The Chinese Must Go

by Beth Lew-Williams

  this vio lence did not arise every day or affect every one, it was common

  enough to loom large over every encounter across the color line. The traces of

  this white- on- Chinese vio lence are at once ubiquitous and hidden in the

  historical rec ord, overwhelming in their abundance and yet difficult to

  see. Even when rec ords exist for a given incident, the par tic u lar nature of

  the vio lence is often obscured. Then, as now, it was hard to distinguish be-

  tween interpersonal vio lence, which had little to do with color or creed, and

  po liti cal vio lence, which articulated vicious messages about race and nation.

  Take, for example, the death of Hing Kee. On December 16, 1877, the

  Chinese laborer was murdered in his bed in the com pany town of Port Mad-

  ison, Washington Territory. It was not a clean death. He was found with

  cuts to the fin gers (suggesting a strug gle), two cuts on the side of the head

  (deep enough to penetrate the skull), and a slit throat (inflicted by an “ax or

  cleaver”). The vio lence against Chinese workers in Port Madison did not end

  with this grisly killing; it was quickly followed by expulsion and arson.

  Within days, Hing Kee’s countrymen were driven out of town and the

  housing they had once shared was burned to the ground. In flight, these two-

  dozen Chinese workers left behind their homes and livelihoods. But they

  carried with them, no doubt, the haunting image of Hing Kee’s body and

  the terror that they would be next.2

  17

  18 RESTRICTION

  From this incident of vio lence and so many others, the only surviving ac-

  count is a few paragraphs in the pages of a local English- language news-

  paper. But the Seattle Post- Intelligencer, even as it reported the crime, helped

  erase it from our historical memory of racial vio lence. Despite the brutality

  of the killing, the newspaper dismissed the crime as an act of larceny, em-

  phasizing that the deceased was known to have been in possession of “a gold

  watch and some money.” To local white journalists, this was just another

  unfortunate act of personal vio lence in a society all too familiar with foul

  play. A brief investigation turned up nothing, so local authorities, along with

  the newspaper, declared the crime to have been committed by a “person or

  persons unknown.” When the remaining Chinese were “ordered to leave”

  Port Madison only days later, the newspaper did not report the expulsion as

  an act of vio lence, or even as a crime. Instead, it was “a solution” to the

  prob lem of Chinese labor, one tacitly endorsed by the editors.3

  Curiously, on Christmas Day, the paper issued a correction and apology.

  It had failed to note that the superintendent of the mill com pany had

  ordered the Chinese to leave and the housing “pulled down, and the material

  afterwards burned.” 4 Who this retraction was intended to appease is un-

  clear. Perhaps the correction was meant to insist to readers, especially those

  who read between the lines of print an untold tale of vio lence, that nothing

  nefarious had happened. After all, it was a com pany town so the com pany

  could do as it pleased. Or perhaps the paper simply wanted to give credit

  where credit was due. Either way, the effect was the same: this moment of

  racial vio lence was buried under layers of justification, obfuscation, and

  euphemism.

  And then there was the anti- Chinese vio lence that never made it to print:

  vio lence that occurred behind closed doors, as mistresses beat on house boys

  and johns assaulted prostitutes. There was vio lence that happened outside the

  bounds of white society, in the backcountry of the lumbering industry, along

  isolated railroad lines, or within the recesses of Indian reservations. But

  there was also plenty of vio lence in plain sight of authorities and news-

  papermen, who simply chose to turn away. To white observers, the value

  of Chinese lives was so little, and the vio lence against them so abundant,

  that most forms of harassment seemed unremarkable.

  For the Chinese, these incidents were, of course, far from banal. No one

  cared to rec ord the mi grants’ experiences at the time, but de cades later a team

  THE CHINESE QUESTION

  19

  of academics visited el derly Chinese who remembered the U.S. West in the

  1860s and 1870s. Read together, the old- timers’ testaments of fear and abuse

  are relentlessly repetitive. “When I first came,” Andrew Kan remembered,

  “Chinese treated worse than dog. Oh, it was terrible, terrible. At the time

  all Chinese have queue and dress same as in China. The hoodlums, rough-

  necks and young boys pull your queue, slap your face, [throw] all kind of

  old vegetables and rotten eggs at you. All you could do was to run and get

  out of the way.” “O, I awful scared. I think we gonna get killed,” Law Yow

  recalled, “they stand on side throw rock, club, say God Damn Chinaman.”

  The slurs that most stayed with Daisy Yow were those of the white school

  children who called her “Chink,” “yellow face,” and “cheater.” As the white

  Americans lobbed objects and insults, the Chinese feared worse was to come.

  “Two or three times,” Andrew Kan testified, “I remember Chinese killed by

  mob in San Francisco.” In his memoir, Huie Kin wrote, “We were simply

  terrified; we kept indoors after dark for fear of being shot in the back.

  Children spit upon us as we passed by and called us rats.” “This make me

  very mad but what can I do[?]” Chin Chueng testified, “I can’t do anything.”

  From the abuse and their own feelings of helpless anger, the Chinese learned

  harsh lessons about a new country and their place within it. As Daisy Yow

  put it, “I think they feel that we are a very inferior race of people.”5

  The mid- nineteenth- century U.S. West saw the rise of anti- Chinese vio lence

  and an anti- Chinese movement, but they were not one and the same. A wide

  range of people, many of whom had personal rather than po liti cal aims, par-

  ticipated in scattered incidents of harassment and assault. In attempting to

  prohibit Chinese labor migration, a loosely or ga nized po liti cal movement

  sometimes turned to vio lence but also relied on po liti cal lobbying, sandlot

  demonstrations, journalistic exposés, congressional petitions, third- party

  candidates, and union strikes. From the 1850s to the 1870s, anti- Chinese

  vio lence and anti- Chinese politics overlapped, fed off each other, and must

  have seemed indistinguishable to Chinese mi grants. But in retrospect it

  is clear that racial vio lence, though ubiquitous, was not yet the mainstay of

  the anti- Chinese movement.

  It was in these first three de cades after their arrival that Chinese mi grants,

  anti- Chinese advocates, and cosmopolitan elites established the terms of a

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  debate that would continue into the next century. Though the anti- Chinese

  movement began almost as soon as the Chinese arrived, the campaign for

  Chinese exclusion did not find immediate success because its radical aim to

  halt Chinese migration had many detractors. While white Americans la-

  mented the “Indian Prob lem” in the West and the �
��Negro Prob lem” in the

  South, they continued to be at odds over the “Chinese Question. ” At the

  time, Native American and African American inferiority was considered a

  known prob lem in need of a solution, but Chinese migration represented

  uncharted territory. What did the arrival of Chinese mi grants mean for

  Amer ica? And what should the federal government do about it? The Chi-

  nese Question proved difficult to answer, because it arose out of a funda-

  mental conflict between distinct visions of Amer ica’s imperial future.6

  In the nineteenth century, the United States expanded dramatically,

  extending its territory across the continent and its commercial interests across

  the Pacific. As Americans conquered and settled lands that would become

  the western states of the Union, they relied on capital expansion and diplo-

  matic coercion to gain nonreciprocal access to Chinese territory, ports, and

  markets.7 While in many ways these were twin proj ects of American impe-

  rialism, the fraught issue of Chinese migration revealed the under lying

  tension between domestic and overseas expansion. Elite cosmopolitan ex-

  pansionists saw Chinese mi grants as integral to American penetration of

  Chinese markets, whereas working- class colonial settlers of the U.S. West

  saw the Chinese as an existential threat to their imagined free white republic.

  Thus, the Chinese Question was not simply a question about race. The

  vast majority of Americans agreed that the Chinese were a distinct and

  inferior race, although they continued to quibble over the details. More fun-

  damentally, it was a question about the nature of the American empire.

  Though they shared a similar belief in white supremacy, those who dreamed

  of overseas expansion saw its fruition in opening China for exploitation, while

  others invested in white settler colonialism saw its culmination in Chinese

  exclusion. How white Americans viewed Chinese migration depended, in

  part, on the scale they used to imagine their world. Comprehending these

  divergent worldviews, then, requires us to shift between scales.

  There were times that this growing conflict became violent, but more

  often it remained in the realms of rhe toric and politics, as people on all sides

  voiced divergent dreams for Amer i ca. The arrival of tens of thousands of

  THE CHINESE QUESTION

  21

  Chinese mi grants at mid- century thrust this seemingly intractable debate

  onto the national stage.

  A Mi grant’s Journey from China to California

  One of those mi grants was Huie Kin, the third of five children born in a

  tiny, two- room farm house in a small village in the Taishan District of Guang-

  dong (Canton) Province, China. His family had lived in the village for two

  hundred years, and Kin might have lived and died there if not for rumors of

  gold. In the 1860s a cousin returned from California, known locally as “Jin-

  shan” or “Gold Mountain,” and recounted “strange tales of men becoming

  tremendously rich overnight by finding gold in river beds.” News of a gold

  strike at Sutter’s Mill in California quickly traveled to China in 1848. Within

  a year, 325 Chinese joined the gold rush, followed by 450 in 1850, 2,176 in

  1851, and, suddenly, 20,026 in 1852.8

  The talk of gold held power. Even as a child, Kin wrote many years later,

  he “knew what poverty meant. To toil and sweat year in and year out, as

  our parents did, and get nowhere.” He dreamed of crossing the “ great sea to

  that magic land where gold was to be had for free.” At age fourteen, he sum-

  moned the courage to ask his father for permission to go, and for money to

  cover the cost. To Kin’s surprise, his father readily borrowed the price of

  the ticket, thirty U.S. dollars, from a wealthy neighbor, with his farm as

  security. “Prob ably [my father] had also dreamed of going abroad,” Kin

  hypothesized in his memoir, “but he was married and had a family on his

  hands. His son was plucky to want to go, and he might be equally lucky as

  the other cousins; then they would not have to toil and strug gle any more.”

  If Kin struck it rich, the United States could mean salvation for the entire

  family.

  Kin followed the same path that thousands of Chinese mi grants took be-

  fore and after him. In 1868, he traveled in a small boat or “junk” over the

  waterways of the Pearl River Delta, first to Guangzhou (Canton) and then

  to Hong Kong, carry ing with him only a roll of bedding and a bamboo

  basket containing clothes and provisions. When he reached Hong Kong, he

  found a bed in the home of a friend or relative. There he awaited the arrival

  of an international steamship bound for Amer ica.9 When Kin left his vil-

  lage, he was part of a wave of predominately young, male, lower- middle- class

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  mi grants venturing out of Guangdong Province in search of opportunity.

  For generations, this same demographic group had left home to seek work

  in neighboring towns, provinces, or nations. Now with the help of new trans-

  portation lines, they crossed the Pacific. Except for a few merchants’ wives,

  servant girls, and prostitutes, Chinese women did not follow. Most men

  planned a temporary journey, to leave China only long enough to earn seed

  money to support their family in the future. This “sojourner’s mentality”

  arose from Chinese cultural traditions and religious beliefs that emphasized

  filial duties, but was reinforced by the conditions they found in Amer ica.10

  When the day for departure arrived, Kin boarded a large sailing ship,

  powered by giant billowing white sails. He lined up on deck in front of the

  white captain for inspection and descended to his quarters below. Foreign

  vessels, mostly owned by American or British companies, first traveled north

  along the Chinese coast through the Formosa Strait and then took the west-

  erlies across the Pacific. Most emigrants could not afford the thirty- to fifty-

  dollar one- way ticket to the United States, so they borrowed the money (as

  Kin did) or used the credit- ticket system, signing contracts with Chinese

  brokers promising to repay the price of their ticket through their future

  earnings.11

  Kin spent most of his journey on the lower deck, in the dark and crowded

  space between the top deck and cargo hold. There, Kin and his countrymen

  passed two months sleeping, gambling, smoking opium, and talking of the

  land they had left behind. Disease killed several passengers, including Kin’s

  eldest cousin who traveled with him. Their bodies were lowered overboard

  into a “watery grave” far from the land of their ancestors.12

  When Kin fi nally disembarked in San Francisco, California, in 1868, he

  was tremendously relieved and excited. He remembered: “On a clear, crisp,

  September morning . . . the mists lifted, and we sighted land for the first time

  since we had left the shores of [Guangdong] over sixty days before. To be

  actually at the ‘Golden Gate’ of the land of our dreams! The feeling that

  welled up was indescribable. . . . We rolled up our bedding, packed our bas-

  kets, straightened our clothes, and waited.”13 When Kin arrived in the por
t

  of San Francisco, his appearance was as foreign as his language. He wore

  his hair in a long, braided queue and dressed in a loose shirt, wide- legged

  trousers, a broad- brimmed straw hat, and a pair of wooden shoes. As their

  ship docked, Kin and the other Chinese mi grants entered a scene of loud

  THE CHINESE QUESTION

  23

  confusion. Boatmen, merchants, draymen, customs officials, and spectators

  crowded onto piers strewn with baskets, matting, hats, bamboo poles, and

  other cargo. Kin remembered, “Out of the general babble someone called

  out in our local dialect and like sheep recognizing the voice only, we blindly

  followed and soon were piling into one of the waiting wagons.” Other

  Chinese mi grants followed Chinese labor brokers on foot, walking single

  file with bamboo poles slung across their shoulders, to the Chinese quarter

  of the city. By the time Kin arrived in 1868, there were approximately 57,142

  Chinese on the Pacific Coast.14

  Kin remembered, “The wagon made its way heavi ly over the cobblestones,

  turned some corners, ascended a steep climb, and stopped at a kind of club-

  house, where we spent the night.” The Chinese Six Companies, a mutual

  benefit organ ization established by community leaders in the United States,

  had dormitories where they housed newly arrived mi grants until they found

  labor contracts or a relative came to pay their bill. Despite being an ocean

  away from home, the Chinese enclave had a familiar feel to the newcomers.

  Kin recalled, “In the [eigh teen] sixties, San Francisco’s Chinatown was made

  up of stores catering to the Chinese only. . . . Our people were all in their

  native costume, with queues down their backs, and kept their stores just as

  they would do in China, with the entire street front open and groceries and

  vegetables overflowing on the sidewalks.”15 Kin had found a piece of home

  in this distant and exciting new land.

  Kin may have dreamed of gold when he left China, but the Gold Rush

  was long over by the time he arrived in 1868, and he needed to find wage

  labor. First he acquired a job as the domestic servant of a white American

  family in Oakland, California. Even as a servant, Kin could make a wage

  that was unimaginable in China. He earned about thirty dollars a month,