I have thus far tried to avoid using the term “immigrants” to characterize the Chinese who arrived from the far side of the Pacific seeking gold or other opportunities in nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century America. Certainly they were not immigrants in the same sense as any European group who came from the other side of the Atlantic during the same period. As suggested earlier, the very words “emigrant” and “immigrant” carry baggage incongruous with their early presence in this country.
The crux of the matter is that the Chinese were far less likely than other newcomers to form immigrant families. Only after many decades of struggle on this continent did the broad Chinese community in the United States achieve anything roughly comparable to immigrant footing. The delay has to be seen in relation to the absence of families. The cuisine that they brought with them from southern Guangdong and lovingly preserved among themselves would also, after several decades, “immigrate” into mainstream American foodways with a degree of purposeful reinvention unlike other Old World cuisines that arrived as a natural part of family life.
Well into the twentieth century, women were conspicuously scarce among the Chinese on Gold Mountain. The reason lay partly in obstacles erected by this country’s immigration authorities—but also in a prominent feature of overseas Cantonese culture: the custom of long-distance marriage. Marriage, Guangdong-style, was just one of several social institutions that eluded Western understanding, and that were used as arguments for excluding the dirty yellow race from American society. Unfortunately, all such efforts had the effect of driving the community further in on itself, ironically perpetuating just those features of overseas Chinese life that hostile American activists most loved to denounce.
Bachelor Sojourners
Many or most of the people who sailed from Hong Kong to Gold Mountain were indeed married men. But they were set apart from European immigrants not only by race, an apparently idolatrous religion, and a uniquely baffling language but by a set of interlocking values that revolved around the place of their birth. These beliefs had special force for people in southern Guangdong.
In their world view, the meaning of existence could not be divorced from their native soil—that is, the one village of the Pearl River Delta in which they happened to have been born into a particular clan. Men from southern Guangdong villages had long been accustomed to traveling some distance from the ancestral home not in order to transfer family loyalties elsewhere but in order to fulfill those loyalties. A conscientious son of the region regarded his own village and lineage as the seat of core values and personal identity. No matter where he went, nothing displaced the home village as the center of his internal magnetic field, with a home district (probably one of the Four Counties; see chapter 1) as a slightly larger frame of reference.1 The pattern held good for a surprisingly long time in America.
Far from the Pearl River Delta, a sojourner would seek out people from his village, who often had the same surname and spoke a dialect scarcely intelligible to other Cantonese. He would belong to a large assortment of organizations binding him to different aspects of the overseas Chinese community. Wives and womenfolk were barely incidental to this career trajectory.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Pearl River Deltans still commonly followed work and kinship practices rooted in older, originally rural ideas of land stewardship. Families with more than one son ordinarily expected the eldest to succeed his father as lawful property holder in the ancestral village. The rest moved away to become apprenticed to trades in other communities, perhaps cities—or, eventually, Chinese out posts in and beyond the Nanyang (Chinese-settled Southeast Asia). They commonly left in their mid-teens at the latest but remained firmly cemented to the village and the family.2
Almost never did wives accompany husbands on these sojourns. After a few years getting started in an occupation, a young man would come home for a family-approved marriage, then depart again for his place of work. At intervals he would return home and stay long enough to father a child. His life’s goal, aside from sending home enough money to assist his parents and maintain his wife and children, was final repatriation in his birthplace. With luck, this might occur when he was still able to enjoy it. “He died in his home village, where his grave still is honored by his descendants” was a consummation as devoutly to be wished as “And they lived happily ever after.” Otherwise, he would try to make advance arrangements to have his bones shipped back for proper burial in the all-important spot. If he had reached great prosperity, his name might be further immortalized as a village benefactor who had funded a new school or public building project.3
During the great nineteenth-century exportation of Chinese labor to destinations as far away as North America, many thousands of hua gong continued to adopt the transnational-family model. On Gold Mountain, the result was the most unequal male–female ratio among any group of settlers in the Far West. Virtually all other men reaching 1850s San Francisco and the mining camps had led a bachelor existence for the nonce. But for them, reinforcements of women in the next few decades would bring a shift to more conventional domestic arrangements.
The situation was far different for the Chinese. Only a handful defied the barriers (on both sides) to interracial marriages. Like second and third sons paying conjugal visits to the home village from some nearby city, thousands of others tried to make the nearly seven-thousand-mile voyage from San Francisco to Hong Kong at intervals that might be as short as a few years or longer than a decade. Back in the Pearl River Delta for a few months or perhaps longer, they would be welcomed by their extended families and beget more children. Ideally, the offspring would be sons, who eventually would join their fathers on Gold Mountain and continue the pattern.
In Western eyes, the nonrepresentation of decent females went to prove the heathen state of the Chinese community. The Chinese view was of course quite the reverse. Late Qing-era China was a rigorously patrilineal society ruled by neo-Confucian values that made contemporary North America look like a feminist paradise.
Especially in Guangdong, the expected duty of a girl was to live in deferential seclusion (and with bound feet, unless she belonged to the peasantry) under first a father’s and then a husband’s authority. Even if widowed, she still belonged body and soul to her husband’s family. The thought of independent, self-directed lives required a greater mental leap for Chinese than for Western women.4 Men, on the other hand, were unfazed by the thought of bachelor housekeeping—for instance, the need to do their own cooking, which seldom came naturally to all-male groups of white gold-seekers.
During the first few centuries of Western contact with the Middle Kingdom, women had not figured even slightly in any East–West commercial exchange. Before the opening of Hong Kong, only a handful of English females had gotten anywhere near the Guangzhou foreign “factories” or other Pearl River Delta sites. On the part of the locals, dealings with Western commercial missions—including cooking for them—were carried out by men; almost without exception, women’s existence was closeted within their own domestic sphere.
When San Franciscans gazed upon the first gold-seeking Celestials in 1849 and 1850, Bancroft’s History of California records the balance of Chinese men to women as 787 to 2. The ratio had reached about 19 to 1 in 1900.5 Part of the reason for the change was that the overseas business factotums—always less strictly bound by Confucian orthodoxy than other members of Chinese society—had gradually begun sending for their wives and daughters. The far more numerous manual workers seldom did so. For traditionalists, uprooting a wife from the village household that she had entered through marriage disturbed the integrity of the family in a way that her husband’s absences did not.
Anti-Chinese propagandists feverishly denounced the twin evils of the transpacific marriage system and what went with it, the sardine-like bachelor accommodations that thousands of laborers found in San Francisco’s Chinese quarter and dozens of smaller Chinese communities throughout the Far West.6 Few images of sober, decent Chinese family life were available to offset the propagandists’ picture of bivouacked aliens bypassing any pretense of local domesticity, intent on bleeding the local economy dry before heading back to the home planet. Most of the Chinese-born women who had made the Pacific crossing were prostitutes; American immigration authorities spent much time and money trying to disprove the claims of any who maintained that they were lawful residents’ wives or daughters.
The bleak fact was that poverty and prostitution went hand in hand for people from southern Guangdong, hit especially hard by the many natural and man-made disasters that overtook late Qing-era China. For thousands of struggling households, a daughter (sometimes even a wife) might be the closest thing to a liquid asset. In hard times, selling a girl into prostitution was a family fiscal decision not much more drastic than the usual practice of marrying her off for a bride-price, though it brought in less money.7
Again, Hong Kong was the major Far Eastern entrepôt for the overseas trade. Entrepreneurs in the colony were linked to supply rings throughout the Pearl River Delta as well as San Francisco traffickers on the other side. White women might reach California ready to keep house for husbands and cook the day’s meals; such expectations were not the norm for newly arrived Chinese women.
Elizabeth Sinn’s Pacific Crossing (a study of several Hong Kong–San Francisco trade networks) shows that fortunate women might be legally sold under various degrees of compulsion either to sex-trade professionals recruiting whores or to households looking for a bondservant-of-all-work (Mandarin, mei zai; Cantonese, mui tsai). The less lucky were kidnapped outright.8
No matter how they got there, sex workers undoubtedly formed a majority of the female Chinese American population in the early years—by the admittedly lurid accounts of American moralists, an overwhelming majority. Reliable statistics are elusive, but in this case the moralists’ claims may have made sense. The demagogues who claimed that the male Chinese laborers streaming into the United States were “coolies,” or slaves in all but name, did not understand the varied possibilities of credit ticket arrangements. Where women were concerned, the accusation of quasi-slavery had more merit. Undoubtedly, thousands reached San Francisco and the hinterlands as terrified victims with no hope of escape.
But the story is less cut and dried than that. Many of the procurers and brothel owners were themselves women; these were among the few occupations that afforded women an independent niche in either Hong Kong or San Francisco. From analysis of selected California census statistics, the historian Sucheng Chan has also concluded that prostitutes were often able to graduate from brothels to marriage.9 Many people who later managed to claim citizenship must have been the children of Chinese-born prostitutes or former prostitutes.
In 1875 wrought-up political posturing against supposed hordes of incoming coolies and sex slaves had produced the Page Act, a predecessor to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. It contained a jumble of provisions meant to keep out forcibly recruited labor from “Oriental” countries and prostitutes from anywhere.10 Immigration authorities pursued the second aim with a zeal that failed to wipe out Chinatown bordellos but did make it almost insurmountably difficult for women to prove that they had not come from China for immoral purposes. The result was to reinforce existing hindrances to the settlement of families in the Chinese American community.
The first passage and repeated renewals of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act further distorted the life of all Chinese—male or female—in the United States. (Similar legal hurdles would soon be enacted in Canada.) Everybody was forced to prove that he or she did not belong to the automatically excluded categories of laborer or prostitute, or was not engaged in prohibited trafficking. Even if most Chinese newcomers had wanted to claim immigrant status in the same sense as others, that option was barred still more rigorously than before.
The Drug of Choice
The passage of the Exclusion Act was followed by decades of legal battles and extralegal maneuverings in an atmosphere rife with lurid accusations against Chinese sexual and other vices. Some people hinted that Chinese food was tainted with all manner of filth—if not snakes, cats, and vermin, then probably opium masked by heavy seasonings.11 Opium prepared for smoking was indeed one of the uglier facts of life for Gold Mountain sojourners, and a crucial element in the Hong Kong–San Francisco commercial pipeline. Along with gambling and visits to prostitutes, it offered some solace to workers eking out a weary existence in cramped, squalid quarters. One of its useful effects in lean times was to dull hunger.
The United States would not prohibit the import of opium until 1909. Until then it was expensive because of high production costs and steep import duties, but lawful and resoundingly popular among both rich and poor Chinese. Sensational if undocumented contemporary estimates suggested that between 30 and 50 percent of the California Chinese were opium smokers during the late nineteenth century.
The drug had been the master key with which the British—later abetted by Americans—opened up the immense market of China by both stealth and force, imposing a disastrous balance of trade on what had been a wealthy exporting nation renowned for tea, silks, and porcelain. Western societies knew the raw version of opium, dried lumps of poppy-head sap that might be eaten in that form or consumed as laudanum, an alcoholic tincture. It was the Chinese who had discovered how to boil down the raw latex to a concentrate that could be smoked in pipes. But it was chiefly the British who throughout the nineteenth century dispatched raw opium from colonial India and parts of the Nanyang to processors in the Pearl River Delta and eventually every port in China, with Hong Kong rapidly becoming the hub of the trade.
Almost every vessel reaching San Francisco from Hong Kong between the Gold Rush and the early twentieth century carried eagerly awaited shipments of Indian opium already prepared for smoking. A handful of large Hong Kong firms usually controlled the importing, processing, and exporting. At the San Francisco end, several major importers distributed the drug to retail outlets in the city as well as Chinese settlements throughout the Far West. A few recognized brand names competed for customer loyalty.12
Though opium took a higher economic and physical toll on badly paid manual laborers than anyone else, its use extended to all classes. Like alcohol, it could be devoured by addicts in squalid rooms or savored by recreational users in gracious settings enhanced by elegant accessories. Connoisseurs assessed the fine points of any batch as minutely as lovers of single-malt whiskies, while laborers who habitually worked to the point of scarcely bearable physical exhaustion and pain found grateful relief in even third-rate opium. Their inert euphoria was a bizarre and, to many outsiders, scary contrast to the antics of drunks under the influence of the preferred Western intoxicant.
Anti-Chinese alarmists thundered against opium smoking as yet another threat to decent white Americans. Parties of the latter could often be seen voyeuristically snooping around opium dens (either real or stage-managed for the occasion) in San Francisco Chinatown or a younger counterpart taking shape in New York City, usually guided by police officers with a sideline in horror tourism.13 The agendas might also include exotica like Chinese restaurants—or, more daringly, brothels.
Organization Men
The hua shang/hua gong division altered over time, in response to the shifting political and cultural landscapes of both the United States and China; within a few decades of Exclusion, the original Chinese terms become somewhat anachronistic as applied to the American scene. The many-sided wheeler-dealers, more adroit than other Chinese at finding commercial niches fairly secure against Sinophobic threats, came to resemble not nineteenth-century Chinese or Western “merchants” but twentieth-century American businessmen. The larger class of manual laborers bravely sought their own niches, with more varied success. Undoubtedly the luckier importers and entrepreneurs often thrived at their expense, as purveyors of prostitutes and opium as well as many daily necessities including cooking gear and rice. But the two groups managed to make common cause against racist opponents. They were strengthened by an extraordinary Chinese talent for what is now called networking—or in today’s China, guanxi (Mandarin) or gwaanhaih (Cantonese).
Even in China, southern Cantonese had long shown a penchant for forming themselves into groups, a tendency magnified by the hostile, white-dominated environment of Gold Mountain. English speakers were bewildered by the plethora of organizations that everybody seemed to belong to. Most were called hui (Mandarin) or wuih (Cantonese), an all-purpose label that could refer to any class of assemblies, associations, meetings, consortiums, leagues, federations, clubs, caucuses, syndicates, or credit unions. Some were based on lineage—traced back with a mixture of imagination and Confucian piety to primordial ancestors supposed to have founded the surnames “Wong,” “Lee,” and so forth—and village or at least district of origin. Some resembled the benevolent societies organized by newcomers from particular corners of Europe.14
More titillating to Western curiosity were the san he hui (Cantonese, saam hahp wuih) or “triads,” secret brotherhoods obscurely descended from outlaw groups of diehard Ming dynasty loyalists who had roamed the rebellious southern provinces for generations after the Qing came to power. An allied term that might be innocuous or sinister was tong (in Cantonese; Mandarin, tang), literally meaning “hall” or “pavilion.” Some tongs were aboveboard business organizations; others were gangs of racketeers claiming the mantle of the triads. The category glimpsed on business signs as often as “Co.” or “Inc.” in English was gong si (Mandarin) or gung si (Cantonese). It denoted various kinds of trading companies, business firms, and commercial enterprises, though it might confusingly apply to a tong, triad, or hui.
Triad activities shaded into legitimate territory in the many “assembly halls” or huiguan (in Mandarin; Cantonese, wuihgun), a slew of mutual aid societies based on Guangdong village or district of origin. From early Gold Rush days, nearly everyone climbing off the boat in San Francisco was met at the wharf by representatives of his own huiguan, who steered him to temporary lodgings and oversaw his introduction to white society.
Hostile Americans professed to find criminality everywhere in the Chinese community. Chinese settlements in the larger American cities often saw clashes or sustained feuds between tongs or different huiguan that helped spread the notion. But despite internal rivalries, an overall agreement on the need for communal solidarity against the coming Chinese Exclusion Act led several separate huiguan in 1882 to band into an umbrella group, the San Francisco Chongwah or Zhonghua (Cantonese or Mandarin, respectively, for “China”) Huiguan. It soon became the nearest thing to governmental authority in the fractious Chinese community. Headed by members of the traditional hua shang or merchant class, it adjudicated internal disputes and presented the public face of San Francisco Chinatown to mainstream society. Its unofficial English name was the “Six Companies.” (At one time it had comprised six huiguan, though the actual number fluctuated from year to year.) With the passage of the Exclusion Act, the Six Companies prepared to take on a larger protective role under the name of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA).
The developing Chinese communities in midwestern and East Coast cities formed their own CCBAs or Six Companies on the San Francisco model for governing internal affairs and dealing with the outside world. At times the CCBAs were pitted against the tongs in the struggle for community authority. Belatedly recognizing some responsibility for the safety of overseas Chinese, the imperial Qing court began dispatching consuls and other official liaisons to keep the various city benevolent associations and Beijing abreast of each other’s affairs, including rivalries with the tongs.15
The CCBA and Wong Kim Ark
The business leaders who controlled the national (though chiefly San Francisco–based) CCBA were the only Gold Mountain Chinese with the money, lawful residency status, command of English, and political or legal connections to wage public campaigns on behalf of themselves and their poorer compatriots, the now-barred manual laborers. The tenth anniversary of the first Exclusion Act found the community threatened with an even harsher renewal. The CCBA mustered all possible influence and legal advice to stop passage of the new bill, and failed. It was voted into law in May 1892 as the Geary Act, which added muscle to the previous exclusion of Chinese workers by requiring any “Chinese person or person of Chinese descent” already in the country to obtain a certificate of legal residence or be deported after a year’s hard labor. The certificates, as issued by the Internal Revenue Service, included a mandatory mug shot of the bearer.16
The CCBA dug deep into its pockets to challenge the Geary Act on constitutional grounds, only to see it upheld by the Supreme Court in 1893. There remained one other constitutional hope: the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Wong, the son of Chinese-born parents and a cook by trade, was able to prove beyond all doubt that he had been born in San Francisco. Again the CCBA footed the legal costs of pursuing successive appeals all the way to the Supreme Court. This time the effort was successful. In 1898 the Court ruled by a vote of 6 to 2 that, by the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment, any child of Chinese (or other) parents born on American soil was a birthright U.S. citizen.17
The decision had one nearly immediate and one more slowly realized consequence. Within a few years of Wong Kim Ark, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire sent great masses of birth and customs records up in smoke—a dazzling opportunity for people who could get away with it to concoct fictitious explanations of their presence on Gold Mountain. The longer-term effect was unforeseeable but in hindsight inevitable. Once both boys and girls started being able to claim unchallengeable birthright citizenship on the same grounds as any other children of foreign-born parents, the skewed sex ratio very gradually began to even out. It was the first long-delayed step toward the emergence of Chinese Americans as an immigrant community.
The official and unofficial threats facing Chinese-born working-class people were still dreadful. The CCBA and other Chinese American associations continued to mount legal challenges against deportation proceedings; meanwhile, the Chinese also desperately fought back with extralegal scams inspired by Wong Kim Ark.
The great decision would have affected only a handful of people in the short run had not Chinese on both sides of the ocean set about constructing fake identities for thousands. For decades they and the immigration authorities pitted their wits against each other. With false papers, many managed to pass themselves off as American-born citizens. Thousands more produced doctored evidence to prove that, as the Chinese-born children of citizens, they were potentially eligible for citizenship, depending on their fathers’ history of residence here and abroad; members of this larger group became popularly known as “paper sons.”
The authorities fought back in turn by building a detention center on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. Starting in 1910, new arrivals from China claiming U.S. citizenship were detained at these grim barracks for exhaustive interrogations meant to weed out liars (as all were assumed to be until cleared by lengthy examination).
The immigration officials had amassed a stunning circumstantial knowledge of street layouts, landmarks, and topographical details in every Toisan village. (Toisan, of course, had produced the vast majority of Chinese laborers trying to enter the United States, or re-enter after conjugal visits to the home village.) Every detainee was required to recall, with clockwork precision, such minutiae as the number of steps on a staircase in a parent’s house, the location of the nearest well, and the years in which brothers or cousins had been married. A frequent question concerned an applicant’s mother’s feet; to tell the interrogator that they were unbound amounted to confessing one’s own status as a mere laborer ineligible for entry. All answers were rigorously checked against those provided by witnesses already residing in this country, who were summoned to testify on behalf of the person under interrogation.18
Even legitimate applicants might well get some petty detail wrong or fail to give answers 100 percent consistent with a witness’s. The system simply asked to be gamed in any way possible. The most obvious was cribbing. Fabricating crib sheets, or “coaching letters,” became a thriving business in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta. Witnesses and new arrivals devised ways of surreptitiously exchanging information, often through Chinese American Angel Island employees such as cooks. Among the evidence collected by investigators for the Office of the Superintendent of Immigration—and still preserved in the files of successor agencies—were photographs of a banana skin and a peanut shell that had been adroitly converted into receptacles for coaching letters.19
But the resources of the superintendent of immigration and various local authorities, mostly along the Pacific Coast, were far beyond those of poor Toisanese laborers seeking to evade the law. Exclusionary measures could not instantly shut out that supposed enemy, the Chinese manual labor supply. They did, however, shrink the flow to a diminishing trickle, while the masterminds of immigration policy suddenly—if briefly—decided that Japanese workers were the answer to Far West labor shortages.
The “Chinese Menace” Arrested
The original Chinese Exclusion Act and its progeny came close to the desired effect, though not all at once. The number of incoming Chinese reached a peak in the decade between 1870 and 1880 and began to decline after 1910. Consequently, the steeply rising U.S. Chinese population leveled off and appeared to be reversing course. Fewer people in Guangdong or any other part of China even hoped to enter this country through any port city (though daring handfuls managed to survive as undocumented aliens after crossing the Canadian or Mexican border).
About 14,800 Chinese arrived in the United States between 1890 and 1900—a sharp drop compared to the figures for the previous two decades (123,000 from 1870 to 1880; 63,000 from 1880 to 1890). The next few decades saw small increases perhaps partly attributable to “paper son” scams that also gave an edge to what might be called “paper merchants”—people able to tailor their applications to the immigration authorities’ definitions of merchantry. The total Chinese or Chinese-descended population in the mainland United States had reached a peak of about 118,750 in 1900 after a previous high of roughly 109,800 in 1890. It fell to approximately 94,400 in 1910 and 85,200 in 1920.20
As the architects of anti–Yellow Peril acts had hoped, the remaining Chinese in America were progressively forced out of the unskilled labor market after about 1900. Denouncers of the Chinese presence on American shores must have felt that they had won the battle for good in the years immediately after World War I, an era that saw several heated debates over what kind of society the United States wanted to be. Prohibition and women’s suffrage were painfully thorny questions requiring constitutional amendments. By contrast, it was no trouble at all for the voting public at large to agree on a newly restrictive approach to immigration from almost anywhere and for Congress to pass the necessary bills.
By this time, national xenophobia had begun to rely less on violence and more on high-minded appeals to science. Beatings, burnings, and lynchings of unpopular newcomers gradually declined in the first decades of the century. Americans of northwestern European and British origin now turned to the flourishing discipline of eugenics to explain why they alone represented the genetic foundation of a new, improved human race recognizable by fair coloring and commanding height. The rest of the world was awash in short, dark-skinned specimens whose physique denoted their mental and moral inferiority. America owed it to herself to keep them out—Italians and other swarthy sons of southern Europe, Polish or Russian Jews, and of course “Asiatics,” an elastic category including anybody born east of Suez but especially damning when applied to Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and people from all of Southeast Asia.
Senator Albert Johnson of Washington State—which had an aggressive anti-Asiatic history—led the charge in 1921. His “emergency” bill to head off foreigners passed without even token opposition. Aided by postwar controversy over national security threats including Russian Bolshevism and genetic degradation, it established immigration quotas for every nation on earth outside the Western Hemisphere.21 By 1924 Representative David Reed of Pennsylvania had joined the fray. The 1921 act had set annual quotas at 3 percent of the number of persons from any given nation living in the United States in 1910. Horrified at the thought that this arrangement would loose floods of undesirables into East Coast states to overwhelm “the American born” and defeat the aim of “keeping American stock up to the highest standard,” Reed teamed up with Johnson to introduce a much more restrictive bill.22
This draconian measure, the Johnson-Reed Act or National Origins Act, set national quotas at 2 percent of 1890 U.S. census figures. Entry for Russians and Poles (code language for Eastern European Jews) was almost eliminated. China’s quota would have been effectually reduced to something under 2,200 a year if not for a handy rider forbidding persons ineligible for naturalized citizenship (i.e., nonwhites, under the 1790 Naturalization Act) from coming at all.23 Among a tiny handful of opponents in either house, thirty-eight-year-old freshman Representative Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn resolved to overturn Johnson-Reed if it took the rest of his career. It did.
In the early years of Exclusion, many Chinese-born manual workers throughout the Far West simply gave up and returned to a motherland now undergoing merciless humiliation at the hands of foreign powers—not least, the Japanese. Meiji Japan, inspired by the plundering zeal of Western interests in the Far East, had first managed to wrest Taiwan and a chunk of southern Manchuria from the enfeebled Qing Empire in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. Ten years later the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 resulted in Japanese annexation of all Manchuria, the ancestral home of the Qing. Between these two victories, Japan joined the United States and six European nations in an armed expedition that ended the bloody antiforeigner and anti-Christian insurrection known as the Boxer Rebellion by occupying and sacking Beijing itself in the summer of 1900. If anything could have brought more rage and despair to Chinese workers already battling to maintain a precarious existence in the Pacific Coast states, it was that, at least for the time being, state and federal authorities were inviting China’s great Far Eastern enemy to become the preferred source of West Coast farm labor in place of the nearly banished Chinese.
Chinese on the Move
Almost from the start of the Gold Rush, the Chinese had simultaneously pursued opportunity and avoided racist violence by fanning out into the boondocks. But when “Chinese Must Go” campaigns intensified after the Civil War, they were still mostly concentrated in California. So were the most rabid anti-Chinese demagogues.
With the changing fortunes of mining and then railroads, Chinese laborers first spread into many parts of the Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain territories, soon to be states or Canadian provinces. California remained the greatest center of settlement. But Oregon, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana as well as British Columbia and the Canadian Northwest Territories had begun to attract scattered Chinese communities in the 1850s and 1860s, as shown by Henry George’s 1869 complaint about a mean and filthy “Chinatown” blighting every Pacific Coast hamlet. Seeking occupations beyond mining or track-laying, the Chinese found nativist ill-will threatening almost any kind of physical work that they put their hand to. Many or most men of the laboring class eventually would face a toss-up of two career options meant to disguise their laborer status: laundries or restaurants. Other hopes were successively closed in their faces.
Along the California coast, the Chinese who had pioneered in exploiting rich local fisheries were soon driven out of the business by whites. Newly arrived Genoese and Sicilian fishermen used threats, intimidation, and a racially weighted licensing system to rid San Francisco Bay of Chinese competition.24
Equal hostility greeted Chinese would-be fishermen farther north. They soon fell back on less independent opportunities as factory workers in the salmon canneries that began opening along the Sacramento River and the major northern Pacific waterways as far as British Columbia and Alaska during the 1870s and 1880s.25 But their virtuosic skill at cleaning, gutting, and deboning salmon brought them steady employment only until an automated device began doing the job more than ten times faster than any human. Perfected in the first decade of the twentieth century, the new machine was universally known as the “Iron Chink”—i.e., Chinaman. “There is a suggestion of the Inquisition about that name,” a Canadian journalist commented in 1909, “but the ‘Iron Chink’ is an instrument of good, never of evil. It does away with a large number of Chinamen, and therefore is very popular in British Columbia.”26 The device never eliminated all Chinese labor in the canneries but greatly curtailed it and left the remaining workers dependent on extortionate contracts.
South of the border, Oregon soon became the state with the second-largest concentration of Chinese, most of them clustered in Portland. Like compatriots elsewhere in the Far West, they turned to vegetable gardening and peddling as an endeavor calculated to both put familiar foods on their own tables and appeal to a white clientele. In the mid-1870s a colony of Chinese began erecting shanties west of the Tanner Creek Gulch, directly opposite downtown Portland, and laying out garden plots. For several decades the “Chinese Vegetable Garden” neighborhood supplied much of the city’s fresh produce before being squeezed out by an athletic club and field.27
In mining country a few hundred miles to the east, still more remarkable patches were sculpted from soil that most American farmers never would have bothered with. Examining a stretch of steep terrain along the South Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho in 1982, the archaeologists Jeffrey M. Fee and Mark Arnold came on an area where Chinese settlers had painstakingly dug and smoothed out the precipitous ground, foot by foot, into an uncanny likeness of the terraced fields their ancestors had built in southern Guangdong. It was one of at least five terraced gardens known to have existed in this vicinity—luckily less hostile to Chinese mining claims than many others—during the 1880s and 1890s.28
In most of the Far West, savage anti-“Chink” outbreaks impelled thousands to put a wide distance between themselves and Kearneyite lynch mobs. Some followed the mining trail eastward as either miners or founders of small “service” businesses, trekking through Nevada and Wyoming as far as the Black Hills of South Dakota. (Deadwood, South Dakota, had a well-known Chinese community for sixty or seventy years.) Many were recruited for construction projects in different regions of the country. One famous instance brought a contingent of Chinese laborers to Augusta, Georgia, in 1873 to widen and deepen a pre–Civil War canal originally built to accommodate freight traffic along the Savannah River. It does not appear that anyone else paid them further notice once the canal project was finished. But in succeeding years, handfuls of Chinese managed to put down roots in the city. Others ended up in Atlanta.29
The idea of importing Chinese labor from the Far West (or possibly China) occurred to many builders of rail connections in the Southwest and South, and at times brought some months or years of reliable employment to scattered groups. For a few decades after the Civil War, plantation owners frustrated by the loss of slave labor in the Mississippi Delta also tried recruiting Chinese to work cotton or sugar fields. The new employees, however, proved surprisingly stubborn about holding white bosses to the terms of contracts as they (the workers) understood them, and ready to walk off the job for perceived affronts. The main legacy of the experiment was a sprinkling of Chinese who stayed on to found neighborhood grocery stores throughout the delta, sometimes intermarrying with local blacks but mostly occupying an uncertain niche in a society that otherwise recognized only two racial categories.30 Some gravitated to New Orleans, where a well-known Chinese quarter thrived from the 1880s into the 1920s.31
Meanwhile, Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountain Chinese (sometimes together with surreptitious border crossers or loophole-exploiting new arrivals from Guangdong) began finding their way from embattled western outposts into most of the East Coast and midwestern states. They came either singly or in tiny increments that eventually coalesced into substantial Chinatowns or tiny Chinese outposts in major or minor cities as well as some large towns.
The New Chinatowns
Chinatowns in the Midwest and along the East Coast tended to follow a somewhat predictable pattern. Most of them got off to an inconspicuous start between 1870 and 1875 with the founding of some pioneer business that attracted others at an accelerating pace. At first, outsiders regarded the larger ones in a somewhat sensationalistic light, as potential haunts of opium fiends or addicts of other forbidden pleasures. (The 1909 disappearance of a New York missionary’s daughter named Elsie Sigel, whose body eventually turned up in a Chinatown tenement along with bundles of love letters to two Chinese wooers, pumped much tabloid-fueled energy into this line of thought.32) But as time went on, American Chinatowns emerged as accepted parts of city landscapes, generally represented by respectable members of some CCBA who worked at discouraging the more lawless tongs and maintaining courteous relations with mainstream municipal authorities.
Manhattan, a somewhat atypical case, had had handfuls of ill-documented Chinese-born sailors, peddlers, and miscellaneous residents floating around the waterfront for a few decades before a distinct Chinese community began to form. New York Chinatown’s first chronicler, Louis J. Beck, cited one Wo Kee and his general merchandise store—originally located in a dockside area of today’s Two Bridges neighborhood—as the decisive seed. By the early 1870s Wo Kee, also known as Wong Acton, had made a couple of moves that eventually landed him at a strategic spot on Mott Street, still the heart of today’s Chinatown.33
St. Louis Chinatown had gotten a slightly more organized start a few years earlier, after some 250 former railroad workers arrived from San Francisco in 1869 looking for employment.34 Philadelphians have usually identified Lee Fong’s laundry on the 900 block of Race Street as the original magnet for the city’s Chinatown.35 The Chinese Historical Society of New England points to three laundries operating on Harrison Avenue, Tremont Street, and Shawmut Avenue in 1875 as founding elements of Boston Chinatown.36 In Chicago it would be the brothers Moy Dong Chow, Moy Dong Hoy, and Moy Dong Kee, energetic scions of a notable Toisan clan, who got the ball rolling after about 1875.37
The usual Cantonese name for any Chinatown was tong yan gai, meaning “street of Chinese people.”38 The largest new examples belonged to New York and Chicago. Between 1880 and 1930 their official Chinese populations (certainly smaller than the real totals) rose from, respectively, 747 and 172 to 8,414 and 2,757. Such growth occurred at the expense of the San Francisco Chinese community—which shrank from 21,745 to 16,303 during the same period—and other Far Western Chinatowns.39
Most Chinatowns were not just residential communities but supply depots and recreational oases for many Chinese living in other neighborhoods or even some distance away from a particular metropolis or town. Any tong yan gai had “service” businesses including Chinese barbershops and doctors’ shops as well as grocery stores with the crucial ingredients that had been arriving on Gold Mountain from the beginning. Now, however, they might also stock some imported canned products such as bamboo shoots—especially welcome in the scattered small Chinatowns that were less likely than big cousins to have access to the fresh article.40
Restaurants fed the community’s cultural lifeblood. People obliged to live in non-Chinese neighborhoods (a growing trend for laundrymen) happily traveled to Chinatown at the end of long work weeks, eager to reconnect with their own culture and enjoy a good restaurant dinner.41 The arrival of modern gas and electric utilities had made it not easier but more difficult for many workers to prepare a proper meal for themselves than it had been in sardine-style Far Western living quarters, where they could usually cook (either indoors or in the street) in woks on small braziers. In eastern and midwestern cities they were likely to find themselves in rented rooms with even less access to cooking facilities—probably at most an American gas or electric hot plate, nearly useless for stir-frying. The major Chinatown restaurants, however, could give all comers a taste of home. They commanded excellent fresh greens and vegetables grown on nearby Chinese farms. For many years they used big wood-fired brick stoves that could accommodate enormous woks for flash-cooking over the roaring heat that everybody from laundryman to chef recognized as the sine qua non of wok flavor.42 After about 1910 these would be replaced by powerful gas ranges specially built for the Chinese restaurant industry.
The Changing Face of Chinese Labor and Chinatowns
The shortness of urban memories ensured that within a generation or so any Chinatown would appear to whites as if it had always been there, complete with laundries, restaurants, and various exotica-laden shops. From the Chinese point of view, the many Chinatowns that had spread out across the United States by 1915 or 1920 offered better shelter than the rudimentary Far Western Chinatowns decried by Henry George more than forty years earlier. Of course, the original labor battle was now officially lost. The problem was finding occupations that the immigration authorities would not construe as infringing on the prerogatives of lawful (i.e., white) American manual labor.
In Chinese communities large and small, the initially preferred line of work was laundering, followed by the restaurant trade. At first, both seemed attractive as enterprises that took relatively little capital to start up, didn’t involve large payrolls, and could be conducted with almost no English. These same qualities, however, quickly roused the suspicions of immigration officials on the watch for excluded manual laborers. After all, anyone trying to avoid deportation could wash a couple of shirts or boil a pot of noodles and pretend to be a laundry or eatery. Prudent people soon realized that creating business partnerships involving several principals and a payroll of a few employees was the soundest legal strategy. At least on paper, it put them into the lawful-resident class of businessmen. Many followed the natural (for Cantonese) strategy of going into partnership with “cousins”—that is, men with the same surname and presumed kinship ties.
For a few decades, laundries were the default occupation of most Chinese ex-laborers living in the orbit of city Chinatowns. Their great disadvantages were the physically punishing nature of the work itself and the fact that no one could attract white customers without settling as close as possible to white neighborhoods, at a remove from Chinese companionship. In addition, the business itself was rapidly changing. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, big mechanized facilities powered by steam were taking over much of the business. (In fact, one of these at Belleville in northern New Jersey had been the first industrial employer to recruit Chinese workers in the vicinity of New York.43)
The Chinese at first attempted to position themselves as specialists in washing and ironing shirts and other articles that had to be finished by hand with delicate attention to detail. But even in the hand-laundry business, Chinese laundrymen in the major cities incurred hostility and accusations of price gouging from white competitors. During this period many began moving from large to smaller cities with less organized labor opposition. Some even founded hand laundries in dozens of little country towns that might not have a single other Chinese resident. After about 1920, however, a new challenge arose in the form of home washing machines.44
Luckily, an alternative to laundering was already at hand. Inspired by trends in the great metropolises, Chinese laundry proprietors in small cities and the hinterlands began to shift to the restaurant business.45 The whole restaurant enterprise was now acquiring a hugely enlarged emphasis on cooking for non-Chinese patrons in settings saturated with quasi-Chinese atmospheric touches. America’s Chinatowns had gained a new allure as tourist attractions. Some tinge of the former vice-district sensationalism remained, but it was quickly being replaced by artificial evocations of local color.
San Francisco had shown the way. After the 1906 earthquake the city’s seriously dwindling and shabby Chinatown managed to muster enough political clout to avoid forcible relocation to another district and consolidated this victory by rebuilding its shattered remnants in a deliberately chosen Shangri-La architectural style. This act of self-reinvention proved to be a permanent draw for white visitors marveling at gilded pagodas, tiled roofs with turned-up corners, and other “Oriental” motifs.46 The neighborhood’s Chinese restaurants, already clever at invoking a storied Cathay for the benefit of Western diners, fell in with the chinoiserie ploy.
The growing Chinatowns in the East and Midwest soon adopted elements of the same strategy. None did such an extravagant job of pseudo-Sinification as San Francisco, but most put some thought into atmospheric tourist-geared touches—including tourist-geared restaurant food. A heaven-sent gimmick had appeared a decade earlier, just in time to galvanize the white community’s attention.
The New Frontier of Chop Suey
By historical destiny or luck, an early stage of the Chinese exodus from the Far West to other regions coincided with one of the journalistic feeding frenzies that fueled turn-of-the-century American newspapers. In 1896 the rapidly sinking Qing regime dispatched the august statesman and general Li Hongzhang—or Li Hung Chang in Cantonese transliteration—on a round of state visits to Western powers including the United States. Arriving in New York on August 28 amid swarms of reporters and even film crews, he was feted for the next few weeks in several American cities before departing for the Pacific Coast via Canadian railway—conspicuously bypassing California, in protest against the state’s notorious maltreatment of Chinese. During his stay at the Waldorf Hotel in Manhattan, reporters wrote breathless accounts of seeing the hotel kitchen commandeered by a troop of Chinese master cooks preparing dishes to the distinguished visitor’s palate. A handful of supposed recipes appeared in New York newspapers, to be picked up by lesser publications elsewhere.47 At some point attention became fixated on an exotic masterpiece called “chop sui,” and from then on various popular accounts seized on the garbled idea that Li, or his cooks, had introduced America to chop suey.
Today food historians know that Li Hung Chang and his cooks did no such thing. But his obsessively scrutinized visit did have the effect of getting all things Chinese in the news. Chop suey, as understood or misunderstood by the American press, was an immediate benefactor. Thanks to the age’s mass communications, by 1900 it was all the rage among fashionable diners everywhere—the first “crossover” dish to leapfrog from any foreign cuisine to American tables throughout the land, and one of the most durable in its new incarnation.
The turn-of-the-century era was marked by an insatiable national hunger for novelty and glamour. The founders of major chop suey restaurants during this period astutely read the market and responded with just what was wanted: an atmosphere that breathed opulent exoticism. In major cities where restaurants could be launched by large, well-funded partnerships, the decor might cost a small fortune. Joy Hing Lo’s opening in Chicago in the summer of 1908 was heralded by a full-page puff piece in the Daily Tribune fulsomely proclaiming that not only would “chefs who understand every detail of food making in China . . . follow the native recipes to the letter” in preparing “dishes such as are served to the mandarins themselves” in the Celestial Empire, but no expense had been spared on the furnishings:
The walls are of Chinese green and Chinese yellow beautifully intermingled and are paneled alternately with richly colored silk heavily embroidered and mirrors that reflect the light of thousands of incandescent lamps concealed beneath softly shaded oriental lamps and swinging lanterns. At intervals the great room, which occupies an entire floor, is divided by gilded columns serpentined by dragons richly carved by native workers. Around these columns at comfortable distances are the richly carved and ornately inlaid teakwood tables, 68 of them in all.48
Restaurants like Joy Hing Lo occupied one glittering stratum in major metropolitan Chinatowns or other districts where white patrons expected a lavishly atmospheric dining experience. In the same neighborhoods, the more plebeian establishments popularly called “chop suey joints” or “noodle parlors” usually made at least token efforts to invoke the exotic Orient. Depending on location and marketing strategy, restaurants on both levels might be good enough to attract Chinese patrons as well. The outlying cousins of metropolitan Chinese restaurants also did their best to provide at least a few Oriental touches in the form of hanging lanterns and silk tassels.
The success of chop suey would usher in the next stage in Chinese American career opportunities. American-targeted Chinese restaurants extolling their authentic chop suey proliferated in all regions of the country between the eve of World War I and the approach of the next war. They would lastingly stamp particular notions of “Chinese food” on the non-Chinese community. Their eventual growth to a permanent feature of small-town as well as metropolitan life was made possible by a new demographic bend in the road: an unforeseen resurgence of the Chinese American population.
From a Floating to an Anchored Immigrant Community
By a twist of fate that neither the “America for Americans” partisans nor the Chinese in America could have anticipated, the enactment of Johnson-Reed in 1924 occurred just as the natural birthrate of the persecuted community was starting to redraw the picture. Coming as it did sixteen years into Exclusion, the 1898 Wong Kim Ark decision about the birthright-citizen status of children born in this country had narrowly preceded a sharp decline in the total Chinese American population. But a couple of decades later, it was about to produce a lasting turnaround.
The total Chinese or Chinese-descended population in the mainland United States had fallen to a fifty-year low of 85,200 in 1920. After that, however, it began a remarkable comeback not predicted by anybody. The main reason was that only now, forty years after the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act, had the distorted male–female ratio had a chance to correct itself through births within the community.
With an improved balance of the sexes, second- and even third-generation Chinese Americans could be born in this country, passing on the privileges of citizenship to their children. Between 1920 and 1930, the number of Chinese in the United States rose to about 102,160.49 The “paper son” dodge may have accounted for a few thousand. But marriage and childbearing were the chief factor.
This reversal marked the first emergence in seventy years of a Chinese American immigrant community comparable to other immigrant communities. Only now did a family physically present in America become the primary social unit for people of Chinese origin. Thousands of second- and third-generation Chinese American children—daughters as well as sons—now attended American public schools. While still very small they started learning English, the unfathomable language that most of their elders could speak only in broken form and couldn’t write at all. Many doors remained closed to them as members of a despised minority. That, however, was true of nearly everyone who couldn’t boast English or Teutonic origin. Eventually these youngsters would confront questions of self-definition and American versus old-country loyalties in ways somewhat recognizable to other immigrants’ children.
Intense anti-Chinese hostility had died down for several reasons. Now that the Chinese had been substantially drummed out of the farm labor market, Japanese laborers were the usual targets of anti-Asiatic campaigns in the Far West. The insane logic by which white Americans had denounced Chinese men as failing to lead decent family lives and meld into the cultural and economic fabric of the United States while simultaneously barring them from becoming naturalized citizens and discouraging their women from joining them, no longer galvanized protestors. A limited amount of melding took place on at least marginally amicable terms.
Households on the male breadwinner / female homemaker model became more of a norm. So did wives and mothers who cooked for husbands and children as they had done in China, though now with much more independent access to the outside world. For the first time on American soil, meals shared by father, mother, and children became as commonplace among Chinese as anyone else. One clear difference was that Chinese men had a hands-on savvy about cooking seldom matched among male members of other immigrant groups. Almost without exception, men, women, and children alike loved talking about what they were eating, armed with loud opinions and a deep understanding of ingredients and techniques.
The growth in the number of families living together in a relatively safe and peaceful North America was probably the most important factor behind the emergence of family-owned chop suey restaurants well outside the orbit of the older big-city Chinese communities between about 1910 and World War II. During the buildup to Exclusion and the first grim years after its passage, many had found refuge through the road to Chinatown. But as the community managed to regroup on a protected immigrant footing, the road from Chinatown would prove equally crucial. It was instrumental in securing Chinese food—in strategically altered form—a lasting acceptance among the larger American public.