Chapter Eight
The addition of California to the United States made it easier for Americans to conduct business with Asia across the Pacific Ocean. It also opened the way to emigration from Asia, as people from China began crossing the Pacific to Californian ports, especially San Francisco.
In 1848, soon after the United States acquired California in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a policymaker named Aaron H. Palmer sent a plan to Congress. Palmer predicted that San Francisco would become a booming hub of commerce. He also recommended that the United States import Chinese workers to build the transcontinental railroad and to farm the fertile lands of California.
Chinese and European workers building the
transcontinental railroad, 1869.
Pioneers from Asia
A year after Palmer proposed his plan, Chinese migrants began arriving in America, but they came for their own reasons. China was torn by war, rebellion, high taxes, floods, and famine. These harsh conditions drove many Chinese people to seek survival in America.
At the same time, America seemed to beckon. Hearing about the Gold Rush, Chinese gave California the nickname Gam Saan, or Gold Mountain, the land across the sea. Many of the younger, more impatient, and more daring Chinese men left their homes to seek their fortunes. America promised not only gold but also opportunities for employment. In the 1860s a laborer in China could earn three to five dollars a month. In California he could work for the railroad and make thirty dollars a month.
The Chinese migrants were mostly men, planning to work abroad temporarily. They were illiterate, or had little education, but they dreamed of new possibilities. Their goal was to earn money in America and return to China, prosperous and successful. As they prepared to leave their farms and villages, they said goodbye to their wives and families, knowing they would not see them again for years. But they promised to return someday.
And so they left China, by the hundreds and thousands. By 1870 there were 63,000 Chinese in the United States. More than three-fourths of them were in California, but they lived elsewhere in the West, the South, and New England. The Chinese made up a sizeable share of the population in some places: 29 percent in Idaho, 10 percent in Montana, and 9 percent in California.
By 1930 about four hundred thousand Chinese had made the Pacific crossing. About half of these immigrants stayed in America and made the United States their new home. They could not hope to become US citizens, however. A law called the 1790 Naturalization Act said that only white immigrants could become naturalized citizens.
Working in America
At first California seemed to welcome the Chinese, but as their numbers increased, the political tide began to turn against them. From the goldfields came the cry, “California for Americans!” In 1852 the California legislature answered that cry by passing another miner’s tax. Every foreign miner who did not intend to become a US citizen had to pay three dollars a month, which was a significant amount at the time. The tax was aimed primarily at Chinese miners, who were prevented by law from becoming citizens. They were trapped in a state of being foreigners forever.
During the 1860s, two-thirds of the Chinese in America worked in the California goldfields. Most were independent prospectors, but sometimes they organized into small groups and formed their own companies. Clothed in blue cotton shirts, baggy pants, and wide-brimmed hats, the Chinese miners were a common sight in the California foothills. By 1870 California had collected a total of five million tax dollars from the Chinese immigrants—between a quarter and half of the state’s entire income.
Then mining profits started to fall, and the Chinese began leaving the goldfields. Thousands of them, along with newly arrived immigrants, went to work on the railroads. The building of the Central Pacific Railroad, the western part of the first rail line across the entire country, was a Chinese achievement. Chinese workers laid tracks, operated power drills, and handled the explosives needed to blast tunnels through Donner Summit. During the winter of 1866 they lived and worked in tunnels under sixty-foot snowdrifts.
Chinese railroad laborers worked for lower wages than whites. When the white laborers demanded that Central Pacific stop hiring the Chinese, superintendent Charles Crocker told them that if they could not get along with the Chinese, he would have only one alternative: to fire the whites and hire more Chinese. When the Chinese workers went on strike and asked for the same wages as whites, Crocker isolated the strikers in the mountains and cut off their food supply. After a week the starving workers were back on the job.
After the completion of the Central Pacific Railroad in 1869, thousands of the Chinese workers went to San Francisco, where many of their fellow immigrants were living. The industrialization of San Francisco developed hand-in-hand with the growth of the city’s Chinese community. In 1860 San Francisco had just over 2,700 Chinese residents. Ten years later, it had more than 12,000, a quarter of California’s Chinese population. Half the labor force in four of San Francisco’s key industries—boots and shoes, woolens, cigars and tobacco, and sewing—was Chinese.
Meanwhile, in rural regions the Chinese were contributing to the agricultural industry of California, helping the state to shift from farming wheat to growing fruit. Some Chinese agriculture workers became tenant farmers, working on white-owned land in exchange for half the proceeds from selling the crop. These workers had been experienced farmers in China. They shared their knowledge, teaching their employers how to plant, cultivate, and harvest the crops of orchards and fields. They also shared their skills and techniques in building dams and irrigation systems, turning swamplands into fertile fields. By 1880 more than two-thirds of the farm workers in Sacramento, Solano, and Yuba counties were Chinese.
Targets of Resentment
Chinese workers became targets of white labor resentment, especially during hard times.
“White men and women who desire to earn a living,” reported the Los Angeles Times in 1893, “have for some time been entering quiet protests against vineyardists and packers employing Chinese in preference to whites.” Those protests soon became violent. Economic depression led to brutal anti-Chinese riots by unemployed white workers throughout California. Immigrants from China were beaten, shot, and loaded onto trains and shipped out of town.
Ethnic hostility in the mines, factories, and fields forced thousands of Chinese into self-employment. They opened stores, restaurants, and especially laundries. Many chose laundry work because it was easier and less expensive to open a laundry than to start other businesses. A Chinese laundryman needed only a stove for heating water, a trough for washing, space for drying things, a place to sleep, and a sign. Laundrymen did not even need to speak much English to carry on their business.
But Chinese laundrymen were also pushed into this occupation. Laundry work was not a traditional man’s occupation in China, but in America it was one of the few opportunities available to them. The laundry represented a retreat from a labor market that offered limited possibilities.
As Chinese immigrants struggled to earn a living, Americans debated what role the Chinese should play in their society. One view was that the Chinese should remain a permanent class of foreign laborers, working under the direction of white foremen and directors. This idea was rooted in the racist notion that “American” meant “white.”
Not all Americans were comfortable with the idea of a large, permanent class of Chinese laborers. Many of the negative ideas and images that had been associated with African Americans and Native Americans were applied to the Chinese, too. The Chinese were called savage, childlike, immoral, and pagan. All three groups shared a common identity: they were people of color. This was made clear in 1854 when California’s state supreme court ruled that “Chinese and other people not white” could not give evidence against whites in court. California also passed a state law banning marriage between a white person and an Asian, black, or mixed-race person.
In 1879 President Rutherford B. Hayes issued a racist warning to the American people about the “Chinese problem.” He said, “Our experience in dealing with the weaker races—the Negroes and Indians—is not encouraging. I would consider with favor any suitable measures to discourage the Chinese from coming to our shores.”
Banned by Law
Three years after Hayes’s warning, Congresspassed a law called the Chinese Exclusion Act. It prevented Chinese laborers from entering the United States for the next ten years, and it specifically stated that the Chinese who were already in the country could not become citizens. At that time the Chinese made up just 0.002 percent of the US population, but the fears and forces behind the Exclusion Act had little to do with numbers. Chinese men were seen as threats to racial purity.
Something had gone wrong in America, and an age of economic opportunity seemed to be coming to an end. The economy took a downturn. Unemployment rose as thousands of men and women were thrown out of work. In this context of economic crisis and social strife, the Chinese were seen as outsiders who came to “steal” the jobs of white Americans. Support for the Exclusion Act was overwhelming. The law was renewed in 1892, and in 1902 it was extended indefinitely into the future.
Meanwhile, the Chinese fought discrimination. Time and time again they took their struggle for civil rights to the courts. Although the Chinese failed to gain the right to citizenship, Chinese merchants succeeded in winning some protections under the 1870 Civil Rights Act, which guaranteed people of color the same rights as white people to make contracts, give evidence, and be protected by law. They also overturned the Foreign Miner’s Tax.
But guarantees of equal protection by federal law had little effect on what happened in society. The Chinese continued to be victims of racial violence. “The Chinese were in a pitiable state in those days,” recalled Kin Huie, describing life in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1870s. “We were simply terrified; we kept indoors after dark for fear of being shot in the back. Children spit upon us as we passed by and called us rats.”
Chinese Americans in a tenement in San Francisco’s
Chinatown, around 1890.
Chinese Women in America
Although the great majority of Chinese immigrants were men, a few Chinese women did come to “Gold Mountain.” In 1852 there were about tweleve thousand Chinese in California. Seven of them were women. By 1900 about 5 percent of the nation’s ninety thousand Chinese were women.
Chinese tradition and culture limited the possibilities of migration for women, who were expected to be obedient to fathers, husbands, and sons. Women were also left behind because it would have been expensive to bring them, and because the men thought they would be gone only temporarily. In addition, conditions in America—including harsh frontier life, hard work, and racial hostility—discouraged women from joining their husbands. In the view of many white Americans, letting Chinese women and families enter the country would threaten a “white man’s country.”
Before the Chinese Exclusion Act, however, some men had been able to bring their wives to America, or to have women sent over to become their wives. One such man was Chin Gee Hee, who arrived in Washington Territory in 1862 and found work in a lumber mill. Within a few years he sent for his wife and got her a job in the mill’s cookhouse. Their son, Chin Lem, was born in 1875. He is believed to be the first Chinese American born in Washington.
Another Chinese wife braved the difficulties of traveling across the Pacific to join her husband in California, where she sewed garments and made cigarettes to support herself and her child while her husband worked in the mines.
Slowly, Chinese families began to form as men left the mines and railroad crews for more stable jobs in farming or shopkeeping. In the early decades, however, most of the Chinese women who came to America came alone, often brought by force to serve as prostitutes. Some sank into opium addiction or died from abuse or disease. Many of them, however, managed to buy their way out of servitude. Marriage and children became possibilities for them because there were so few Chinese women available.
A Colony of Bachelors
A big problem for Chinese men was that there were not enough Chinese women. The Exclusion Act outlawed the immigration of Chinese women as well as laborers. After the Act was passed, the prospect of bringing a wife to America disappeared for most Chinese men. For the overwhelming majority of these immigrants, the future would not include a family in their adopted land. They became a colony of bachelors, men who had never married or who had left their wives in China and now could not bring them to America.
The Chinese had come to America with the idea of making a temporary stay, but from the beginning they showed signs of settling down. Chinatown in San Francisco was already a bustling colony in the 1850s, with dozens of stores selling Chinese groceries, clothing, medicines, and other goods for the ethnic community. New arrivals from China were drawn to the neighborhood. By the mid-1870s Chinatown was six blocks long, busy and vibrant. Immigrants also built Chinatowns in rural towns like Sacramento, Marysville, and Stockton, with businesses to serve the needs of Chinese miners and farmers.
Organizations were part of life in Chinese America from the start. Groups called tongs not only controlled criminal enterprises such as prostitution and gambling but also protected Chinese migrants. Other organizations called fongs were made up of family or village members. Clans were larger groups of fongs. These associations maintained clubhouses that served as residences and social centers for members. They established temples, helped people send letters home to China, and shipped the bodies of the dead back to the homeland for burial. The fongs and clans also helped new arrivals find housing and jobs.
Gradually, the Chinese were creating their own communities in America. They celebrated their own holidays and enjoyed performances at Chinese theaters. The many unmarried men gathered in social clubs and in the back rooms of stores, passing their lonely hours together in conversation and gambling, sharing letters from the villages and families in China that they would never see again.
An Earthquake Brings a Change in Fortune
Desperate to bring their wives and children to America, Chinese men looked for loopholes in the law. Laborers’ families could not immigrate, but the families of merchants could enter the country, so many laundrymen, restaurant owners, and other workers tried to pass themselves off as merchants. Still, most Chinese men thought that they would never be able to bring their wives to America. Then suddenly a natural disaster changed the course of Chinese American history.
Early in the morning of April 18, 1906, an earthquake shook San Francisco. Residents of Chinatown fled in terror from collapsing buildings. Then fires swept through the devastated city. Among the many things that were destroyed in the disaster were most of the city’s records. That opened the way for a new Chinese immigration.
Although Chinese immigrants could not become citizens, anyone born in the United States was automatically a citizen, no matter what his or her race. After the disaster, Chinese men who had immigrated could claim that they had been born in San Francisco—and they could not be expected to prove it, because everyone knew that birth certificates and citizenship records had been destroyed by the fire. And once a man was recognized as a US citizen, he could bring his wife and children from China.
After the catastrophe in San Francisco, Chinese women began arriving in increasing numbers. Between 1910 and 1924, one in four Chinese immigrants was female, compared with only one in twenty before 1900. By 1930 women accounted for one-fifth of the total Chinese population in America, providing the basis for Chinese American families.
Chinese sons also began coming to America at this time. According to US law, children of American citizens were also American citizens, even if they were born in a different country. This meant that children in China who had been fathered by Chinese American citizens could enter the United States.
Many of the young men who immigrated really were the sons of US citizens. But others were the sons of men who only pretended to be citizens, claiming that their birth certificates had been destroyed. Still others were not sons at all—they paid Chinese Americans to claim them as sons. The young men who entered the country under false pretenses were called “paper sons” because their citizenship existed only on paper.
By the thousands, Chinese began entering the United States again. After passing through the narrow waterway called the Golden Gate, they left their ships at an immigration station on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. There they were crowded into unsanitary barracks to await their entrance interviews. By 1943, some fifty thousand Chinese had entered America through Angel Island.
“Caught in Between”: Born in America
From Angel Island the newcomers went to the cities, seeking shelter, and employment in the Chinatowns of Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, New York, and Boston as well as San Francisco. Although there were Chinese in nearly all parts of the United States, the cities of San Francisco and New York were home to 40 percent of all Chinese in America by 1940.
Chinatowns became residential communities, business districts, and tourist centers. They also became places where children lived. In 1900 children were relatively rare in the nation’s Chinatowns. Only 11 percent of the Chinese population had been born in America. “The greatest impression I have of my childhood in those days was that at that time there were very few families in Chinatown,” one resident recalled. “Babies were looked on with a kind of wonder.” But thanks in part to the San Francisco earthquake and fire, the American-born Chinese group grew quickly to 41 percent of the population in 1930 and 52 percent in 1940.
In their Chinatown world, children watched their parents work long hours. Young children accompanied their parents to the factory—one Chinese American man remembered being tied to his mother’s back while she operated a sewing machine in a garment shop. The children were urged by their parents to study hard so they could have better lives.
For the second-generation Chinese Americans, education was viewed as a way to advance in society. Yet at home, two cultures sometimes clashed. Young people simply wanted more independence and more choice for themselves than their traditional parents allowed. Many youngsters experienced painfully torn feelings, pulled by their ethnic identity and by their desire to fit into the larger American society.
“There was endless discussion about what to do about the dilemma of being caught in between . . . being loyal to the parents and their ways and yet trying to assess the good from both sides,” said Victor Wong, a second-generation Chinese American. “We used to call ourselves just a ‘marginal man,’ caught between two cultures.”