by Judy Yung
souRCE: U.S. Census Bureau publications.
souiicr.: U.S. Census Bureau publications.
SOURCE: My tally from U.S. National Archives, Record Group zg, "Census of U.S. Population" (manuscript), 19oo, 1910, 192 o.
Introduction
i. Sucheng Chan, "Chinese American Entrepreneur: The California Career of Chin Lung," Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1987 (San Francisco, Chinese Historical Society of America), pp. 73-86; Ruthanne Lum McCunn, Chinese American Portraits: Personal Histories, 1828-1988 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1988), pp. 88-97; Jew Law Ying, interview with author, September 7, 1982-, and January 14, 1987; Chin Lung, folder 12-017/38498, and Leong Shee, folder 12017/37232, Chinese Departure Case Files, San Francisco District Office, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 8 5, National Archives, San Bruno, Calif. (hereafter cited as CDCF-SFDO).
z. Law Ying Yung, interview with author, August 15, r 99z; Chin Mee Ngon, folder 1938o/8-6, CDCF-SFDO.
3. Tom Yip Jing, interview with author, April 17, 1977, and November zo, 1986; Yung Hin Sen, folder 12017/51188, CDCF-SFDO. A "paper son" was a person posing as the son of a merchant or U.S. citizen, two of the exempt classes permitted entry to the United States during the Exclusion period (1882-1943).
4. Jew Law Ying, interview with author, January 14, 1987.
5. Important race theories that ignore gender include Robert E. Park's race relations cycle (see Race and Culture [New York: Free Press, 1950]); Robert Blauner's internal colonialism model (see Racial Oppression in America [New York: Harper & Row, 1972-]); and Michael Omi and Howard Winant's theory of racial formation (see Racial Formation in the United States from the 196os to the 198os [New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986]). Important feminist theories that ignore race include Michelle Rosaldo's theory of private/public asymmetry (see "Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview," in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19741, pp. 17-42-); and Heidi Hartmann's Marxist feminist model (see "Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 3 [spring 1976]: 137-70).
6. See Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1198r); bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 11984); and Bettina Aptheker, Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1198z).
7. See Evelyn Nakano Glenn, "Racial Ethnic Women's Labor: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Class Oppression," Review of Radical Political Economics 17, no. 3 (1985): 86-io8.
8. See Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17, no. Z (1992): 2511-73; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 119911); Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill, eds., Women of Color in U.S. Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History (New York: Routledge, 1994); Gloria Anzal- dua, ed., Making Face, Making Soul, Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation, 11990); and Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers, eds., Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude, and Escape (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994).
9. See Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom (New York: Walton Rawls, 1966).
to. In choosing to use the theme of footbinding to frame my study, I do not mean to lend support to the Orientalist obsession with the "victim script" of bound feet, which, as China scholars like Dorothy Ko and Susan Mann rightfully point out, have for too long dominated research on gender relations in Chinese history. Recent research on Chinese women writers and women's work in the household economy before the modern era show all too well that a significant number of women, far from being oppressed victims, did not allow their bound feet to silence their voices or hinder their productive labor. See Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Susan Mann, "Learned Women in the Eighteenth Century," in Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State, ed. Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel, and Christina Gilmartin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. z7-46; and Li Yu-ning, "Historical Roots of Changes in Women's Status in Modern China," in Chinese Women Through Chinese Eyes, ed. Li Yu-ning (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 11992), pp. ioz-zz.
11. For examples of immigration studies that refute the modernization theory that premodern immigrants to America eventually all abandon Old World traditions for new ways, see John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigration in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); and Miriam Cohen, Workshop to Office: Two Generations of Italian Women in New York City, 1900-1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 199z).
i z. Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter (New York: Harper & Bros., 1950).
i. Bound Feet
i. Leong Shee, folder 12017/37232, CDCF-SFDO. According to the immigration file, Leong Shee claimed that she had married Chong Sung in 1885, yet she was seeking admission as the wife of Chin Lung. Immigration officials most likely did not question the discrepancy in her testimony because of her apparent upper-class background: she had bound feet.
z. Jew Law Ying, interview with author, January 14, 1987.
3. For a discussion of Chinese immigration in the context of modern world capitalism, see June Mei, "Socioeconomic Origins of Emigration: Guangdong to California, 1850 to 1882," in Labor Migration Under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States Before World War II, ed. Lucie Cheng Hirata and Edna Bonacich (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), PP. 219-47; Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California, 186o-191o (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), chap. i ("The Chinese Diaspora"); and idem, "European and Asian Immigration into the United States in Comparative Perspective, 18zos to 19zos," in Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics, ed. Virginia Yans- McLaughlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), PP. 37-75.
4. Sing-wu Wang, The Organization of Chinese Emigration, 1848-1888 (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1978), pp. 8-9.
5. See Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, pp. 7-31. For a further discussion of the conditions in the Guangdong Province that led to emigration overseas, see Zo Kil Young, "Chinese Emigration into the United States, 1850-188o" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1971); and Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966).
6. The tendency in the past has been for immigration historians to view Chinese as "sojourners" and Europeans as "immigrants," the implication being that the Chinese, unlike Europeans, did not intend to stay but remained unassimilated and apart from mainstream American society; hence it was justifiable to bar their further immigration and exclude them from American social and political life. Recent scholarship, however, using return migration rates and written sentiments of immigrants, has demonstrated that many Europeans-such as Greeks, Italians, Poles, Danes, Germans, and Slovaks-shared this sojourner attitude. See Franklin Ng, "The Sojourner, Return Migration, and Immigration History," Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1987, PP. 53-71; and Chan, "European and Asian Immigration," pp. 38-39.
7. Charles Caldwell Dobie, San Francisco's Chinatown (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1936), p. 41.
8. My calculations are based on statistics given in Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration (New York: Henry Holt, 19o9), pp. 50Z, 498.
9. Lai Chun-chuen, Remarks of the Chinese Merchants of San Francisco upon Governor John Bigler'sMessage and Some Common Objectives, with Some Explanations of the Character of the Chinese Companies and the L
aboring Class in California (San Francisco: Office of the Oriental, Whitton, Town & Co., 1855), P. 3.
1o. New scholarship on women's prescribed roles in traditional China has thrown into question whether these precepts do not more readily reflect the idealized social order rather than the reality of women's lives. Daughters of the gentry class were often educated by private tutors and some were thus able to distinguish themselves in the literary world. As Dorothy Ko's study of women writers in the late imperial period shows, for this group of literate women talent and virtue were compatible and, in fact, mutually reinforcing. It was precisely because women's literary talents gave them visibility and a powerful new voice that maxims such as "absence of talent in a woman is a virtue" gained popularity. See Ko, "Pursuing Talent and Virtue: Education and Women's Culture in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century China," Late Imperial China 13, no. i (June 1992): 9-39; and Li Yu-ning, "Historical Roots of Changes."
i i. See Kay Ann Johnson, Women, the Family, and Peasant Revolution in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), chap. 1; and Elizabeth Croll, Familism and Socialism in China (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), chap. z.
iz. Croll, Feminism and Socialism in China, p. 17; Arthur Smith, Village Life in China: A Study in Sociology (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1899), pp. 275-76; Daniel Harrison Kulp, Country Life in South China: The Sociology of Familism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), pp. 89-90, 252; Holmes Beckwith, "The Chinese Family, with Special Relation to Industry" (Master's thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1909), pp. 103-5; and Rubie S. Watson, "Girls' Houses and Working Women: Expressive Culture in the Pearl River Delta, 1900-1941," in Jaschok and Miers, eds., Women and Chinese Patriarchy, pp. z5-29.
13. See Marjorie Topley, "Marriage Resistance in Rural Kwangtung," in Women in Chinese Society, ed. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 67-88; Andrea Patrice Sankar, "The Evolution of the Sisterhood in Traditional Chinese Society: From Village Girls' Houses to Chai T'angs in Hong Kong" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1978); Janice Stockard, Daughters of the Canton Delta: Marriage Patterns and Economic Strategies in South China, 1860-1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); and Kenneth Gaw, Superior Servants: The Legendary Cantonese Amahs of the Far East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988 ).
14. See Ludwig J. Young, "The Emancipation of Women in China Before 19zo, with Special Reference to Kwangtung" (Master's thesis, Columbia University, 1965).
15. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), pp. 1-16.
16. Marlon K. Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), P. 46.
IT I am grateful to Zhao Shaoping of Xinhui District, Guangdong Province, for sharing this folk song with me.
18. Compared to Chinese and Italian women, Jewish, Polish, and Irish women were less inhibited about leaving home and emigrating to a new country. See Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 198 5); Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buf- falo,188o-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971); Dino Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco: The Immigrant Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 11982); Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 11990); Hasia R. Diner, Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); and Doris Weatherford, Foreign and Female: Immigrant Women in America, 1840-1930 (New York: Schocken Books, 1986).
19. For an analysis of why more Chinese women immigrated to Hawaii than to California and why more Japanese women emigrated than Chinese women, see Ronald Takaki, "They Also Came: The Migration of Chinese and Japanese Women to Hawaii and the Continental United States," Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1990, PP. 3-19.
zo. During the 18 50s Chinese residents and businesses were located in different parts of the city, with a small settlement around Sacramento Street. By the 1187os Chinatown had become a segregated ethnic enclave, six blocks long (between California and Broadway Streets) by two blocks wide (between Stockton and Kearny Streets). See Thomas W. Chinn, ed., A History of the Chinese in Calijbrnia:A Syllabus (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1969), pp. so-i s; and Otis Gibson, The Chinese in America (Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1877), pp. 63-94. For a fuller discussion of institutional racism and Chinese resistance, see Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 11991), chap. 3; and Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle Against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).
zi. See Chan, Asian Americans, chap. 3; and Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), chap. io.
zz. For a discussion of how immigration laws and policies in the United States shaped Chinese American family life and community development, see Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy, 1850-1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
z3. My calculations are based on statistics provided in S. W. Kung, Chinese in American Life: Some Aspects of Their History, Status, Problems, and Contributions (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), PP. 33, 92-93; Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, p. 98; and Helen Chen, "Chinese Immigration into the United States: An Analysis of Changes in Immigration Policies" (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1980), pp. 176-91.
z4. In re Ah Quan, zi Federal Reporter i82 (1884); and Case of the Chinese Wife, z1 Federal Reporter 785 (1884). For a discussion of these and other significant cases relating to the exclusion of Chinese women, see Sucheng Chan, "The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870-11943," in Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943, ed. Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), PP. 94-146.
25. In re Chung Toy Ho and Wong Choy Sin, 4z Federal Reporter 398 (1890). See also United States v. Gue Lim, 88 Federal Reporter 1136 (1897).
z6. I am indebted to Waverly Lowell, director of the San Francisco District Office, Immigration and Naturalization Service, for this quote from the CDCF- SFDO files. The San Francisco Call made a similar observation on November 23, 1895, in a story about Customs detaining seven Chinese women at the Presbyterian Mission Home on suspicion of fraudulent entry: "The size of the foot is an important factor in determining the character of the women of China, and none of the ladies in Miss Houseworth's charge have the diminutive feet which are said to distinguish the ladies of the higher class" (p. 7).
27. See Weatherford, Foreign and Female; and Maxine Schwartz Seller, Immigrant Women (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981).
z8. See Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars.
29. See Maxine Schwartz Seller, To Seek America: A History of Ethnic Life in the United States(Englewood, N.J.: J. S. Ozer, 1977), pp. 127-30; S. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl; and Diner, Erin's Daughters in America.
30. See Paul Ong, "Chinese Labor in Early San Francisco: Racial Segmentation and Industrial Expansion," Amerasia journal 8, no. i (spring/summer 1981): 69-92.
31. See Jacqueline Baker Barnhart, The Fair but Frail: Prostitution in San Francisco, 1849-1900 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1986), chap. 5; and R. A. Burchell, The San Francisco Irish, 1848-1880 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), pp. 17-18. According to Mary Lou Locke in "Out of the Shadows and into the Western Sun: Working Women of the Late NineteenthCentury Urban Far West," Journal of Urban History 16, no. 2 (February 1990): 178, only 6 percent of the young female workers in San Francisco worked in factories in 188o.
3 z. "Condition of the Chinese Quarter," San Francisco Municipal Reports for the Fiscal Year 1884-85, Ending
June 30, 1885 (San Francisco: Board of Supervisors, 1885), p. z16.
33. Lucie Cheng Hirata, "Chinese Immigrant Women in Nineteenth-Century California," in Women of America: A History, ed. C. R. Berkin and M. B. Norton (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1979), PP. 236, 239-40; and Ruth Hall Whitfield, "Public Opinion and the Chinese Question in San Francisco, 19001947" (Master's thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1947), p. 7. Moreover, as pointed out in William Issel and Robert Cherny, San Francisco, 1865-193 2: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 70-73, manufacturers often paid Chinese workers less than white workers for doing the same tasks.
34. Herbert Ashbury, The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underground (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 19 3 3), PP. 3 2-3 5. Ashbury noted that within a few years of the gold rush, "San Francisco possessed a red-light district that was larger than those of many cities several times its size," and "there was no country in the world that was not represented in San Francisco by at least one prostitute" (p. 34). Like many other journalistic accounts of the heyday of prostitution in San Francisco, Ashbury's book is suspect and needs to be used judiciously in the absence of writings by Chinese prostitutes themselves.
3 5. Albert Benard de Russailh, Last Adventure, San Francisco in 1851 (San Francisco: Westgate, 1931), pp. 29, 11.
36. Barnhart, Fair but Frail, p. 6o. For other studies on prostitution in the West, see Anne Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitution in the American West, 1865-9o (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); and Brenda Elaine Pillors, "The Criminalization of Prostitution in the United States: The Case of San Francisco, 1854-1919 (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1982).