Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco

by Judy Yung

  One of the advantages for women who immigrated to America was the chance to remove themselves from the rule of the tyrannical motherin-law, the one position that allowed women in China any power. 100 Not only was the daughter-in-law freed from serving her in-laws, but she was also freed of competition for her husband's attention and loyalty and given full control over managing the household. Because of the small number of Chinese women, wives in America were valued and accorded more respect by their men (although there were still incidences of wife abuse). In addition, most Chinese men, because of their low socioeconomic status, could not afford a concubine or mistress, much less a wife. Thus, having a wife was a status symbol to be jealously guarded. Women physicians who attended Chinese wives and children had "much to say of the kindness and indulgence of Chinese husbands, their sympathy and consideration towards their wives in pregnancy and childbirth and their willingness to spend money for pretty clothes for them."101 This same indulgence is also evident in photographs taken in the 18 9 os that show Chinese families in the streets of Chinatown or at the park.'°2

  Wives were also more valued in America because they were essential helpmates in the family's daily struggle for socioeconomic survival. As it was for European immigrants, the family's interest was paramount, and all members worked for its survival and well-being. A Chinese wife's earnings from sewing, washing, or taking in boarders could mean the difference between having pork or just bean paste with rice for dinner, or between life and death for starving relatives back in China. It was also her duty to cook and prepare the Chinese meals and special foods for certain celebrations, to maintain the family altar, to make Chinese clothing and slippers for the family, to raise the children to be "proper Chinese," and to provide a refuge for the husband from the hostile world outside. Thus, even while the family was a site of oppression for Chinese women in terms of the heavy housework and child care responsibilities and possibly wife abuse, it was also a source of empowerment. Wives ran the household and raised the children; they also played an important role in the family economy and in maintaining Chinese culture and family life as a way of resisting cultural onslaughts from the outside.

  As Protestant women gained a foothold in bringing Christianity, Western ideas, and contact with the outside world into Chinatown homes, Chinese wives became more aware of their bound lives. They also be came an important link between the Chinese family and the larger society and an influential factor in the education and socialization of Chinese American children. Convinced that there was little hope of redeeming the Chinese unless the women were converted to Christianity and Americanized, missionary women visited Chinese homes regularly to give lessons on the Bible and American domestic and sanitary practices, often while the women worked-"one woman making paper gods, another overalls, another binding shoes."103 According to one missionary report in 1887, the visiting list was eighty-five families long, including one hundred children, thirty-six "little-footed" women, fifteen "little-footed" girls, and about twenty-eight slave girls.104 Mothers, one observer noted, were particularly interested in having missionaries provide their children with an education:

  The most encouraging features in visiting from house to house in Chinatown are, first, the great love the mothers have for their children, their anxiety to have them learn English, and their pride in the progress made in reading, writing, spelling and singing, and the desire to help the teacher in her work, evidenced by collecting the children to be taught, and scolding them when inattentive or sulky.'Os

  These visits won few converts, but some mothers were persuaded to educate their daughters and discontinue the practice of binding their feet, and a small number of women also began to venture out of the home to attend church functions. Abused wives also found their way to the mission homes. Records of the Presbyterian Mission Home indicate that a number of "runaway wives" came asking for help when they were threatened with being sold, subjected to beatings, or just unhappy with their husbands. In one case, Lan Lee, who had continually been beaten by her husband and threatened with murder, was assisted by the Presbyterian mission in winning a divorce on the grounds of extreme cruelty in 1893.106 Slowly, Chinese women were becoming aware of legal rights in America, rights that European women already knew how to take advantage of.

  UNBOUND LIVES OF EXCEPTIONAL WOMEN

  There were exceptional Chinese women in nineteenthcentury San Francisco who did not live oppressive lives under the control of men or other women. The unbound lives of Maria Seise, Mary Tape, and Lai Yuri Oi, for instance, provide important insight into the possibilities for social change among Chinese immigrant women. All three immigrated as single women on their own, and, in contrast to the restrictive lives of their peers, all three were self-sufficient, exercised freedom of choice, and were to a large extent in control of their own lives.

  Maria Seise was probably the first Chinese woman to immigrate to California (preceding Ah Toy by one year), and she remained selfsupporting throughout her life. She arrived in San Francisco aboard the Eagle with the Charles V. Gillespie household in 1848. Gillespie, an enterprising New York trader, was returning from a stay in Hong Kong with three Chinese servants, two men and Maria Seise. According to the records of Bishop Ingraham of the Trinity Episcopal Church in San Francisco, who baptized her in 1854, Maria Seise ran away from her home in Canton at an early age to avoid being sold into slavery by her parents. Upon arrival in Macao she worked for a Portuguese family, adopting their dress and Roman Catholic faith. She later married a Portuguese sailor, who left on a voyage and never returned. Destitute, she then worked as a servant for an American family and in 1837 went with them to the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii). Upon her return to China six years later she found employment with the Gillespies, accompanying them to San Francisco in 1848. She became, according to the church records,

  a companion [to Mrs. Gillespie,] enjoying her fullest confidence. She has acquired a sufficient knowledge of the English language to enable Mr. Wyatt to instruct and examine her for confirmation and no shadow of doubt as to her preparation and fitness for assuming these responsibilities existed in his mind, or in that of the lady with whom she lived, who knelt at her side to receive the rite at the same time.107

  The two Chinese male servants soon left for the gold fields, but, according to one source, Maria Seise stayed with the Gillespies, who settled on a large tract of land in the vicinity of Chinatown.'08

  Although Chinese men did not hesitate to speak up and use the courts and diplomatic channels to fight discrimination whenever possible, there were not many Chinese women like Ah Toy who had the resourcesEnglish language facility, finances, and adeptness-to do the same on their own behalf. Mary Tape was one of the few. Brought up in an orphanage in Shanghai, she immigrated to America with missionaries at the age of eleven and lived for five years at the Ladies' Relief Society outside Chinatown. She later married Joseph Tape, a Chinese American expressman and interpreter for the Chinese consulate. Mary Tape spoke English and was thoroughly Westernized in dress and lifestyle. Ac cording to a newspaper reporter, she was also a self-taught photographer, artist, and telegrapher, as well as the mother of four musically accomplished children.109 In 18 8 4, when their daughter Mamie Tape was denied entry into the neighborhood school outside Chinatown because "the association of Chinese and white children would be very demoralizing mentally and morally to the latter,"' 10 Mary and Joseph Tape took the Board of Education to court (Tape v. Hurley). The lower court ruled that all children, regardless of race, had the right to a public school education-a ruling that was upheld by the California Supreme Court; but the school district circumvented the ruling by establishing a separate school for Chinese children in Chinatown. Enraged, Mary Tape wrote the board a scathing letter of protest, which read in part:

  I see that you are going to make all sorts of excuses to keep my child out off the Public Schools. Dear sirs, Will you please to tell me! Is it a disgrace to be Born a Chinese? Didn't God make us all!!! What right! have you to ba
r my children out of the school because she is a chinese Descend.... You have expended a lot of the Public money foolishly, all because of a one poor little Child. Her playmates is all Caucasians ever since she could toddle around. If she is good enough to play with them! Then is she not good enough to be in the same room and studie with them? ... It seems no matter how a Chinese may live and dress so long as you know they Chinese. Then they are hated as one. There is not any right or justice for them.... May you Mr. Moulder, never be persecuted like the way you have persecuted little Mamie Tape. Mamie Tape will never attend any of the Chinese schools of your making! Never!!! I will let the world see sir What justice there is When it is govern by the Race prejudice men! 111

  As an outspoken woman able to stand up for her rights, Mary Tape was a rarity among Chinese women in nineteenth-century San Francisco. Fortunate to have had an education, a liberal upbringing, financial resources, and a supportive husband, she was an early example of an emancipated Chinese American woman.

  Like Maria Seise, Ah Toy, and Mary Tape, Lai Yun Oi immigrated as a single woman on her own. Her story is unusual in that she came as a widow in the late r 87os or early 18 8os and was able independently to make her fortune in America even though she spoke no English and had few marketable skills. As her grand-nephew the historian Him Mark Lai recalled her story, Lai Yun Oi was originally from the Nanhai district, where women who were employed in the sericulture industry were more independent than most other women in China. They did not practice footbinding and often followed the shu qi custom of refusing to marry. 112 It was therefore not surprising that Lai Yun Oi chose not to stay at her husband's home and village after he died, which would have been the "proper" thing to do. Instead she went to seek work in Canton and then followed a fellow clansman on his way to New York. She finally decided to settle alone in San Francisco, where she worked as a dai kum (a woman who escorts young brides in the traditional Chinese wedding ceremony), supplementing her income by doing needlework at home and providing hairdressing services to women in Chinatown. Living frugally and investing wisely in businesses in New York and San Francisco, Lai Yun Oi was able to return to Canton, invest in a tailor shop and a few buildings there, and retire comfortably while still in her mid-fifties.113

  My great-grandmother Leong Shee did not come from the same liberal background as Lai Yun Oi; nor was she as educated and influenced by missionary women as Maria Seise or Mary Tape. For Chinese women like her, immigration to America was not a liberating experience; their lives were doubly bound by American and Chinese ideologies that emphasized the inferiority of the Chinese race and the subordination of women, on one hand, and economic conditions that nurtured prostitution and the exploitation of female labor, on the other. But Great-Grandmother, because of her class background, an understanding husband, and a domineering personality, was able to do something about her unhappy circumstances: she chose to leave America and return home with all her children. It was back in China that Great-Grandmother, encouraged by the liberal ideology of the 19 11 Revolution, became an emancipated woman. She unbound her feet, converted to Christianity, and became educated and active in the local Church of Christ. Moreover, she invested her husband's money wisely in property and business ventures, had a two-story house with indoor plumbing built for herself in Macao, purchased four mui tsai to serve her and her family, and lived to the ripe age of ninety-four.

  Even at this early stage of their history, Chinese women were adapting to life in Gold Mountain with mixed results. Although most of them lived bound lives, remaining confined to the domestic sphere and subordinate to men, their important roles as producers (wage earners) and reproducers (childbearers as well as homemakers) in a predominantly male and pervasively racist land elevated their value as scarce commodities and essential helpmates to their men. Others, most notably prostitutes and mui tsai, suffered considerable abuse in America but found new options opened to them, through the assistance of missionary women and what legal rights were available to them at the time. Nonetheless, as in the case of my great-grandmother, it took the additional influence of Chinese nationalism and its inherent feminist ideology, combined with increased economic opportunities and the continued support of Protestant women, before Chinese immigrant women could become "new women" in the modern era of the twentieth century.

  No nation can rise above the level of its home and the key to elevating home-life is to raise the status of women.

  Mrs. E. V. Robbins

  Occidental Board of Foreign Missions, 19oz

  Without educating women, we can't have a strong nation; without women's rights, our nation will remain weak.

  Qiu Jin revolutionary heroine, 19o6

  From the beginning, social change for Chinese women in San Francisco was tied to the nationalist and women's movements in China. This became evident on the afternoon of November z, 1902, when Sieh King King, an eighteen-year-old student from China and an ardent reformer, stood before a Chinatown theater full of men and women and "boldly condemned the slave girl system, raged at the horrors of foot-binding and, with all the vehemence of aroused youth, declared that men and women were equal and should enjoy the privileges of equals."' Her talk and her views on women's rights were inextricably linked with Chinese nationalism and the 1898 Reform Movement, which advocated that China emulate the West and modernize in order to throw off the yoke of foreign domination. Beginning with the Opium War (1839-1842), China had suffered repeated defeats at the hands of Western imperialist powers and been forced to yield to their demands for indemnities and extraterritorial rights. Fearing the further partitioning of China and possibly national extinction, reformers and revolutionaries alike were advocating social, economic, and political changes for their country along the lines of the Western model. Elevating the status of women to the extent that they could become "new women"educated mothers and productive citizens-was part of this nationalist effort to strengthen and defend China against further foreign en- croachment.2

  Sieh King King, whose talk was sponsored by the Baohuanghui (Protect the Emperor Society), a reform party that advocated restoring the deposed emperor and establishing a constitutional monarchy in China, expounded on exactly this point. China was oppressed from within by feudal practices and from without by Western imperialism, she said. The country was weak because for centuries it had bound the feet of women and kept them ignorant, effectively barring them from work and public affairs. The solution, she concluded, lay in establishing schools for the zoo million women in China so that they could develop their intellect, engage in professions, and contribute to the well-being of their families and the prosperity of their country on the same footing as men.3

  Sieh King King's sentiments on women's emancipation actually had roots in China, even before the arrival of Westerners. As early as the seventeenth century, women of the gentry class were becoming educated and asserting themselves as literary talents. Their rising visibility as writers and publishers of their own works sparked controversy, leading male scholars like Mao Qiling, Yuan Mei, Yu Zhengxie, and Li Ruzhen to denounce sexist practices such as footbinding and the double standards of chastity. In the 18 5 os, the Taiping rebels, who sought to liberate China from Manchu rule, abolished footbinding, prostitution, arranged marriages, and polygyny and allowed women to fight in the army, own land, and be educated. But it wasn't until foreign missionaries gained a foothold in China after the Opium War that women's emancipation was advanced through the establishment of anti-footbinding societies and schools for girls, institutions that became an integral part of the modernization platform of the Reform Movement led by Kang Youwei.4

  Although Chinese reformers and Protestant missionaries differed in their ultimate goals-reformers sought national salvation, while Christians sought religious conversion-they shared a common strategy, namely social reform, of which women's emancipation played a central role. While reformers understood that China could not be saved as long as half its population remained underutilized, missionaries saw the
remaking of Chinese women in their image as the key to converting and civilizing all of China. For these reasons, both groups worked for women's emancipation, not only in China, but also in Chinese communities such as San Francisco Chinatown. Their overlapping programs included education and equal rights for women and an end to footbinding, female slavery, and polygyny. Regardless of the reformers' respective motives, Chinese women in both China and the United States directly benefited from their combined efforts, which encouraged them to unbind their feet and their lives, to free themselves of patriarchal oppression.

  Sieh King King herself was an embodiment of feminist ideology stemming from both Western Christianity and Chinese nationalism. A daughter of a liberal-minded merchant, Sieh King King grew up and attended a missionary school in the treaty port of Shanghai, where she and other reformers were heavily influenced by Western contact and ideas. Even before emigrating as a student to the United States, where she hoped to further her education, she had developed a national reputation as a patriot and an orator. According to one newspaper account, in r go i she delivered a stirring speech before thousands of people in Shanghai in which she protested the treaty forced upon the Chinese government that granted Russia special rights in Manchuria.5 Although missionary efforts resulted in few religious conversions, ideas of women's emancipation did capture the imagination of women such as Sieh King King, who argued that an improvement in women's conditions would make for stronger families and ultimately a stronger China. Unlike in the West, in China the argument for improving women's lot was always put in terms of how it would benefit the Chinese race and nation, rather than how it would benefit women as individuals.' Because this line of thinking was in keeping with traditional Chinese thought and practice-that the collective good took precedence over individual needs-it was more effective than Western feminist ideology in gaining wide support for women's emancipation in China as well as in San Francisco Chinatown.