refuge.”
If any among the attacked men had spoken these words aloud on the night of September 4, 1907, they might have been struck by the sad fact that hope of refuge was precisely what had brought them to this land.
The city of Bellingham, hard upon the Canadian border in Washington State, then less than twenty years a member of the Union, was a hardscrabble lumber and mining town tucked between Lake Whatcom and Bellingham Bay, which by way of the Strait of Georgia made Vancouver just a day’s journey by steamship. Thanks to an influx of European immigrants eager to work the mills and the docks, the population more than doubled from 1900 to 1910, when it stood just shy of twenty-five thousand.
It was right in the middle of this boom—in January of 1906—that groups of men born in South Asia began to trickle down from British Columbia. Mostly from the Punjab, along the line of demarcation that would separate India from Pakistan forty years later, they were almost entirely followers of the Sikh religion. Sikhism is organized around belief in one God yet reveres ten historical gurus who led the community in succession from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, as well as one “living guru,” which is not a person but a collection of hymns describing the nature of the divine. Often confused with both Hinduism and Islam, it arose during one of the many periods of conflict between the two, emerging as a third way among a people caught in the middle of warring faiths. By necessity, Sikhs were known as warriors from their earliest days, yet as the tradition developed, the symbols of combat such as the kirpan, which once perhaps served a practical purpose, came to be interpreted in spiritual terms.
As the locals of Bellingham understood it, the first two Sikhs in their city had walked down the Great Northern Railway line to escape the harassment and threats of violence they had faced across the border in Canada. Perhaps they had hoped that America, with all its promises of freedom, was a place where they might carry out the struggle of their faith in peace. They also hoped to find a place where they could earn money to send to the families they had left behind. When it was determined that these first two Sikhs, whose names were recorded in the local press as Linah Singh and Pola Singh, had not passed through required immigration examinations, they were arrested and deported, to the relief of the white Christian immigrant workers in town.
Within two months, however, others began to arrive—most also called Singh, the traditional surname of all male Sikhs. Coming through proper immigration channels, and now inside railcars instead of walking along the tracks, the next group of Sikhs took jobs as ditch diggers before finding work in the lumber mills that filled the town with the screech of band saws late into the evening. Unlike many of the other available workers, apparently, these newcomers had little interest in the saloons that both catered to mill employees and hurt their employers’ bottom line. The lumber mill owners proclaimed they would rather have other laborers, but this group of men whose faith prohibited drink proved more reliable. “We cannot get white men who will remain steadily at their work,” one owner lamented. “A large number are transient and work only for ‘whisky money’ leaving the company in the lurch just at the time that their services are most desired.”
The need was so great for workers with no interest in “whisky money” that soon there were hundreds of Sikhs in Bellingham. Locals, many of them immigrants themselves, greeted them on the street with shouts of “Hindus go home!” That they were not actually Hindus did not seem to matter—not to the white workers who believed they had been put out of a job by cheaper labor, which was not apparently the case, and not to the editors of the city’s several daily newspapers.
By September of 1906, readers of the Puget Sound American were greeted with an ominous headline: “Have We a Dusky Peril?” Beneath it, an illustration of bearded men in turbans—one playing a flute to charm a cobra emerging from a basket—bore the caption “Hindu Hordes Invading the State.” The story itself warned, “Hordes of Hindus have fastened their eyes on Bellingham and the northwestern part of the United States in general, and the vanguard of the invasion which in the minds of many discerning people, threatens to overshadow the ‘yellow peril,’ has reached this city.” Describing them as “swarthy sons of Hinduism,” the article went on to suggest that “thousands of worshippers of Brahma, Buddha and other strange deities of India may soon press the soil of Washington.”
That the unsigned writer of this news report knew nothing about the spiritual tradition that had actually arrived in Bellingham did not prevent the article from going on in great detail about the religious complexities of India:
The land of the Hindus harbors 300,000,000 souls, and it has been called “an epitome of the whole earth,” so varied is its physical characteristics. There the bull, the cow and the monkey are held sacred. In all there are about fifty tribes, which can be traced back to two or three original races. The Hindus form the largest part of the population, and their religion, Brahmanism, is therefore, chief. Of the other principal religions, Mohammedanism has 60,000,000 followers and Buddhism 8,000,000 believers.
Brahmanism was originally a philosophical religion, mingled with the worship of the powers of nature.… In practice, in the course of years, the religion became a system of idolatry, with cruel rites and hideous
images. The caste system, a part of the religion, became a grievous burden, and still is. In the first class are the priests. Warriors are next, followed by traders, and they by the common types.
If the vast populations cited in the article were not enough to alarm the residents of this small town who believed a horde of thousands would soon descend upon them, the paper put the supposed threat in unambiguous terms through a letter to the editor featured as a sidebar. Written by an Englishman named George Pertinet, who obviously had no problem with immigration per se, the letter painted the group as armed and dangerous guerrillas:
Bellingham, Sept. 15, 1906
Editor, American.
Having resided in India nine years and closely observed the habits of the Hindus, I consider their advent in this country very undesirable. They are strictly non-progressive and adhere to their old established customs with far more tenacity than either the Japanese or Chinese. Their code of morals is bad (from our point of view), and if allowed the freedom, which they naturally expect in America, they will eventually become troublesome. The most of them have been soldiers under the British government and are well-versed in the use of fire-arms. In conclusion, they have the habit of running amuck, when annoyed, in which case a number of innocent people get butchered. By all means keep them out.
One Nation, Under Gods Page 37