twentieth century, some Chinese lived in hyper- segregated urban enclaves
while others were scattered across agricultural California and the eastern
United States. In 1880, the U.S. West was home to 99 percent of the Chinese
population, but by 1900, the figure had dropped to 75 percent.75 Though
Oregon and Washington saw a slight increase in Chinese population, the
western states of California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Utah
saw a significant decrease by 1900. Some Chinese mi grants left the country,
while others went east. New York, Illinois, Mas sa chu setts, Pennsylvania, and
New Jersey saw the most dramatic growth in the 1890s.76 For the Chinese,
there was safety to be found in large numbers or in near- isolation, which
explains why the Chinese in the United States emerged from the nineteenth
century more isolated and segregated than they had ever been before.77
All of the displaced Chinese were survivors, but not all of them had sur-
vived the same ordeal. Anti- Chinese expulsions could be sudden and bloody
events, or slow and prolonged campaigns. At times, force was applied. At
other times, it was only threatened, and sometimes in highly subtle ways.
Indeed, there could be vast differences among individuals’ experiences, not
to mention in their interpretations of them. These interpretations have barely
left traces in the historical rec ord; few survivors found occasion to speak of
expulsion, and seldom were their words saved for posterity.78 If Chinese mi-
AFTERLIVES UNDER EXCLUSION
225
grants ever constructed a vernacular history of this vio lence through verbal
storytelling, it has been all but lost. What can be gleaned from the little that
remains?
There is no question that expulsion represented a moment of rupture in
the lives of Chinese. Rupture was not new to these mi grants— they had al-
ready uprooted themselves to cross an ocean and remake their lives in a new
world— but in the aftermath of vio lence, they were once again uprooted, this
time against their will. As they fled their newfound homes, the Chinese suf-
fered substantive losses: the deaths of their countrymen, termination of
work, and destruction of property. As they rebuilt, they also mourned more
intangible casualties: a sense of security, the familiarity of routine, and
the confidence that came with community. In short, they suffered losses of
life, liberty, and happiness.79
Though the vigilantes did not distinguish by sex, the vio lence still had
gendered effects. Men suffered the brunt of the expulsions, because they con-
stituted the vast majority of Chinese in the U.S. West, but women suffered
collateral damage. As husbands were driven from work, wives in Amer ica
and China temporarily lost their source of support. And when husbands
died, wives lost their life partners, the fathers of their children, and often,
their primary means of sustenance. In Seattle, the wife of Chin Gee Hee
lost her pregnancy. For both men and women, the destructive force of ex-
pulsion was not momentary; past terrors had lasting effects on bodies and
souls. In Amer ica, survivors carried these physical and psychological scars
of vio lence with them as they navigated white society every day.
On the most basic level, becoming a survivor meant contemplating death.
Anti- Chinese vio lence in the U.S. West put the Chinese on alarmingly
intimate terms with their own mortality. Far from the land of their ancestors,
the Chinese faced the possibility of a solitary death without mourners, and
a restless afterlife without honor. According to Guangdong tradition, burial
in one’s native place and proper rituals of death were needed to transform
the deceased into an ancestor. Denied these rites, the dead would become
wandering ghosts, unfed, unclothed, and unable to bring good fortune to
their descendants. Mindful of this dreaded limbo and its effects on future
generations, Chinese mi grants in the United States bought into mutual aid
organ izations that promised to repatriate their bones and facilitate secondary
burial in their native place. The anti- Chinese massacres of the mid-1880s
226 EXCLUSION
fueled fears of destroyed or forgotten bones. Even brief moments of vio-
lence left the Chinese haunted by the possibility of an eternity spent adrift.
After death as well as in life, the Chinese faced a precarious existence.80
It was all too easy for Chinese mi grants to imagine a restless afterlife given
their daily familiarity with rootlessness. Ceaseless wandering is the central
theme in a rare anthology of Cantonese folk rhymes first published in 1911
by a Chinese bookseller in San Francisco. In one poem, the anonymous
writer describes himself as “a brave man meeting an untimely adversity / All
day long, unable to eat or sleep / Rushing about over ten thousand miles, / deep
in sorrow. / Every hour, every minute, mind and body toil in pain.” An-
other bemoaned his “pitiful” life as a “sojourner” who is “Unable to make
it home. / Having been everywhere— north, south, east and west— / Al-
ways obstacles along the way, pain knitting my brows. / Worried, in si-
lence. / Ashamed, wishes unfulfilled.” It was not the choice to migrate that
rendered the Chinese homeless, since the pro cess of migration contained the
possibility of finding a new home. Rather, it was the experiences of expul-
sion and exclusion that set them adrift, stripping them of agency over their
own settlement or return.81
Though their plight was shaped by forces beyond their control, few Chi-
nese escaped the sense of personal failure. For banished Chinese, injuries
wrought by expulsion, exclusion, and imperialism were inseparable, and gen-
erated cumulative feelings of shame. In a poem titled “Expulsion of the
Immigrants,” Huang Zunxian, a Chinese consul- general at San Francisco
from 1882 to 1885, describes the multiple and tangled degradations to which
the Chinese were subjected.
If a nation does not care for its people,
They are like sparrows shot in a bush
If the earth’s four corners won’t accept them,
Wandering in exile, where can they rest?. . . .
Grave, dignified, I arrive with my dragon banners,
Knock on the custom’s gate, hesitant, doubtful.
Even if we emptied the water of four oceans,
It would be hard to wash this shame clean.82
In a few short lines, Huang alludes to fallen China, the banished Chinese,
and the threat of border control (even to a diplomat like himself). Together,
AFTERLIVES UNDER EXCLUSION
227
these humiliations meant a loss of face, for the individual, the nation, and
the race. “Men are no longer regarded as men [ here],” Huang wrote in an-
other poem, “mauled like a subhuman species. / In this vast and desolate
world / where can they find a foothold?”83
Chinese reflections on this trauma, whether in the form of testimony or
poetry, seldom reflected anger, rage, or desire for retribution. Lum May’s wife
is a rare exception. When May, a Tacoma merchant, testified before Gov-
ernor Squire in Washingt
on Territory, he claimed his wife as an unquantifi-
able loss. “From the excitement, the fright and the losses we sustained through
the riot [my wife] lost her reason, and has ever since been hopelessly insane,”
he stated. “She threatened to kill people with a hatchet or any other weapon
she can get hold of.” Another merchant, Kwok Sue, also testified to the
woman’s previous sanity and current “homicidal mania.” A local white doctor
corroborated the merchants’ testimony, offering his expert opinion that her
“pres ent insanity is due to the experiences there had by her when driven out
of Tacoma.”84 The woman herself was never named and did not testify. Per-
haps she was declared insane for expressing a dangerously unfeminine sen-
timent: a desire to murder those who took her home from her. Or maybe
she truly had lost all reason. In any case, she was the sole voice of anger to
emerge from Chinese testimony in Washington Territory, albeit one filtered
through the words of others. The merchants, standing before U.S. officials,
thought better of expressing any fury they may have felt. No doubt there
was much that was left unspoken.
As the Chinese experienced mass displacement in the late nineteenth
century, they also had to navigate the legal and social terrain of exclusion at
the nation’s territorial borders and, increasingly, in its interior. The Chinese
had long been marked by assumptions of racial difference; now they were
marked by assumptions of illegality as well. The result was not a uniformly
precarious experience, but one divided by class, gender, legal status, and date
of entry. In practice, exclusion and its enforcement produced five distinct
social categories of alienage.85
Three were forms of illegality. There were the undocumented who had sur-
reptitiously crossed into the United States undetected. These mi grants paid
smugglers to ferry them across the border, but inside the country, they lived
in danger of being discovered without papers. There were the fraudulently
documented who had entered the country through legal channels but with
the help of fraudulent immigration documents. These mi grants had falsely
228 EXCLUSION
claimed an exempt status, likely that of a merchant or returning resident.
There were also fraudulent citizens who entered the country fraudulently
claiming U.S. citizenship. Though Chinese aliens were ineligible for natu-
ralization by virtue of race, they could be U.S. citizens by virtue of birthplace
or parentage. Fraudulent citizens, known as “paper sons and daughters,” had
managed to buy a false genealogy and with it the privileges of U.S. citizen-
ship, including unfettered entry. Of these three groups of unauthorized mi-
grants, only the undocumented were unambiguously situated outside the
bound aries of legal and social legitimacy. But all were in danger of being
found out.86
The remaining Chinese population occupied two legal but still unenvi-
able positions within the nation. First were legal Chinese residents who had
no path to citizenship. They had entered the nation lawfully, but would re-
main in defi nitely “aliens ineligible to citizenship” due to racial prerequisites
for naturalization. Most of these permanent aliens were old- timers who had
first entered the United States before 1882, or elites, exempted by their status
as merchants, students, diplomats, or wives of these exempt classes. All
Chinese legal residents were denied the rights and privileges of citizenship,
chief among them the right to vote, the right to remain in the country, and,
in some western states, the right to own land. Despite their legal status, these
permanent aliens could be deported for alleged prostitution, criminal of-
fenses, or inconsistent papers.87 Fi nally, there was the small but rapidly
growing group of Chinese Americans who were natural- born U.S. citizens,
as recognized by the Fourteenth Amendment and confirmed by the 1898
Supreme Court ruling U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark. Although these citizens were
legally recognized by the state, they were “alien citizens” who were pre-
sumed to be foreign based solely on their race. After years of restriction,
exclusion, and bars on naturalization, being Chinese had come to connote
alienage. In the eyes of most white Americans, including some state officials,
Chinese Americans, even those born in the United States, remained forever
alien.88
Whether at Amer ica’s borders or within them, all Chinese and Chinese
Americans faced the danger of being presumed to be illegal. This made them
vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by conmen, employers, and state offi-
cials. Any Chinese person with questionable legal status risked being extorted
(by white and Chinese alike), exposed to inhumane labor practices (with little
AFTERLIVES UNDER EXCLUSION
229
hope of redress), and subjected to immigration raids (seemingly at random).
These risks were not confined to the territorial border.89
One of the least recognized hazards of exclusion was the proliferation of
smuggling. As state officials tightened their grip on the border, Chinese mi-
grants increasingly made the risky choice to hire smugglers. U.S. customs
officials were deeply concerned that smugglers were “utterly without
princi ple.” In 1887, Special Agent Herbert Beecher reported fears that “at
several times while being closely chased by the [U.S.] Revenue Cutter, these
men have deliberately killed and thrown over board their cargo of humanity.”
Writing to the Imperial Court in 1889, Chinese Minister Zhang Yinhuan
agreed that smuggling had made Chinese workers more susceptible to vio-
lence. “Some malevolent foreigners conspired with local Chinese to estab-
lish migration agencies in Hong Kong,” he explained, “They delivered at least
five thousand people every year and [their] annual income is over 500,000
[ yuan]. They share the profit with Chinese gangs in San Francisco.” Ac-
cording to Zhang, the mi grants rarely understood U.S. exclusion policies,
and traffickers made no effort to educate them. “The dealers do not care at
all whether the Chinese workers they shipped to Amer ica may get a job, be
expelled or burned,” he complained, “Neither are they concerned about those
workers’ well- being or whether they might commit suicide.”90 Though
the history of unauthorized Chinese migration is often remembered as
individual acts of re sis tance, the increase in human trafficking challenges
this narrative.91 Exclusion further stripped Chinese workers of the power to
plot their own journey, rendering them deeply vulnerable to inhumane
treatment by smugglers. In yet another arena, exclusion and vio lence con-
tinued to walk hand in hand.92
It should come as little surprise that, lacking security in their surround-
ings and status, many Chinese mi grants remained detached from their new
place of residence. Though the Chinese continued to come to Amer ica and
live there, they became reflexively self- protective, deploying strategies of co-
ethnic solidarity when in Chinatown and self- reliance when in isolation. In
search of safety and dignity, Chinese mi grants in the United States main-
tained distinct and parallel structures of community, communication, busi-
ness, medicine, and justice. Though they participated in the mainstream
economy and society, they also fashioned alternative ways to save and send
money, print and disseminate information, produce and administer medicine,
230 EXCLUSION
Ross Alley in San Francisco, California (1898) by Arnold Genthe. Seeking safety and
community, some Chinese mi grants sought out ethnic enclaves like San Francisco’s
Chinatown. Arnold Genthe Collection Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
Division, Washington, D.C., LC- USZC4–3890.
open and maintain businesses, and punish criminals. Those who moved far
from Chinese enclaves often entered niche industries, such as hand laundries
and Chinese restaurants, rather than directly participating in the mainstream
job market.93 These survival strategies were not new— they were common to
the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, Australia, and South Amer ica— but
exclusion and expulsion help explain their per sis tence in Amer ica.94
Still, many Chinese discovered small spaces of racial toleration and, within
them, the opportunity to recover from the scourge of vio lence.95 In 1924,
when scholars asked Chinese respondents to reflect on race relations in the
United States, they recounted a variegated color line. Woo Gen, who had
opened a cigar factory in Seattle before the vio lence of 1886, testified that he
successfully resisted expulsion with the help of a gun and an axe. Once the
chaos ended and the dust settled, he found that he could no longer sell his
cigars. Chinese truck gardeners, he remembered, also had “trou ble selling to
white men.” The vio lence had rewritten the racial rules of business, re-
AFTERLIVES UNDER EXCLUSION
231
quiring him to learn new codes of conduct by trial and error. In the end, he
found it pos si ble to open a laundry in Seattle. This was a step down from
his previous trade, but still an ave nue toward financial in de pen dence.96
Another Chinese merchant, Chin Cheung, who arrived in Seattle after
the vio lence, also described a fine- grained color line. When the interviewer
inquired about discrimination in shops and restaurants, Chin denied having
The Chinese Must Go Page 33