Cooks, Merchants, Workers, and Role Reversals
Modern accounts of the Chinese American food story sometimes portray the first Guangdong-born Gold Rushers as culinary dimwits marooned in California almost without, as one unwittingly sexist description has it, “a woman in the kitchen to show them how things were done.”1 This version of the saga often goes on to explain that the fare served to Americans in Chinese restaurants until the late twentieth century was a clumsy, half-accidental makeshift cobbled together out of substitutes for unavailable Chinese ingredients.2 Both ideas are long overdue for correction.
In fact, the assumption that only women would have known their way around a Chinese kitchen is an ignorant cultural bias. No immigrants have ever arrived in the United States with better skills and resources for re-creating their own cuisine than the men who set out from the Pearl River Delta for “Gold Mountain” (the American West) in and after 1849. As for the hybridized American-Chinese cuisine that (beginning at the end of the century) would supply images of Chinese food to the nation at large for close to a century, I later show that it was a cleverly judged construct founded on Cantonese experience in cooking to please Westerners—something that people had been doing along the Pearl River Delta long before a building contractor noticed something shiny in the stream at Sutter’s Mill.
Surviving descriptions indicate that the first eateries founded by Chinese immigrants in San Francisco had a high degree of professional polish and sophistication. There is every reason that they should have. In the first place, restaurant food carefully prepared for well-defined clienteles has had a conspicuous role in Chinese civilization for many centuries. This cannot be said of all world cultures. (Until about the last sixty years, Brahmin society in India was hedged about with so many ritual prohibitions as to exclude the idea of food or drink even touched by the wrong hands, much less prepared from start to finish by strangers outside the home.) Cookshops, taverns, and restaurants of various kinds had existed in China since at least the tenth or eleventh century AD, perhaps still earlier. They were skillfully tailored to different classes of patrons, from workingmen grabbing a bowl of noodles at a humble street stall to wealthy merchants for whom trained professional cooks could produce something like scaled-down versions of the banquet fare prepared by the staffs of the imperial court kitchens.
The first great Chinese flowering of a diversified consumer culture took place during the Song dynasty. It grew up initially at the northern Song capital of Kaifeng on the Yellow River (AD 960–1126) and then, after Kaifeng’s surrender to invaders from Mongolia, at Hangzhou south of the Yangzi (1127–1279). Observers in twelfth-century Kaifeng and thirteenth-century Hangzhou have left elaborate descriptions of the two cities’ numberless eating houses and rich culinary life. Many details are corroborated by Marco Polo, who reached Hangzhou several decades after it too had fallen to the Mongols. But none of the Chinese accounts has been translated into any Western language. The snippets from a few that the French scholar Jacques Gernet cites in his study of Hangzhou’s golden age afford tantalizing glimpses into a restaurant scene already at a high pitch of development. Huge numbers of flourishing establishments offered both food and wine, sometimes along with sex, to many differentiated clienteles. They were staffed by professional cooks of whom the great majority were men, though some restaurants are known to have had women cooks. All were attuned to their particular segments of a vast and diverse market.3
“The people of Hangchow are very difficult to please,” commented Wu Zimu in Meng liang lu (Dreaming of the city of abundance), describing a class of large restaurants with flower-decked archways and a choice of seating arrangements:
Hundreds of orders are given on all sides: this person wants something hot, another something cold, a third something tepid, a fourth something chilled: one wants cooked food, another raw, another chooses roast, another grill. The orders, given in a loud voice, are all different, sometimes three different ones at the same table. Having received the orders, the waiter goes to the kitchen and sings out the orders, starting with the first one. The man who replies from the kitchen is called the Head Dishwarmer, or the Table-setter. When the waiter has come to the end of his list, he takes his tray to the stove and then goes off to serve each customer with the dish ordered. He never mixes them up, and if by any unlikely chance he should make a mistake, the proprietor will launch into a volley of oaths addressed to the offending waiter, will straightaway make him stop serving, and may even dismiss him altogether.4
Nothing of comparable pizzazz and efficiency would exist in France, or anywhere else in Europe, for another half-millennium. Other contemporary sources mentioned by both Gernet and Michael Freeman (in an essay on Song dynasty food) make clear that terms like “hot,” “cold,” “roast,” or “grill” don’t begin to suggest the richness of the cuisine. Hangzhou, in particular, commanded an infinite wealth of fruits and vegetables, fish, shellfish, meats, and game prepared by still more methods than those mentioned in chapter 2. There were numberless dishes based on wheat (noodles, “ravioli,” “pies,” and various flatbreads or “cakes”); many different strains of rice were prized by knowledgeable cooks and eaters for special qualities.5 No body of cooks has ever had an audience better qualified to appraise culinary refinements, from short-order noodle-making skills to prowess at elaborate trompe l’oeil fantasies.
Strange though it may sound, the food that would be served six hundred years later at Chinese restaurants in early San Francisco is much more poorly documented than these Song-era achievements. The explanation is simple enough: local Chinese cooks and restaurateurs themselves had no reason to record it. The only people who produced written accounts were American or European customers almost completely unable to decipher what they were eating.
Of course, the people writing about Song dynasty cuisine at its height had been a class of cognoscenti rather than the cooks and restaurateurs who dished up actual meals. Any gastronomic cognoscenti who may have existed in gold-crazed California were supremely unqualified to appraise Chinese cuisine. The parties to East–West restaurant transactions during this era had as much grasp of each other’s culinary terminology as deaf people and blind people trying to decipher each other’s words for colors and sounds. But as already noted, the Chinese on their part had already acquired some kind of practical insight into Western preferences that made any formal terminology unnecessary.
By the time the first groups of Chinese disembarked amid the jerrybuilt beginnings of San Francisco, residents of the southeastern provinces already had a cannier xiang banfa sense of what it took to organize and outfit expeditions to distant regions than nearly anyone from the eastern United States. Most of the necessary expertise belonged to the hua shang, meaning the merchants and variously specialized commercial operators who knew how to make things happen in defiance of inconvenient Qing dynasty imperial policies. Until the Gold Rush, their main overseas theater of action had been what they considered their rightful backyard: the many bailiwicks of the Nanyang, or Southeast Asia.6 In China proper, merchantry was at least officially regarded as a debased occupation by comparison with three higher-ranked callings: mandarin scholar-bureaucrat, tiller of the soil, and skilled artisan. Shackled by irksome imperial restrictions at home, would-be moneymakers enjoyed comparative freedom in different corners of the Nanyang. Their activities there would have tremendous importance for both China and (later) the Western powers. Food-related activities were especially crucial.
As early as the Song dynasty, southeastern Chinese had become acquainted with a quick-maturing strain of rice native to Champa on the central coast of today’s Vietnam. Soon they were planting this double-cropping variety (more notable for yield than quality) on a large enough scale to revolutionize Chinese agriculture.7 In the nineteenth century, when even Champa rice proved unable to keep up with the needs of a rampantly increasing population, Chinese growers and brokers penetrated the rice business in Burma, Vietnam, and other areas of the Nanyang. Late in the century, as rice milled and polished to perfect whiteness by Western-devised machinery became the worldwide industry standard, Chinese entrepreneurs would manage first to buy and then to copy and manufacture milling equipment successfully enough to monopolize rice processing and exporting in Thailand for several generations. They set up sugar mills in the Philippines. In other parts of the region, Chinese had achieved firm control of local enterprises ranging from trade in dried fish and shellfish, bird’s nests, and the creatures known as “sea cucumbers” or “bêche-de-mer” to sugar refining and pepper growing in, respectively, Thailand and Borneo. They dominated many other trades.8 In fact, the scope of Chinese activities throughout the Nanyang would dwarf any traffic between China and the United States for a long time to come. It would also incidentally fuel regional anti-Chinese resentments that would be fully unleashed after the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s.
Meanwhile, Gold Rush–era sojourners directly benefited from earlier Chinese experiences in the Nanyang. The hua shang had long expertise as protean contrivers outfitting parties of Chinese headed for overseas settlements. As the Western colonial powers boldly expanded their Far Eastern sway, the hua shang also acquired immense practical know-how as labor brokers and bosses dispatching hua gong, or Chinese manpower, on a large scale to British and European plantations everywhere in the Nanyang. Suitable provisions were automatically factored into the planning and would continue to be so when fortune seekers set out for the fabled riches of America.
But America wasn’t the Nanyang. Neither were Australia and Canada, the sites of other gold fields. All three had already managed to sweep sparse populations of aborigines out of the way and define themselves as societies of white English-speaking transplants. In all three, it would be only a few years before government-backed Sinophobia and some of the most blatantly racist initiatives in the history of Western labor movements confronted new arrivals from southern Guangdong.
The Pearl River Delta Chinese in America would also experience unforeseen rearrangements of traditional Confucian social rankings. Though laboring men were the descendants of the Chinese peasantry, a class regarded as a peculiarly honorable part of the kingdom’s Confucian moral foundations, they would find themselves more defenseless than anyone else against future white campaigns to harass and expel the “inferior” race. The merchants and facilitators, who in their homeland were looked down on by the mandarins as mere moneygrubbers, would not only be exempted from American laws meant to exclude unskilled labor but would to some extent stand as protectors of the hua gong as well as the lifeline that kept laborers in touch with families back in Toisan and the rest of the southern Guangdong counties. It was also the hua shang who, through thick and thin, would maintain the flow of Chinese cooking necessities and other supplies from the motherland to the overseas Chinese community—eventually to Chinatowns in nearly every one of the United States, but initially to San Francisco’s “Little China” and the California mining camps. A network of supply lines from Little China into prospecting territory quickly materialized.9 Wherever Chinese miners arrived, Chinese cooking ingredients like preserved duck and fermented vegetables also arrived at some hole-in-corner shop run by a Chinese—or sometimes by an American. Prentice Mulford, who prospected during the 1850s, related in 1873:
The Chinese grocery stores are museums to the American. There are strange dried roots, strange dried fish, strange dried land and marine plants, ducks and chickens, split, pressed thin and smoked; dried shellfish; cakes newly made, yellow, glutinous and fatty, stamped with tea-box characters; and great earthen jars filled with rottenness. I speak correctly if perhaps too forcibly, for when those imposing jars are opened to serve a customer with some manner of vegetable cut in long strips, the native-born American finds it expedient to hold his nose. American storekeepers in the mines deal largely in Chinese goods. They know the Mongolian names of the articles inquired for, but of their character, their composition, how they are cooked or how eaten, they can give no information. It is heathenish “truck,” by whose sale they make a profit. Only that and nothing more.10
The news of strange discoveries at Sutter’s Mill began circulating in February of 1848 and had spread as far as the ports of Valparaíso and Honololu by summer. The story must have reached Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta before autumn. No detailed records and statistics survive to tell us just when parties of Chinese started embarking from Hong Kong. But it does not appear that they were exclusively filled with treasure-crazed “Argonauts,” the popular label for hopeful prospectors. All signs suggest that many, perhaps most, of the first Chinese Forty-Niners were businessmen who arrived with solid plans for profiting from the future needs of a more sizable Chinese laboring contingent and the immediate needs of everybody else.
For instance, the well-known lack of building materials anywhere near the sandy, scrubby environs of San Francisco inspired the Chinese hua shang not only to dispatch bricks and marble slabs across the Pacific (both attested in 1849 Hong Kong shipping records) but to design prefabricated wooden houses in either Western or Chinese styles. Entrepreneurs everywhere from New York to England and Europe were sending their own versions of prefabs, but as the French journalist Étienne Derbec reported in 1850, Chinese models, shipped in panels, were “the prettiest, the best made, and the cheapest; it is possible to have one for fifty or sixty dollars.”11 Guangzhou and Hong Kong carpenters were also busy building chairs and other household furniture for Americans. Additionally, the merchants had foreseen a market for such mementos as ivory fans, embroidered silk shawls, tortoiseshell combs, and parasols, to be bought for white Argonauts’ sweethearts or families back East.12 And they had come prepared to set up restaurants.
The swashbuckling New-York Tribune correspondent Bayard Taylor, who visited San Francisco several times between August and late December of 1849, noted three Chinese eateries named “Kong-Sung’s,” “Whang-Tong’s,” and “Tong-Ling’s.” They were, he observed, “much frequented by Americans on account of their excellent cookery, and the fact that meals are $1 each, without regard to quantity.”13 As we have seen, the art of pleasing Western palates was at least a century old in the Pearl River Delta and had been further cultivated in Hong Kong. There is nothing surprising about its rapid transfer to Gold Mountain.
November 19 saw an important meeting at a place unmentioned by Taylor, the Canton Restaurant on Jackson Street. As reported in the Daily Alta California on December 10, “some three hundred representatives of the Celestial Empire” had gathered to draft a resolution petitioning a popular local figure, Selim E. Woodworth, to act as “arbitrator and adviser” to the Chinese community—“strangers as we are, in a strange land,” who might in future “be at a loss as to what course of action might be necessary for us to pursue.”14
This episode points to the sort of organizational skills that “Celestials” had already honed in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta. The attendance on November 19 may have represented more than a third of California’s total Chinese population.15 The resolution, with its excellent English and deft scriptural allusion (Exodus 2:22), sounds like the work of someone already practiced at reading British or Yankee mentalities. Equally apt was the choice of local advocate. Woodworth, a thirtyish ex–New Yorker, had already evinced political and commercial ambitions as well as an interest in real estate. (In a few years he and his brother Frederick would also be major figures in the crime-plagued city’s first “Committee of Vigilance,” a stopgap substitute for constituted legal authority.) “The China boys,” according to the Alta article, subsequently presented “an excellent entertainment” in their new protector’s honor to an assembly of guests including such public figures as Alcalde (a Spanish title soon to be amended to “Mayor”) John W. Geary.
The meeting place also said much about Chinese restaurants and their place in the new city. In fact, a “Canton Restaurant” had opened earlier in 1849, only to be replaced in autumn by the “New Canton Hotel and Restaurant,” announced by an advertisement in the October 4 Weekly Alta California as “a new and elegant establishment for the accommodation of the public.”16 Since canvas tents and assorted prefabs in a slough of mud represented the apogee of the Bay Area building trade in the first months of 1849, it’s a logical guess that the original Canton had been built for the spring–summer season rather than the ages. That its more ambitious replacement was heralded by a well-written paid ad in an English-language newspaper suggests an alert sense of marketing possibilities in the larger San Francisco community. (Already a few people with good English speaking or writing skills must have been acting as interpreters for other Chinese.) And no one could have built and outfitted a restaurant of three-hundred-person capacity amid the jumbled welter of the infant city without serious fiscal and logistical resources.
The great majority of Chinese activities on the Forty-Niner scene went undocumented. This was undoubtedly true of restaurants and other food-related businesses, few of which could have been on the impressive scale of the Canton. The first city directory, published in 1850, lists only one Chinese restaurant: the “Macoa [sic] and Woosung.”17 The proprietor was Norman Asing, whose name also appears in spellings like “Assing” and “As-sing.” (Contemporary anglicizations of Chinese names are hopelessly confused and inconsistent.) Asing—who would later inform California’s bigoted governor that he was a Christian and a republican—belonged to a very small scattering of Chinese who had reached the United States decades earlier, though it is unclear whether he had remained there continuously or traveled back to the Far East.
Him Mark Lai, the doyen of bilingual Chinese American historical studies, was able to identify Norman Asing as Sang Yuen, a prominent merchant with a finger in many community pies, who would help found one of the early local mutual-aid associations for emigrants from individual Guangdong districts.18 A colorful personage even by Gold Rush standards, Asing had been born nearly on the doorstep of Macau (then usually spelled “Macao” in English). The “Woosung” half of the restaurant name is harder to understand unless Asing also had some connection with the east coast town known in Mandarin as Wusong, which played a strategic role in establishing the British as a major trading presence in Shanghai. One of the early prospectors, James O’Meara, long afterward recalled Asing as “the recognized chief of the Chinese” in Forty-Niner days, and his establishment as a highly profitable “Chinese cake and confectionery shop on Kearny Street.”19
O’Meara’s description suggests that the San Francisco “Little China,” a district then located roughly between Jackson and Sacramento Streets close to Kearny Street, already supported some specialized businesses such as tea houses or Chinese-style pastry shops. Other Argonauts were only dimly able to grasp the distinctions between various kinds of Chinese eating houses. The ones that Westerners wrote about seem to have combined plenty of atmospheric touches (balconies, lacquered screens, ornate lanterns) with food prepared to either Chinese or English-American taste. The latter was no clumsy afterthought. O’Meara found that the language barrier tended to make any correspondence between what you ordered and what you got somewhat unpredictable, but this was not a majority view.20 In early days, most accounts praised not only the cheapness of the very first Chinese restaurants but the consistent quality and capable service, sometimes aided by a moderate command of English.
For a short time, Chinese commercial hopes flourished peacefully along with other newcomers’ ambitions in San Francisco and other nearby towns. The earliest settlers in post-Mexican California tended to find its chaotic assortment of national origins and languages colorful rather than threatening. To whites, the Chinese seemed stranger than anyone else by virtue of their appearance and speech. But they had quickly made themselves useful in a rough-hewn international fellowship of equals.
Certainly their first restaurants filled a need for well-cooked meals served in pleasant surroundings, at modest prices. San Francisco had almost instantly sprouted innumerable saloons and bars renowned for free lunches, over-the-top decor, and legendary virtuosity at compounding cocktails; a smattering of German beer gardens or other ethnic eating places; and several genuine or purported French restaurants on various levels. All strata of greedy or elegant taste were catered to by someone, somewhere. The English gold-seeker J. D. Borthwick, who arrived in 1851, commented with some favor on the classier French and “principal American” restaurants while less enthusiastically noting the many places serving “corn-bread, buckwheat cakes, pickles, grease, molasses, apple-sauce, and pumpkin pie”—to him, American grub at its grubbiest. The sight of “very nasty Chinese eatables,” such as dried fish or ducks, at the stores of “long-tailed Celestials” apparently put Borthwick off trying Chinese restaurants.21 But many English and American Argonauts knew better.
The wherewithal of enjoyable meals was not easy to come by in those first years, but Pearl River Delta natives attacked all problems with resolution and displayed an uncanny knack for addressing their new neighbors’ palates. They were not themselves fond of either beef or mutton but had nonetheless already learned how to prepare both for white men’s tables in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, where herds of cattle were kept to please Western appetites. They went on exercising these skills in the Golden West.
Before the transfer to American rule, California’s chief sources of revenue had been cattle to furnish hides and tallow as well as sheep raised for wool. Though destined to decline quickly, small local sheep and cattle ranches owned by Spanish-speaking Californios were still the major meat producers.22 The animals’ flesh was undoubtedly stringy and tough, but beef or mutton specially fattened for the table was not yet locally available. Pigs and poultry had been in somewhat scarce supply. But they became more numerous after the arrival of the Chinese, who would pay top dollar for good specimens of either.
Records of the earliest California Chinese restaurant offerings have not survived. We should not envision them as handsomely printed bilingual menus with Chinese characters on one side and English-language listings on the other. (Printing even English, much less Chinese, menus cannot have been cheap for several years at least; all but the grandest local eateries must have initially depended on spoken orders or bills of fare scrawled on boards, eventually graduating to handwritten and later to printed menus.) Our only evidence of what was served comes from Forty-Niners’ descriptions. Many details in these suggest a conscious appeal to everyday Anglo-American preferences.
Several early visitors to San Francisco remarked approvingly that Chinese restaurants served not only tea but “excellent” coffee, an article certainly not intended for fellow Chinese.23 Newcomer James Delavan, nervously anticipating ordeal by chopsticks, was relieved to find a meal presented “in true American style, with knives, forks, spoons, and all the other accessories of the table.”24
William Shaw, arriving from Australia in 1850 and apparently picking up on the good reputation of local Chinese restaurants, mustered the courage to try Chinese-style “curries, hashes, and fricasees, served up in small dishes, and as they were exceedingly palatable, I was not curious enough to enquire as to the ingredients.”25 Given ubiquitous rumors that the authentic Chinese larder was a chamber of horrors heavily dependent on rat, cat, and still more gruesome articles, readers would generally have understood this to mean “Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies.”
Most Anglo-American visitors were content to eat food specifically designed for them, in surroundings notably decent and sanitary by early Gold Rush standards. The English-born William Redmond Ryan, venturing into the Canton in 1849, took pains to mention not only the good food and modest prices but how neat and well-ordered it was: “As I had always been given to understand that these people were of dirty habits, I feel it only right to state that I was delighted with the cleanliness of this place, and I am gratified to bear testimony to the injustice of such a sweeping assertion.” As an artist newly retired from the prospecting business, Ryan was especially charmed by the manner in which orders were taken: “Every article that was sold, even of the most trifling kind, was set down, in Chinese characters, as it was disposed of; it being the duty of one of the waiters to attend to this department. This he did very cleverly and quickly, having a sheet of paper for the purpose, on which the article and the price were noted down in Chinese characters, by means of a long, thin brush, moistened in a solution of Indian or Chinese ink.”26
The report of William Kelly, published in 1851, probably represents a fairly common opinion. Having noted the range of international options on display in San Francisco, he announced, “But amidst the host of competitors the Celestials carry off the palm for superior excellence in every particular. They serve everything promptly, cleanly, hot, and well cooked; they give dishes peculiar to each nation, over and above their own peculiar soups, curries, and ragouts, which cannot be even imitated elsewhere; and such is their quickness and civil attention, they anticipate your wants, and secure your patronage.”27
We can only hazard educated guesses about what dishes were served for the special pleasure of Americans. If the newly arrived Chinese tried to reproduce the respectable English-descended cooking then common at middling American hotels and restaurants throughout the land, they probably offered a soup or two; a few boiled dishes such as fish with anchovy sauce and leg of mutton with caper sauce; assorted steaks, chops, and roast joints; local game in season; potatoes in one or another simple form; and perhaps some of the delicacies like lobster meat (dispatched in “tin canisters” from the East Coast) or “macaroni” (i.e., Italian pasta) that were already invading the very early Gold Rush dining scene as tokens of extravagance to come.
Beyond question, the wants of newly arrived Chinese were met still more capably. Cantonese diners are notoriously demanding culinary critics. It is not simple racism to guess that most of the Pearl River Delta contingent—even common laborers—were both more particular about quality and better able to judge it than the majority of white Argonauts. And unlikely though it may seem, they enjoyed a better supply of cooking necessities and luxuries than counterparts dependent on sea or overland routes from the East Coast. Prentice Mulford’s bemused listing (above) only scratches the surface.
Here again, the sojourning hua shang had managed to start laying down a transpacific pipeline as soon as they reached the wharf. The first surviving records of shipments from Hong Kong to San Francisco include dozens of imported food items that Chinese cooks and diners simply could not have done without. In Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home, a history of the links maintained between sojourners and their birthplaces, Madeline Y. Hsu points out that “Gold Mountain firms,” or jin shan zhuang (Cantonese, gum saan jong) in Hong Kong kept up an endless flow of cooking necessities. Counterparts in San Francisco distributed them to settlements in the interior. Soy sauce (probably several kinds), rice wine and distilled grain liquors, and various preserved vegetables were imported in their own special ceramic jars. Dried meats and poultry cured by traditional salting or smoking methods rapidly became a common sight in San Francisco Chinese shops and even the mining camps. So did different kinds of dried shellfish (shrimp graded by size, oysters, scallops) and fish, dried mushrooms, preserved eggs, bean curd in several forms, cooking oil, and dried noodles.28 Good rice was a matter of course. Chinese exporters were not above palming off adulterated tea shipments on Westerners, but Chinese-born purchasers demanded the best. Even rare items like shark’s fins and bird’s nests could be counted on for special banquets. Chinese gardens filled with any of the newcomers’ own favorite food plants that could be acclimated to Gold Mountain soon took root on small plots of ground, supplying fresh produce for restaurant kitchens as well as peddlers’ routes.
In short, for a couple of years nobody did more than Chinese facilitators, planners, and cooks to start turning San Francisco into a restaurant town, with unerring re-creations of Pearl River Delta cookery for Chinese patrons and adept versions of Western fare for others. The tiny Celestial community must have looked like a model for establishing a sound business footing in the fledgling port city.
The Climate Alters
With a luckier throw of the dice, early commercial success might have blossomed into lasting American acceptance of the settlers from south Guangdong, in and beyond the Pacific Coast states. In 1850 Étienne Derbec confidently predicted that “San Francisco will one day be a half Chinese city, and it certainly will not lose by it.”29 It is tempting to imagine an alternate universe in which a whole range of Westernized or less Westernized Chinese eating houses matched to different preferences and pocketbooks could have put down American roots and gone on merging into the national culinary landscape. But that possibility was rapidly doomed by the anti-Chinese hysteria of the next several generations.
In a sense, the hua shang were victims of their own success as labor brokers and architects of a transplanted “Little China” on foreign soil. The uncanny re-creation of their own culture—culinary and other—on Gold Mountain echoed earlier Chinese achievements in many parts of the Nanyang. But when they next began organizing an efficient high-volume flow of Pearl River Delta hua gong to the American labor market, they were inviting a backlash for which no prior overseas adventure had prepared them.
Statistics for the early American West tend to be rough rather than precise guidelines, especially regarding minority groups. But the estimates in Hubert Howe Bancroft’s monumental History of California (completed in 1890) show clearly enough where things were headed. Bancroft gauged the Chinese population of California as 54 at the start of 1849, about 790 in January 1850, and about 4,025 in January 1851. Everybody would later point to 1852 as the watershed. Bancroft calculated totals of 7,512 in January of that year, 11,787 in May, and 18,040 in August.30
In other words, the Chinese population of California had increased more than twenty-two-fold between 1850 and the late summer of 1852. Meanwhile the state’s entire population had less than tripled, from about 92,600 in 1850 by U.S. census figures to about 264,000 according to the first California state census in 1852; other estimates suggest that the full tally of Chinese arriving in 1852 was more than 20,000, perhaps as many as 25,000. (Nationally speaking, the increased Chinese presence was a mere drop in the bucket: The total U.S. population was over 23 million in 1850 and would far exceed 31 million in 1860.)31
The job of record keeping got progressively more confusing after 1852 because newcomers started fanning out more rapidly from San Francisco into the hinterland, while in any given year a few hundred or thousand Chinese usually left California on the return voyage to Hong Kong. But in any case, 1852 was the year when public figures started discussing restrictions on Chinese immigration to San Francisco.
At the time, we should realize, Americans had no way of grasping the general concept of “race relations.” The first Gold Rushers could comfortably regard a smattering of Chinese newcomers as entertaining oddities who made useful or pretty things and set a good table. Chinese arriving by hundreds or thousands every month triggered other responses only too natural in an avowedly white state unused to recognizing other races as entities in their own right.
For all mid-nineteenth-century American citizens except a few do-gooders of a fervent abolitionist persuasion, such as William Lloyd Garrison and the Beecher family, both black and red people could be categorized as primitives if not savages. Some might deserve kindly Christian regard, but all essentially belonged to rude orders of proto-humanity with no advanced achievements of their own worth weighing against the clear superiority of modern (i.e., white) Western civilization. In fact, before the Gold Rush the vast majority of white Americans had never seen members of another race claiming independent status.
When only a few Chinese were on the scene, the first Argonauts might welcome them or shrug them off on an individual basis. But viewed in growing numbers that suggested even larger hordes to come, they began to look like some ghastly vision come to life—a new phenomenon incompatible with thoughts of a justly ordered universe. The racist tide that began to sweep California was outwardly focused on competition for work. But the sheer virulence to which it rose suggests a less rational hatred, a violent and instinctive urge to exclude such beings from any notions about mankind being the Saturday afternoon climax to the story of Creation. Worst of all, unlike the enslaved or obliterated black and red appendages to the human race, they had come from a very large, internationally recognized sovereign state that claimed to have a civilization of its own with accomplishments such as a written history and the ability to count. (In fact, the abacus enabled Chinese shopkeepers to outrace American customers at any feat of computation.)
The more south Guangdong Chinese thronged onto the scene, the more repellent and inhuman features their neighbors claimed to see in them. At an average height of no more than five feet, the alien bipeds appeared comically small by contrast with stalwart American manhood, or at least its idealized image. To other Gold Rushers, their shaven foreheads and yard-long queues looked grotesque; their lack or near-lack of beards suggested an unnatural sexlessness. Their color was not light yellow but a darker shade that contemptuous whites sometimes derided as half negroid; their flattened noses and strangely angled facial contours reinforced the comparison. Their speech—the Toisanese dialect, which even other Cantonese found raucous—was more hideous to Western ears than any other foreign language.
The backlash did not erupt all at once. But throughout the 1850s, American mentions of Chinese restaurants and foodways began to acquire a less friendly tone. Gibes about “rat pies” and the like became more frequent. In 1853 the Alta California, which had previously written of the Chinese as welcome additions to the local citizenry, began echoing a call for curbs on “the tide of Asiatic immigration” sounded in the previous year by Governor John Bigler. Citing mining-district rumors about Chinese people’s appetite for vermin “of the creeping or crawling kind,” the newspaper also complained about the clannish distance they maintained from everyday society and darkly mused, “Good cooks, indeed, many of them are, but it is seldom that they can be disciplined to serve the purposes of a family, and their genius consists principally in managing the culinary affairs of one of their own restaurants, where any person in their confidence may be very comfortably served with a dinner on ‘conditions unknown to the public.’”32
The real objects of this gathering enmity were the hua gong, the waves of Chinese laboring men recruited by the brokers. They spread out from San Francisco in several different directions. At first many headed straight up the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers for the nearest gold fields. Later they would make their way across the California borders to the Comstock Lode and the mining districts of Oregon, Idaho, and neighboring U.S. territories as well as British Columbia. (A few thousand South Guangdong gold-seekers had come to western Canada after the 1858 Fraser Canyon gold discovery.) But wherever the Chinese went, white miners soon began ganging up against any who made strikes worth seriously investigating. Most often they were reduced to reworking other parties’ half-exhausted claims.33 In a few years nothing was left to be discovered by cheap, simple panning and placer methods; there was little room for either native or foreign-born Argonauts in the new age of industrial-scale hydraulic and quartz mining.
The Chinese moved into more distant mining districts in the territories or sought out other work opportunities here and there. Some frustrated gold-seekers retreated to Sacramento, Marysville, Stockton, and the many new mining hamlets to found small shops, especially laundries and neighborhood groceries. These choices were no accident. From the first, alert Chinese minds had recognized that local hand-laundry service would infallibly trump the alternative of sending shirts by boat to Honolulu or Hong Kong if not simply throwing them away. And as noted earlier, the Hong Kong and San Francisco hua shang had foreseen the need to keep Chinese and other provisions moving to their countrymen in the boondocks.
Some came back to San Francisco, where the first Little China had evolved into a recognized “Chinatown” large enough, and Chinese enough, to arouse the dislike of white neighbors. Here small Chinese-owned factories were carving out niches in the garment, shoemaking, cigar-making, and textile trades.34 These would employ thousands of laborers over several generations, while hundreds more set up as self-employed laundrymen.
Many resourceful Chinese found a role producing food along the coast or in the nearby countryside. Few Californians had yet grasped that the brightest hopes for the Golden State’s economy lay in edible harvests rather than gold. The first people who did had the market almost to themselves. Forward-looking white entrepreneurs began growing wheat on a large enough scale to turn California into the nation’s largest wheat and flour exporter by about 1855 (actually supplying flour to Hong Kong and China).35 The Chinese in North America looked to other avenues.
Nobody had previously sized up the remarkable fish and shellfish stocks of the California coastline. Long experienced in fishing coastal waters off southern Guangdong, the Chinese newcomers soon discovered one of the world’s richest supplies of abalone, a prized delicacy in China but unappreciated by Westerners. They found vast amounts of shrimp in San Francisco Bay and elsewhere. As the effort expanded, they were able to bring in oysters, squid, and many kinds of finfish from smelts to Petrale sole. Their small fishing hamlets came to dot the California shoreline from San Francisco southward to (and beyond) Monterey. Most of the catch was salted and dried in the sun; white observers curiously noted the racks or frames that the Chinese built for the purpose and the evil smells that wafted from the sites.36
As they had done in the Nanyang, Chinese traders in San Francisco promptly began shipping the preserved bounty back to the mother country. This move reinforced a growing criticism that the clannish aliens never allowed their profits to reach any hands but their own. Some, however, started locally peddling fresh fish to a mixed clientele, especially in San Francisco.
The Chinese also famously took the lead in truck gardening. In this enterprise they expanded more broadly into the larger community. People from hardscrabble districts like Toisan were already old hands at coaxing vegetables from poor soil. They prudently laid in seed stocks for growing fresh greens and vegetables. At the time, any fresh produce in San Francisco usually came to market from some of the nearby ranches that had been founded under Spanish and Mexican rule; it might be both scarce and horribly expensive.
Most Chinese produce was initially grown in small plots close to California mining camps and the outskirts of San Francisco. As the Celestials moved out into other Pacific and Rocky Mountain territories from Northern California to British Columbia, their carefully tended gardens became an invariable fingerprint of their presence. We do not have any complete roster of the crops that were first brought from China. Those that were documented by about 1900 included fresh ginger, some common cabbage relatives like bok choy and choy sum, yard-long beans, a few chive-like or leek-like Far Eastern alliums, and various members of the cucurbit (gourd/melon/cucumber/squash) family.37
The Chinese also cultivated vegetables familiar to the white Argonauts. Nothing had frustrated survivors of the grueling east–west overland journey more than the absence of fresh vegetables—above all, greens. Where they were available, people fell on them with a ravenous appetite that we can now recognize as the sum of several vitamin deficiencies.
The produce that Chinese truck gardeners carried to the market or peddled on neighborhood routes throughout the Far West was renowned for freshness, size, and beauty. It enjoyed another sort of renown in anti-Chinese propaganda describing the secret of the unwanted aliens’ fertilization methods as “ordure” or “foulness.” The idea was simplicity itself: human feces and sometimes urine were collected in pits or tubs and left to mature to hideous smelliness, with the possible addition of some small, luckily discovered animal corpse to enhance the already rich nitrogen content. Eventually the mixture was diluted with water and used to fertilize garden crops.38 The risk of parasitic infections being spread through this practice varied inversely with the length of the ripening period—ideally, several months, though there was no telling how long anybody had bothered to marinate any given batch. Despite the circumstances of their production, Chinese-grown vegetables soon earned a large white as well as Chinese following. In 1879 an Olympia, Washington, newspaper editorialized that though it stood firm against foreigners undercutting the labor market, “until the arrival of Chinese gardeners, all our earliest small fruits and vegetables came by steamer from San Francisco, for which we paid exorbitant prices. Now, through the native tact and indomitable energy of Chinamen, these fruits and vegetables are raised from our own soil and brought to our doors, weeks earlier than ever they were produced by white men.”39
The Tipping Point
The events that drastically precipitated the swelling Chinese community onto the late nineteenth-century political stage began with the coming of the transcontinental railroad, undertaken as a government-backed wartime gamble in 1862. At the time, the gold fields were still disgorging thousands of disappointed seekers into Pacific Coast labor markets. But American ex-Argonauts tended to disdain any really punishing manual labor. The effort that launched the Central Pacific Railroad track line eastward from Sacramento to meet the Union Pacific opposite number being built westward from Omaha soon threatened to stall for lack of capable, disciplined work crews. To the disgust of many, the Central Pacific quadrumvirate of Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, and Mark Hopkins eventually found what they were looking for in the Chinese—who had, as Crocker pointed out to the skeptical Central Pacific construction superintendent, after all built the Great Wall of China.40
After hiring an experimental crew, the planners became impressed enough to end up with a workforce of about twelve thousand Chinese to three thousand whites. The men were recruited with the aid of the San Francisco hua shang and counterparts in Hong Kong, who negotiated the requisite labor contracts and also supplied the crews with their accustomed food and other necessities. Camp cooks sometimes were part of the arrangement.41 The fact that Chinese laborers would agree to work longer hours at far less pay than their white rivals was an overwhelming advantage from the entrepreneurs’ point of view, a dastardly crime in the eyes of the barely fledged American labor movement.
Observers could scarcely believe the endurance, resourcefulness, and Spartan resolve of these outwardly puny hirees, or the manner in which they outperformed brawny U.S.-born laborers as well as immigrants from England or Ireland. Early in 1869, with the terminal point in sight, the Reverend A. W. Loomis reported in the pages of Bret Harte’s Overland Monthly: “Foremen and officers on the road speak in the highest terms of their Asiatic laborers. They are reported as prompt on the ground, ready to begin work the moment they hear the signal, and laboring steadfastly and honestly on till admonished that the working hours are ended. . . . Overseers declare that they can drill more rock and move more dirt with Chinamen than with an equal number of men who claim this kind of occupation as their specialty.”42
But for growing numbers of citizens, such reports merely reinforced an image of the Chinese as swarming, malefic little enemies to the honest workingman. The American workers’ movement had been tinged with a whites-only rationale even before the Civil War. By now, cheap yellow labor was fast becoming a convenient symbol for capitalist greed. The Chinamen’s legendary capacity for toil would shortly earn them not goodwill but beatings, torchings, and lynchings throughout the Far Western states and territories.
The young journalist and budding political economist Henry George sounded the alarm in a galvanizing, much-discussed letter to the New-York Tribune that appeared on May 1, 1869, as “The Chinese on the Pacific Coast” and was rapidly reprinted in other newspapers. “From San Diego to Sitka, and back into Montana, Idaho, Nevada and Arizona, throughout the enormous stretch of country of which San Francisco is the commercial center, they are everywhere to be found,” he warned. “Every town and hamlet has its ‘Chinatown’—its poorest, meanest and filthiest quarter, and wherever the restless proprietors open a new district, there, singly or in squads, appears the inevitable Chinaman.” If not promptly checked, the effect of their perniciously cheap labor would be “to accelerate the prevailing tendency to the concentration of wealth—to make the rich richer and the poor poorer; to make nabobs and princes of our capitalists, and crush our working class into the dust; to substitute (if it goes far enough) a population of serfs and their masters for that population of intelligent freemen who are our glory and our strength; to rear an empire with its glittering orders round the throne, and its prostrate people below, in place of the Republic of Washington and Jefferson.”43
Ten days later the junction of the railroads at Promontory Point in the Utah was marked by a ceremony devoid of Chinese dignitaries, and the “Asiatic laborers” who had carried out most of the Central Pacific blasting and track-laying were left to trudge back to California on foot. Many went to work on the smaller rail links and spurs that were now being built everywhere in the Far West; some joined the crews being recruited from south Guangdong to build the fearsomely difficult western stretch of the Canadian Pacific Railway (not completed until 1885). Others were drafted for a task less spectacular than laying road beds and tracks over mountains and chasms but equally Herculean: land reclamation in the Sacramento River–San Joaquin River Delta.
For years California investors and engineers had been talking about draining the malarial wetlands that emptied out of the Central Valley and clearing the soil for farms. The system was a tortuous maze of channels threading through great islands of spongy peat accumulated during the annual growth-and-decay cycle of tall, stubborn rushes called tules (pronounced “tooleys”). Over thousands of years, the tules had sunk dense, tough roots and rhizomes into their islanded peat mats on the floor of an ancient inland sea. Some attempts to turn the region into farm soil were under way by the early 1850s. More ambitious projects followed over several decades. The problem was locating men with the sheer persistence and muscle to build levees and conquer the existing marsh growth.
Like the railroad builders, the reclamation engineers and bosses failed to recruit the necessary gangs of workers among white Californians, for any money. They tried hiring Mexicans, “Kanakas” from the Pacific islands, and Native Americans before finding, in the south Guangdong Chinese, the world’s only labor force with centuries of prior experience wresting farmland from an equally large, daunting deltaic system. The tules were a new and different challenge, but Pearl River Deltans met it with their accustomed willingness to perform miracles for low pay and stoic persistence in the face of any obstacle.
With mule- or horsepower, they hauled up incalculable numbers of trees and bushes that had taken root on the tule islands. They cut out and dug up peat or underlying clay and carted it by wheelbarrow to build massive levees (sometimes many hundreds of feet long and as high as fifteen feet) around sections of land newly drained by ditches that they had dug. Standing at times up to the waist in water and surrounded by pestilential armies of mosquitoes, they yanked out the stubborn tule rhizome structures. To plow the tough but treacherously spongy sod that remained, they invented “tule shoes,” or detachable horseshoes with large protective outer rings, to keep the animals’ hooves from sinking into the soft muck.44
We will never know how much arable land the Chinese created through these efforts before steam-powered dredges and pumps arrived in the 1880s—if not the “million acres and more” estimated by a witness before a congressional committee in 1876, at the very least several hundred thousand acres.45 In effect, they had made possible the growth of industrial-scale California agriculture for generations to come. It is true that the great nineteenth-century swamp-draining projects now stand as a very faulty long-term hydrological and environmental bargain. But at the time, they were an achievement on a par with the railroad itself.
No more fertile soil existed anywhere in the United States than on the virgin peatlands of the delta. Many Chinese managed to lease plots in the reclamation areas as well as other districts of California and the territories, probably cultivating the same assortments of vegetables that they had grown near San Francisco. But the entire structure of Far Western agriculture was being swiftly revolutionized as white investors (along with a handful of ambitious and well-heeled Chinese) recognized the potential of certain crops grown on a gigantic scale, especially in the reclaimed Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta. Thanks to the railroad, the prospective market now stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast.
As always, masses of newcomers from the Pearl River Delta were the ideal labor force. But in the next few decades their visibility as tenders and pickers of crops ranging from pears, strawberries, asparagus, and onions to hops, grapes, and olives became an invitation to harassment or murder.46
The Age of Persecution
The Chinese presence had not expanded at a fixed rate since the Gold Rush. There had been spurts and slackenings from year to year. The overall number of Chinese arriving in California had probably topped 20,000 in 1852, the first year in which some whites began to sound public alarms. The estimated Chinese population of the United States was close to 35,000 in 1860 and 63,200 in 1870, the year after the completion of the transcontinental railroad. It was in the next decade that the pull of the rapidly expanding Far Western farm labor market (along with factory-labor opportunities) reached the other side of the Pacific. Between 1870 and 1880 America’s Chinese-born population grew by almost 42,270, to a total of nearly 105,500.47 The same years saw a period of prolonged economic depression that fueled widespread anti-immigrant hysteria among voters. The cry for Chinese exclusion was already at fever pitch by 1880.
In the reign of terror that ensued, no form of manual or factory work guaranteed real security to Chinese employees of substantial farming or manufacturing enterprises. Wherever the hua gong were concentrated in their own communities or as a labor corps large enough to attract hostile notice, they became magnets for threats that periodically erupted into violence. The most notorious episode, a murder spree by white coal miners at the Wyoming Territory town of Rock Springs in September 1885, left twenty-eight or more Chinese dead and their small settlement in blackened ruins, and provoked a national and international outpouring of outrage. The United States—shown in a magazine cartoon by Thomas Nast as undeserving to call itself “the head of enlightened nations”—was subjected to the diplomatic wrath of China and eventually forced to pay some $150,000 in indemnities.48 Acts of violence nonetheless continued, with the open or veiled blessing of local and state officials.
In the Far Western states and territories, Democratic and Republican politicians alike swiftly lined up behind the anti-Chinese cause. Somewhat more cautiously, others climbed on the bandwagon in the East, South, and Midwest. Both parties hoped to translate the call for ridding America of the Chinese menace into an electoral advantage in future presidential campaigns. The rhetoric they adopted invoked the specter of “coolieism” as a virulent successor to the institution of black slavery. The general thinking harmonized with Henry George’s argument: rather than having embarked for the United States of their own free will as good-faith immigrants, incoming Chinese were the servile and debased pawns of traffickers eager to shunt conscripted hordes of Asian-born “coolies” halfway around the world. Their supposed aim was to undercut the free, honest labor market that Civil War victories should have guaranteed to all Americans, or all white Americans. The self-appointed opponents to an invasion of coolies were not interested in distinguishing between terrified Chinese forcibly shoved aboard “floating coffins” bound for the Peruvian guano mines and self-directed Chinese who had signed voluntary arrangements to pay back creditors for passage to Gold Mountain. Facts and logic did not matter. For proof of coolieism and its effects, the demagogues simply invited their hearers to shudder at the yellow race’s increasing visibility in the republic of the Founding Fathers.49
California’s Chinese population had increased by more than 14,250 in 1876.50 In that year alarmists had persuaded Congress to send a bicameral delegation to San Francisco for hearings on the Chinese question. In 1877 the young Irish immigrant Denis Kearney, recently chosen to head the California chapter of the new Workingmen’s Party, started a series of rabble-rousing appearances throughout the West meant to unmask the yellow man as a tool of bloated capitalism. Two years later the state constitution was amended to include four provisions meant to curb the numbers of undesirable aliens, forbid the employment of Chinese by corporations or any public body, and fiercely “discourage their immigration” as “foreigners ineligible to become citizens of the United States.”51 (The terms of the 1790 federal Naturalization Act, passed by Congress during George Washington’s first term, restricted the privilege of naturalization to free whites.)
The decisive legislative blow came in 1882, when Congress bowed to overwhelming pressure by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law ever meant to categorically bar natives of any other nation from furnishing manual labor in this one. Its chief directive, meant to take effect in ninety days, sweepingly prohibited “any Chinese laborer” from coming to the United States for a period of ten years. Among a host of other provisions, the most important sections dealt with certifying the identity of Chinese already legally in the country. When the law was renewed in 1892 as the Geary Act, that matter was simplified by requiring legal Chinese residents to obtain certificates of residence and produce them on demand.52
Here it may be useful to point out how massively the rabble-rousing picture of Mongolian hordes overrunning America differed from any ascertainable facts. At no time from 1850 to 1980 did the number of people entering the United States from China during any ten-year period exceed about 123,000, a figure registered during the peak decade of 1871–1880. Between 1910 and 1920 the number was only about 20,000. On the other hand, nearly 437,000 Irish entered this country between 1870 and 1880, and more than 146,000 between 1910 and 1920. For the intervening decades, their numbers ranged from about 146,200 (1911–1920) to about 655,500 (1881–1890). Approximately 3.6 million Italians would arrive between 1870 and 1920, a period that saw the total U.S. population rise from roughly 38.5 million to 106 million.53 In other words, the mountains that roused Denis Kearney’s acolytes to incendiary raids and sporadic lynchings never amounted to anything more than molehills in the pages of the U.S. census.
Almost from the start of the Gold Rush, the Chinese had been the target of legislative bullying by both California and San Francisco (e.g., the state’s 1850 Foreign Miners’ Tax and a succession of urban quality-of-life ordinances meant to make their existence as difficult as possible).54 Now they found themselves not just persona non grata to the nation at large but widely assumed to be guilty of illegal entry until proved innocent (sometimes in spite of proof). Equal hostility was flaring in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta.
Little help could be expected from China itself. Faced with stringent pressure from colonial powers in need of cheap plantation labor, the Qing emperors had had to formally grant Chinese subjects liberty to emigrate. One resulting agreement, the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, had put China and the United States on reciprocal most-favored-nation footing and established the right of free Chinese immigration to America. It provided for the maintenance of Chinese consulates in American ports, with some assurances for the safety of Chinese nationals traveling and working in the United States.55 But under pressure from anti-Chinese agitators, Washington had gotten the treaty amended in 1880 to allow for possible suspension of Chinese immigration. And finally, the Exclusion Act and other unilateral anti-Chinese measures had all but abrogated previous diplomatic guarantees of Chinese nationals’ protection. Several American citizens who had agreed to serve as consuls did their best to mount legal defenses for persecuted Chinese, but most people had no representation. China’s successful protest against the Rock Springs massacre was an isolated (and, considering the brutality of the affair, puny) gesture.
But the law still left one important class untouched: the “merchants,” a term that could be stretched to include hua shang of many descriptions, from importers, factory owners, and labor brokers to (in some cases) grocers and peddlers. From the start, the hua shang had taken some responsibility for the throngs of hua gong, whom they had recruited from Toisan and other South Guangdong districts. Surely they exploited Chinese manual labor as a profitable commodity ensuring generous commissions for themselves. But, to an extent, they also protected workers from the fury of the white community. We shall return later to their role in sponsoring mutual-aid societies based on district of origin, the foundation of persistent legal challenges to discriminatory laws.
Others exercised their wits in the time-honored xiang banfa tradition and formed other plans during the decades of anti-Chinese violence. They decided that the best hope of safety paradoxically lay in relative isolation as self-employed persons in some minimal enterprise requiring little capital and no English-language skills. In virtually all cases, this meant laundries—hand laundries, since large-scale, steam-driven equipment for the purpose was still in the course of development. Hand laundering was work so physically punishing as to daunt the majority of recently arrived whites. That was just why Chinese who were willing to spend decades half-crippling their shoulders, backs, and legs in return for a dependable income were able to carve out a living at it. For thousands of them, survival meant spreading out into villages and hamlets far from the main centers of urban strife and quietly establishing a service that white neighbors found it hard to do without.56 It is true that isolated laundrymen sometimes found themselves more, not less, vulnerable to anti-Chinese wrath. But on occasion white citizens rallied to their defense.
The Luck of Chinese Cooks
There remained one other fairly secure and often lucrative option for at least some Chinese with the courage to seek employment on an individual basis rather than as factory personnel or members of work gangs: cooking for whites. All the anti-Chinese hysteria of the era between about 1870 and World War I could not shake a widespread conviction among Westerners (and eventually many people in other parts of the country) that nobody made a more gifted and reliable cook than a Chinaman.
This belief had begun with foreigners living and traveling in China and had been emphatically repeated by writers like George Wingrove Cooke and the Abbé Huc. Almost from the start of the Gold Rush, it took hold in the American and Canadian Far West among two classes of white Westerners. The organizers of mess-hall or other communal-dining facilities at mining camps and lumber camps, large ranches and farms, boarding houses, and fish canneries routinely swore by Chinese cooks, as did some hotel owners (for instance, James Beard’s mother; see chapter 2). Their reputation was equally high among many middle-class rural or urban families seeking house servants with decent cooking skills.57
In photographs of Far Western logging or ranch crews, an aproned Chinese among the ranks of the men he cooked for was a common sight even when anti-Chinese violence was at its height. The reminiscences of miners, loggers, ranch hands, and others connected with the camps where such people lived abound in mentions of Chinese cooks. They commonly dished up the same breakfast, lunch, and supper dishes that any white (or, less commonly, black) American camp cook would have prepared, from coffee and flapjacks to steaks and apple pie. At times they might add inspirations of their own. Richard Steven Street, the distinguished historian of California farm labor, recounts the story of a San Joaquin Valley ranch cook whose superb roast goose dinners had the crew mightily puzzled about the source of the birds until one man surreptitiously tracked the artist (who was carrying a large hollowed pumpkin with eyeholes cut out) to a nearby waterfowl pond and saw him strip naked.58 What followed precisely matched the technique that the Spanish Dominican friar Domingo Fernandez de Navarrete had observed in China in the mid-seventeenth century:
The Chineses [sic] . . . go into the Water with their Heads thrust into Calabashes, and walk so slowly, that it looks as if nothing moved but the Calabash upon the Water: Being come up in this manner to the Goose or Duck, which they can see through the holes in the Calabash before their Eyes, they lay hold of it by the Feet and pull it under Water, where they wring the Neck, and put it into a Bag they carry for the purpose; once this is full they then go out again as softly as they went in, without disturbing the rest of the birds.59
It is true that not all Chinese made equally good camp or other cooks. “Our Chinese cooks imitate the American style with a painful accuracy,” Prentice Mulford wryly observed in 1869. In his horrible example, the fictitious “Polyglot House” in the nonexistent “Hangville,” an Italian owner had educated a Chinese “clerk de cuisine” in his own ghastly notion of American cooking. Knowing that “a certain amount of meat, flour and vegetables were to be daily prepared after the fashion taught him by his employer,” the cook accordingly “exposed [food] to heat on the principle that you season your wood, to burn the easier. American humanity to this Celestial was merely a collection of high pressure flesh and blood machines, for whom he prepared fuel.”60
By the law of averages, at least some Chinese must have cooked some truly awful meals for camp inmates. The real hurdle was the sheer difficulty of Chinese-speakers and English-speakers trying to hammer out a satisfactory understanding of anything as subtle, intricate, and culturally ingrained as cooking, with almost no linguistic common ground. It took not only forbearance but some mental agility on the part of both instructor and instructed to figure out exactly what was being communicated.
Nonetheless, Chinese camp cooks as a class stood in very high regard for generations. Managers often found them both more reliable (i.e., less habitually drunk) and more naturally talented than the common run of white cooks. Most of them began as boys in their mid-teens—even after the Exclusion Act, which adventurous Chinese indomitably worked to circumvent for decades. They might spend thirty-five or forty years at one job unless they chose to move around; their services were much in demand. In fact, they often commanded higher wages than white cooks, a circumstance enraging to many self-anointed patriots.
Denouncing the un-Americanism of keeping filthy yellow men on payrolls, angry partisans of Denis Kearney’s mantra “The Chinese must go!” took to burning or looting camps where they were employed. Some employers bowed to pressure by firing the Chinese cook and promising to observe racial purity in future. Some—often backed up by the other camp employees—refused to cooperate. Similarly, whites who hired Chinese to cook or clean in private homes frequently refused to give in to Kearneyite harassment and threats. Homemakers sometimes wrote to newspapers to give their side of the story, which rested less on benevolence than the bruising truth that keeping house for a family was more than one woman could physically manage on her own.61
In an age where the closest thing to any labor-saving household appliance was a cast-iron kitchen range, even badly off middle-class families desperately needed at least one servant to share daily duties with the mistress. The only candidates, however, were immigrants. American-born females of all social classes grew from girls into young women who spurned the role of domestic servant. Even daughters of very poor families considered factory work a far prouder option. In the Far West, the available choices for household servants boiled down to two rival groups: Irishwomen or Chinamen. The latter were at a clear advantage.62
Irish immigrants had not been seamlessly absorbed into the American landscape. To a great extent, they still retained the reputation of drunken and pig-ignorant refugees from the most benighted corner of the British Isles. Anti-Irish prejudice especially dogged the thousands of young women who arrived in America looking to enter domestic service. The perceived sins of “Biddy” and “Norah” included coarseness, irresponsibility, Catholicism, thickheadedness, and a tendency to bully hapless employers. By contrast, male Chinese house servants were generally agreed to be deft-handed, quiet, respectful, and phenomenally efficient—in short, jewels, once you had managed to make them understand what you wanted through repeated pidgin-English commands. Like their counterparts in camp kitchens, they could usually command very good wages, an understandably sore point with their female rivals. The Chinese particularly shone as cooks, while Irishwomen were repeatedly pilloried as culinary incompetents who could touch no dish without ruining it. Above all, Chinese servants were too clever to put their employers on the spot with self-interested demands.
Frederick Keller’s 1882 cartoon “The Servant Question” in the generally anti-Chinese San Francisco magazine The Wasp sums up the prevailing wisdom. It depicts a procession of truculent harpies trooping from an employment office into a home kitchen and bombarding the mistress of the house with a “shorter catechism” of queries like “Wud ye mind givin me sisther’s pig a run in the gairden of a Sunday afthernoon?” and “Will ye have breakfast ready fer me when I come from confession?” From an upper corner of the picture the smug genie-like image of a Chinaman gazes down on the scene above the caption “NO QUESTIONS ASKED.”63
Statistics about how many Chinese cooked for white people during the gathering anti-Chinese storm are impossible to reconstruct. This phenomenon, like many others, was more easily documentable in cities than in the countryside, but notable in both. Certainly the numbers of Chinese hired cooks were minuscule compared to the many thousands of manual labors employed by construction projects, farms, and factories. But their presence had real consequences. Cooking for American employers was at least a small bridge between cultures. In camp kitchens, it helped expose Chinese newcomers to a certain cross-section of the U.S. working-class population, on peaceable terms. In private homes, it brought them in close contact with the American domestic scene, including usual kitchen routines and the ways of middle-class families. In both cases, it kept alive an association between Chinese cooks and excellent food that had started to take hold during the Gold Rush before the era of Yellow Peril hysteria.
A crucial effect was that when the reign of fear finally subsided, a diminished North American Chinese community would be uniquely equipped to enter the restaurant business in far corners of the United States and Canada, with whites rather than Chinese as the target clientele. It was a new survival strategy, made possible through the invention of a novel cuisine that would appear exotic and adventurous to non-Chinese, though in fact it was safely wedded to a middlebrow, white American cultural-culinary frame of reference. And more than a generation afterward, it would help create a class of restaurants economically contingent on something that had hitherto been notably scarce among the world of Chinese in the Americas: actual Chinese families.