The Chinese Must Go

by Beth Lew-Williams

  through the countryside, their pro gress drew onlookers and hushed conver-

  sations. This was also to be expected. Even from a distance, their wide-

  brimmed straw hats, braided queues, and poles slung across their shoulders

  set them apart from the familiar sight of white workers. To be Chinese in

  Amer ica was to be con spic u ous. But they arrived at the Wold Brothers hop

  farm without incident and pitched sixteen small tents. It was Saturday,

  September 5, 1885.

  Was Gong aware that three days earlier twenty- eight Chinese miners had

  been massacred in Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory? There is no way to

  know. The story was on the front page of every American newspaper, but

  few Chinese workers could read the headlines. Perhaps rumors of faraway

  vio lence gave him some inkling of what was to come, or perhaps he was taken

  by surprise when twenty- five men descended on his camp that after noon,

  brandishing weapons and lobbing insults. Gong did not have to understand

  En glish well to comprehend the mob’s meaning. This was a warning.

  On Sunday all was quiet. Then Monday work began. Since it was har-

  vest time, the hop fields were thick with vines that towered above him and

  made it impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. Though Gong feared

  trou ble, he witnessed none. The vigilantes, it turned out, were busy elsewhere;

  as Gong labored in the fields, the mob intercepted a second group of Chinese

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  Puyallup Valley (1889). Chinese and white workers harvesting hops near the site of the

  1885 Squak Valley murder and expulsion. University of Washington Libraries, Special

  Collections, Boyd and Brass, photographer, UW38226.

  workers bound for the Wold Brothers farm. What exactly happened be-

  tween the vigilantes and the newcomers is unknown, but the outcome

  speaks for itself. The Chinese turned and fled.

  Monday night, Gong was asleep in his tent when the vigilantes returned

  without warning in the darkness. “So many shot fired it sounded all same

  [as] China New Year,” he told a coroner’s jury a few days later. As bullets

  blew holes through the workers’ tents, all was chaos. Gong ran for the forest,

  hunkered down at a safe distance, and watched as the tents burned. He re-

  turned to the camp to find the bodies of men he had labored beside only

  hours before. There was thirty- five- year- old Fung Wai, shot in the chest,

  and thirty- two- year- old Mong Goat, shot in the belly. Beside the bodies

  was a gravely wounded man, Yung Son. “Yung Son was shot through left

  arm, through both thighs and through ankle,” testified Gong. After Yung

  passed the next morning, the Chinese packed up their remaining posses-

  sions and took the road out of Squak Valley.1

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  Gong stayed behind, minding the bodies of the three who died, bringing

  shell casings to the local sheriff as evidence, and serving as a witness in the

  coroner’s inquest and criminal trial. He had been defenseless against the mob,

  but now he could fight for retribution. In emotional testimony, Gong tried

  to convey the anguish of Yung’s death. He told the jury that “[Yung] was

  sorry to die. Got a son [at] home, too young, no one to send him money.

  [Yung] did not talk much, but hollered through the night.” Even in the

  courtroom, Gong proved powerless. He knew the men who had died, but

  nothing of the shooters. All he could say was, “Monday night white men

  come to kill Chinamen.” Who were these “white men”? Why did they kill

  the “Chinamen”? Gong did not know.2

  For the Chinese, this is how the vio lence began, with shock, fear, and lin-

  gering questions. Histories of vio lence, however, rarely start this way. It is

  difficult to begin the history of anti- Chinese vio lence with its victims because

  the story of racial vio lence is, inevitably, a narrative of action and reaction,

  perpetrator and prey. Searching for cause and effect, history favors stories of

  people who instigate events over those who suffer the aftermath. The Chi-

  nese make unnatural protagonists because they did not set these violent epi-

  sodes in motion, nor did they hold the power to stop them. They also make

  problematic narrators because, like Gong, they often could not name their

  attackers or pinpoint their motivations.

  Racial vio lence against the Chinese relied on the power of surprise. The

  Chinese did not know when threats would turn to vio lence, what form the

  vio lence would take, or when it would end. While vigilantes sometimes de-

  pended on bullets to rid their community of Chinese, they often expelled

  them through threats alone. To fully understand the potency of this psy-

  chological vio lence, we must start our exploration of racial vio lence with the

  Chinese, adopt their vulnerable state of ignorance, and attempt to under-

  stand what it means to live in terror.

  Foregrounding the Chinese perspective also guards against their voices

  being drowned out by others.3 The inequalities of the past have produced

  disconcerting gaps in our present- day archives. Thousands were expelled

  from towns and cities in the U.S. West in 1885 and 1886, but only a handful

  of firsthand Chinese accounts still exist. Telling the story of the expelled

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  entails searching for these uncommon rec ords but also requires reading si-

  lences left behind by those who had no voice. To this end, Part II focuses on

  the expulsions in Washington Territory. A combination of dramatic events

  and happenstance created the best- preserved Chinese rec ords there. Many

  of these accounts come in the form of legal testimony collected by county

  courts and federal investigators. This testimony, primarily provided by Chi-

  nese merchants or labor contractors, hardly offers a full picture, and is often

  translated and incomplete. These contemporaneous accounts can be supple-

  mented by oral histories conducted by sociologists in the 1920s. Even these

  remembrances, which include working- class narrators, are often guarded and

  invariably marked by the passage of time. Imperfect as these sources are, they

  offer rare a glimpse of how Chinese mi grants in the U.S. West gave meaning

  to the vio lence and navigated its effects. Though the vigilantes were fond of

  describing the Chinese as an undifferentiated mass, the diversity of Chinese

  responses reveal they were anything but. Even within the severe constraints

  of their position in society, Chinese mi grants maintained some power to in-

  terpret the vio lence and make individual choices in response.

  At times, these responses took the form of outright re sis tance.4 Indeed,

  Chinese labor contractors and merchants, who had significant financial rea-

  sons to stay put, often attempted to challenge the vigilantes’ authority both

  in real time and after the fact. They did so in part by drawing on multiple

  relationships with local white leaders. Given that charges of “inassimilability”

  and clannishness formed the core of the vigilantes’ expulsion campaign, it

  is ironic that the Chinese response reveals the extent of Chinese integration

 
into the white community. The Chinese businessmen of the Pacific North-

  west were strikingly bilingual and bicultural and, at times of crisis, used all

  the social capital they could muster to prevent expulsion. But their local

  power usually proved inadequate to shield them from vio lence.5

  Chinese businessmen were more successful at containing vio lence when

  they operated on an international scale. On the streets of Seattle, for ex-

  ample, the Chinese appeared defenseless against an armed mob, but their

  pleading tele grams to the Chinese consulate helped summon U.S. troops to

  their aid. While their status as “aliens ineligible to citizenship” was usually

  to their disadvantage, in this circumstance it was a potential source of power.

  As Chinese nationals entitled to treaty rights of a “most favored nation,” the

  Chinese held status claimed by no other racial minority in the United States.

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  By drawing on their transnational connections, Chinese merchant- contractors

  thrust the issue of local anti- Chinese vio lence onto the international stage.

  In so doing, they reinforced their status as aliens in the United States and

  changed the course of Sino- American relations. Geographers have described

  similar strategies as “scale jumping.” 6 The Chinese jumped scales when they

  harnessed resources available on the international level to overcome the con-

  straints encountered on the local level. The Chinese may have been meta-

  phor ically and literally outgunned in their own backyard, but they found

  power on an international stage.

  That said, it is impor tant not to assume that direct re sis tance was the only

  form of Chinese agency.7 While some Chinese elites fought to stay, many

  Chinese workers chose to leave. Like their more privileged countrymen,

  members of the lower classes maintained the ability to make individual

  choices, albeit within tight par ameters. Facing a cascading series of events

  beyond their control, many Chinese workers deci ded that retreating and re-

  grouping elsewhere offered the best hope of finding peace, work, and a

  prosperous future. After all, they were mi grant laborers accustomed to sea-

  sonal work, and they lacked financial stakes in the local community. Having

  crossed the Pacific and traveled inland, they were practiced at using mobility

  as a strategy for survival.

  This chapter recovers stories of Chinese re sis tance and flight in the face

  of white vio lence, but this is not its sole intent. A long and troubling tradi-

  tion exists that renders the history of Chinese in Amer i ca as primarily a

  history of white oppression.8 There are dangers to selectively shining the

  spotlight on moments when Chinese mi grants were objects of white preju-

  dice. Doing so reinforces the biases of the past and threatens to deprive

  the Chinese of their full humanity. While we consider the Chinese reaction

  to racial vio lence, we must also attend to what these spectacular events

  reveal about their everyday lives. Moments of crisis and the unique sources

  they produce can expose aspects of the Chinese American experience that

  usually remain hidden, in this case, critical divisions between workers

  and merchant- contractors. Con temporary observers and historians have de-

  scribed a community tightly bound by vertically or ga nized businesses and

  village kinship networks. The pressure of white vio lence, however, revealed

  and accentuated divergent class interests within a seemingly unified Chinese

  community.9

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  “Like So Many Hogs”

  In Squak Valley, the Chinese were banished on arrival. But as vio lence spread

  in the fall of 1885, it took hold in communities where Chinese were far from

  newcomers. Chinese laborers had worked in the nearby Coal Creek mines

  for several years when, days after the Squak Valley murders, fifteen masked

  white men armed with pistols came to their camp at midnight. A Chinese

  worker, Ching Poy Hing, later reported the shocking scene when men sud-

  denly “kicked the door of the house[,] forced an entrance and took hold of

  him and other Chinese and forced them out of the building.”10 One man

  escaped, running from the house with his clothes in his hands. But others

  were not so lucky, suffering beatings before they fled. In an eerie reprise of

  Squak Valley, once the Chinese stumbled into the dark woods, they looked

  back, seeing all of their possessions go up in flames. If Chinese and white

  miners had built any familiarity over three years of daily labor side by side,

  the darkness, masks, and vio lence suddenly washed it away.

  In nearby Tacoma, the Chinese dated their presence back more than a

  de cade, which was a long time in a port town dominated by recent arrivals.

  Even before the town got its name in the early 1870s, the Chinese had ar-

  rived as railroad and lumber workers. By 1885, when the Chinese made up

  only 2.6 percent of the nonindigenous population in Washington Territory,

  the Chinese represented 9 percent of the population in Tacoma and sur-

  rounding Pierce County (and 12.5 percent of the male population). Though

  some of the Chinese workers lived together in wooden shacks along the bay,

  Chinese businessmen began to buy plots in the center of town. An early

  chronicler of Tacoma bemoaned that “having a Chinese for a neighbor” was

  one of the perils of living in town. Indeed, the Chinese elite in Tacoma were

  not strangers to the white community.11

  In retrospect, it is tempting to see the anti- Chinese vio lence that rocked

  Tacoma as evidence of a wide racial gulf in the community. But Chinese

  testimony, gathered by Territorial Governor Watson Squire after the fact,

  reveals a more complicated story. In the pro cess of detailing the expulsion,

  Tacoma’s Chinese merchant- contractors described their strong ties across the

  color line and attempts to use these connections as a means of contestation.

  Warnings of vio lence to come made retreat and re sis tance pos si ble in

  Tacoma. Kwok Sue, a Chinese merchant- contractor, testified that twenty

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  white men gathered in front of his store in October 1885. The vigilantes de-

  clared that “the Knights of Labor and all the people wanted the Chinamen

  to go,” giving them until November 1 to vacate town. Sue estimated that

  this deadline alone drove out more than two hundred Chinese workers. “The

  reason they were frightened,” explained Sue, “was because the parties who

  notified us to go said if the Chinese did not leave they were going to cut

  their throats, kill them and destroy their property.”12 Hundreds more packed

  up and left town after white employers began to bow to public pressure and

  fire Chinese workers indiscriminately. Stil , threats alone did not clear Tacoma

  of Chinese. The wealthiest Chinese merchants, who had large financial stakes

  in the territory, and the poorest Chinese laborers, who could not easily travel,

  deci ded to stay.

  Sue, like many merchants, did not immediately take flight. When the

  notice to leave arrived, he had lived in the United States for twenty years,

 
resided in Tacoma for twelve, and worked as a merchant and labor con-

  tractor for six. He had painstakingly constructed a life and livelihood in his

  adopted country and hesitated to abandon all that he had built. Instead,

  Sue drew on his many connections to the elite white establishment of Tacoma.

  Seeking advice and protection, he visited a banker, a merchant, and the land

  agent of the Northern Pacific Railway. They all told him, he recounted, that

  “this business is nothing but talk. The government will take care of you. Go

  and behave yourselves, attend to your business and every thing will be allright

  [ sic].” Sue believed them.13

  Another Chinese merchant- contractor in Tacoma, N. W. Gow, sought

  advice more widely. In November 1885, Gow had only been in the city for a

  year, but in that short time, using his excellent En glish and his status as a

  successful businessman, he had already embedded himself in the local com-

  munity. In addition to making business contacts, Gow joined the First Bap-

  tist Church, became a regular attendant at Sunday school, and earned the

  re spect of the local pastor. When he received the notice to vacate, Gow vis-

  ited a local judge to ask if the vigilantes had any legal standing. He was as-

  sured that there was no American law that could compel the Chinese to leave.

  Even so, Gow reached beyond the local community to contact regional

  and international powerbrokers. He first sought help from the Chinese gov-

  ernment, notifying the consulate in San Francisco of growing anti- Chinese

  agitation in Tacoma. He was not the only Chinese merchant to jump scales,

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  calling on faraway diplomats to solve local prob lems. Frederick A. Bee, an

  American lawyer hired to represent the consulate, received multiple reports

  that “evil- disposed” people had threatened vio lence and that “in fact, the

  Chinese are to be expelled from [Washington] Territory.” After relaying the

  news to China, Bee wrote to Governor Squire demanding that local gov-

  ernment stop the mayhem. When Squire pledged that every effort was being

  taken to prevent vio lence, Bee telegraphed Gow to stand his ground.14

  A tele gram alone could not calm Gow’s fears. He traveled to the territo-

  ry’s capital, Olympia, to meet the governor. There, Squire advised Gow and