CHAPTER 7

The True Story of Ah Jake

LANGUAGE, LABOR, AND JUSTICE IN LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY SIERRA COUNTY, CALIFORNIA

Mae M. Ngai

MYRIAD CIRCUITS OF TRADE AND MIGRATION composed the Pacific world in the nineteenth century, connecting East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australasia, and the Americas, and creating throughout this world contact zones, new settlements, and cultural borderlands.¹ This essay is a microhistory that finds in a strange and unusual case—a murder trial of a Chinese gold miner in California—larger social and cultural patterns of colonial and race relations. Specifically it finds in the transpacific circulations of language and diasporic labor organization problems of legibility and translation that are immanent of cultural mixing and collision.

My interest in this case was sparked by the transcript of the Sierra County court’s hearing in October 1887, on whether to bring the charge of murder against Ah Jake,² an unemployed Chinese gold miner, for the killing of another miner, Wah Chuck. The transcript, as we will see, is remarkable because much of the hearing took place in neither English nor Chinese, but in pidgin, or Chinglish. Throughout the hearing the judge, the district attorney, the defendant, and the Chinese interpreter all spoke in pidgin. For example, the judge asked the defendant if he had any witnesses to call: “You want some man swear?”

Pidgin is a contact language, a language of borderlands—typically colonial or trading borderlands—in this case, California’s racial borderlands. Researchers often speak of following the people, or the money, or the “thing” in order to track social processes across time and space. Here, I follow the language to pursue greater historical understanding of ethno-race relations in the borderlands of the eastern Pacific world. At another level, Ah Jake’s trial transcripts allude to deeper histories of Chinese-diasporic social formation in the nineteenth century. The present case offers evidence of the circulation of not only linguistic forms but also labor and social organization among the Chinese in the Pacific world. Drawing from common sources in southern China, these formations assumed local variation within the political and cultural economies of Southeast Asia, Australia, and North America. In this essay I hope to show that diasporic and comparative methodologies may afford a richer understanding of social relations in particular sites, in this case, the nineteenth-century California interior.

Although it is unremarkable to note that Chinese miners in California lived at the margins of white society, the use of pidgin in a county courtroom suggests, rather than a simple marginalization, the existence of a contact zone. What was the nature of that contact zone and the social relations it produced? Comparing the characteristics and uses of pidgin in California to that of pidgin in the colonial trading ports of Guangzhou (Canton) and Hong Kong reveals the former to be much less robust than the latter. The differences, I argue, index the relations of power between pidgin-speaking Chinese and Euro-Americans in California and China, respectively. I argue further that the story of Ah Jake offers a more nuanced portrait of Chinese-white relations than those in conventional narratives about the exclusion and driving-out campaigns that swept the North American Pacific coast in the 1880s. Ethno-race relations were not altogether negative and, moreover, could serve to include Chinese, however precariously, within the conventional norms of American justice.

The murder victim in this case, Wah Chuck, does not, of course, speak at trial; nevertheless, court records suggest that he belonged to a secret brotherhood society and a small mining cooperative. These social formations, which traversed the Pacific world in the late nineteenth century, were nearly invisible to contemporary white observers. They have remained largely so to later historians of the United States owing in part to a scarcity of sources, but also to problems of historiography. Disjunctive research agendas and scant exchange characterize the fields of Chinese American history and U.S. labor history, a surprising disjuncture in light of a history of cross-fertilization of immigration and labor histories.³ With regard to the issues under examination here, Chinese American scholarship has focused mostly on social organization and politics with little attention to the organization of labor in the nineteenth century.⁴ Meanwhile, labor and economic historians have persisted in the view that Chinese labor in the nineteenth-century United States was unfree, on the mistaken grounds that Chinese clan and district associations held Chinese workers in bondage through labor contracts and debt peonage.⁵ A close reading of the trial records of this case with attention to the broader context of the Pacific world opens up new grounds for understanding the contours of diasporic Chinese social history and the “Chinese question” in Euro-American racial politics.

Let us turn to the story of Ah Jake and how he came to stand trial for murder. We do not know when Ah Jake first came to the United States, but it was probably some time in the late 1860s or early 1870s.⁶ Like the overwhelming majority of Chinese migrants in California at the time, he hailed from the siyi (four counties), an impoverished region of Guangdong province in southern China. He lived at Texas Bar, near the “joss house” (temple) built by Chinese miners on the bank of Goodyears Creek, not far from where the creek flowed into the North Yuba River. The river and its many little tributaries had yielded a lot of gold in the early 1850s—thousands of prospectors descended upon the area, including many Chinese, and stories abounded about miners finding gold nuggets weighing twenty pounds and more. Goodyears Bar, the main settlement at the junction of Goodyears Creek and the North Yuba, was a thriving gold rush town that included a sawmill, which provided lumber for mining infrastructures, and a large Chinese settlement at the northeast side of town.⁷

In the 1880s several hundred Chinese still lived in towns and small settlements near the sites of old gold claims in the vicinity of North Yuba River. Their housing comprised cabins roughly hewn from logs or rocks, or sometimes bark dugouts, alongside the hand-stacked rock walls and old raceways they had built for their sluice boxes in the 1850s and 1860s.⁸ Ah Jake still did a little mining along the creek with his uncle, but, as he explained at trial, “just now no mine now.”⁹

On the morning of October 20, 1887, Ah Jake set off for Downieville, the county seat about four miles away, to “buy grub” for himself and his “partner,” Ah Chung, and to repair a pair of the latter’s boots. In one pocket he had $4.65 and, in another, in a “little carpet sack,” two gold pieces worth $30. He carried a pistol and a dirk (a small knife), which was his practice when he traveled with money on his person. When walking on the main stage road that connected Downieville and Sierra City, he ran into two acquaintances, Wah Chuck and Ah Ting. Ah Jake and Wah Chuck quarreled over a $20 loan that Ah Jake had made to Wah Chuck in July of that year. In Ah Jake’s telling of the encounter, he told Wah Chuck that the loan had come due, but Wah Chuck refused to pay him and in turn accused Ah Jake of stealing from him a pair of boots and a sack of rice. In the ensuing argument and altercation, Ah Jake shot and fatally wounded Wah Chuck. Ah Jake fled the scene and managed to hide out for two days in attic of a cabin of Chinese miners near Forest City, some ten miles away, before he was apprehended.¹⁰

A hearing on whether to bring the charge of murder against Ah Jake was held before F. D. Soward, the magistrate judge of Sierra County. Lo Kay, a Downieville grocer, was sworn in as an interpreter to assist with the examination of Ah Ting, Wah Chuck’s traveling companion and the only witness to the alleged murder.¹¹ Lo Kay’s knowledge of English and his contact with the local power structure likely derived from his customer base among white residents. However, Lo Kay did not speak English well; instead, he spoke pidgin. More interesting perhaps is that the district attorney and judge also spoke in pidgin when addressing the witness and interpreter. Consider the following:

Q (Smith, the district attorney): When Ah Jake shoot Wah Chuck, what Wah Chuck do?

A (Lo Kay, translating for the witness, Ah Ting): You mean Ah Jake shoot, what Wah Chuck do?

Q: Yes.

A: No say anything at all.

Q: What he do after he get shot? After he get shot what he do?

A: You mean Wah Chuck?

Q: Yes.

A: He say he fell down; no do nothing; no do anything.

Q: He bleed any? … Did he got back to where Wah Chuck was?

A: No. …

Q: Did he see him dead afterwards?

A: He see him down here, no see him dead that place. … He say he see him Funk Kee store; outside door; take him down buggy; see him that time.

DEFENDANT: He no see him dead; he lie.¹²

Ah Jake had already interrupted Ah Ting’s testimony twice, interjecting in Chinese (Lo Kay: “He say he don’t know what he say”) before resorting to Chinglish to challenge the witness, but the judge ordered Lo Kay and Ah Ting to ignore him.¹³ However, because Ah Jake did not have legal counsel, the judge accorded him the opportunity to cross-examine the witness:

CORT. TO DEFENDANT. Q: You want to ask him some questions?

DEFENDANT: Me askum him.

COURT: You want to ask him some questions?

DEFENDANT: He lie; he lie too much.

COURT: You don’t want to ask him any questions?

DEFENDANT: Wah Chuck give him my money—

COURT: You don’t want to ask him any questions? You like to ask him some questions this man. You don’t want to ask any question this man.

MR. SMITH: That is all I want to question this witness.

DEFENDANT: He talk lie.¹⁴

Ah Jake did conduct a spirited cross-examination of the next witness, S. C. Stewart, the sheriff, and put forth his own case that he shot Wah Chuck in self-defense. He spoke directly to the court in pidgin rather than risk having his words mediated by the interpreter, whom he seemed to believe was complicit with Ah Ting’s lying. The reader will forgive the lengthy excerpt:

DEFENDANT: You see up here hole me fall? You see hole that stage road?

STEWART: I see two places.

DEFENDANT: One place down river; one place down river; up road; two places, one place down river me fall down; you no see that time; you see up here two time?

STEWART: There were two places; two marks in the road—

DEFENDANT (ILLUSTRATING ON FLOOR): He lay me down that way; he hold my queue that way; me tell him let me up; he no let me up. (Witness lays on floor making motion, etc., many of his remarks being unintelligible.) …

STEWART: All I know about it there were two marks in the road there.

DEFENDANT: One mark in the road down side river; one mark down side; one mark up side—I catch him that side; he catch me that side. He shoot me I no know—I burn my coat—I no see him; he fight me back side; he catch my queue that way … he make me scare—I no kill him, he kill me; he strong me. …

COURT: You want to ask him some question. … You got any witness. You want some man swear?

DEFENDANT: I no got man swear. Everybody help him. He talk lie (pointing to Ah Ting). He talk lie; he no say take my queue; put on floor; he no talk. … He no hold my foot I no fall down at all; first time he take my bag money; catch my money put him pocket … he [Wah Chuck] say he kill me; I get scare. … He no rob my money I no shoot him. … He say killum me; make me scare. … I think make him scare let me up; he say “You shoot me I no care G—d—s—b—.”¹⁵

We may safely assume that Ah Jake and Wah Chuck spoke to each other in their native Chinese, in this case, in siyi, a subdialect of Cantonese. An interesting question arises as to whether Wah Chuck uttered “You shoot me I no care G—d—s—b” just as it appears in the transcript, that is, in Chinglish or if he spoke in Chinese but swore “G—d—s—b” in English (what linguists call code switching),¹⁶ or if he spoke entirely in Chinese and Ah Jake translated his Chinese swearing into the common American-English epithet. Each possibility suggests a different kind of language translation or hybridization, in which speakers mixed Chinese with English phrases or translated idioms not literally but through cultural common knowledge.

Before analyzing the transcript further, we might pause to consider the reliability of the document as historical evidence. The court reporter was Adolph Meroux, a twenty-two-year-old French American, who ordinarily worked as a clerk in his father’s grocery store in Downieville. Meroux probably used shorthand to record testimony (machine stenography had just been introduced in the early 1880s) and then later transcribed it with a typewriter. Meroux may have had some familiarity with pidgin (perhaps being spoken with Chinese customers in his father’s store). Otherwise he would have had some difficulty recording pidgin testimony with shorthand, which relies upon both phonetic symbols and preset styles for common words and phrases in English. The complexities inherent to language communication—the processes of “translation” that link cognition, speech, reception, and cognition—are made more difficult in transcription and more difficult still when recording an unfamiliar dialect. No court transcript can be considered a verbatim documentation of a proceeding, including Meroux’s. At the same time, Meroux’s transcript shows an absence of correction that contemporary transcribers sometimes made to eliminate traces of vernacular speech and other marks deemed unsuitable for official records. Meroux also honestly recorded where he failed to comprehend the speaker (“many of his remarks being unintelligible”), rather than, for sake of pride or efficiency, elide gaps in his understanding. In the case of Ah Jake’s hearing, Meroux’s transcript can be considered a fairly reliable representation of the proceedings, at least insofar as we can rely on any text as historical evidence.¹⁷

What else can we learn about language and translation from the exchanges in the transcripts? At one level, it is tempting to read the judge and district attorney’s use of pidgin as an infantilization of their speech, a condescension toward Ah Jake and Lo Kay. Did Ah Jake understand “Have you got lawyer man?” but not “Do you have a lawyer?” It is possible that the court’s officers believed Ah Jake’s ignorance of English indexed a general condition of ignorance, a common presumption held by Americans about those of non-European and non-English-speaking origins. This analysis of the transcript follows our experience with pidgin on the printed page, used by white writers to represent the speech of racialized subjects. The modern reader cringes when presented with dialogue written in dialect. But the courtroom is an arena of the spoken word, which is highly contingent and functions in real time. In that context the judge and district attorney’s use of pidgin appears less as mocking and more as a sincere effort to communicate with the defendant. They reached for the language they used when they engaged with local Chinese, a house servant, perhaps, or the garden farmer.

In any case, it can be argued that pidgin was the lingua franca of the proceeding. This pidgin derived from Chinese English Pidgin (also called Canton Jargon by contemporaries), the contact language of Guangzhou, Macao, and Hong Kong that developed during the colonial China trade. “Pidgin” is a corruption of the word “business” (itself shortened from “pidginess”): “pidgin English” means “business English.” Chinese Pidgin English is characterized by reduced grammatical structure (lack of copulas, plurals, verb tense, definite articles, etc.) and certain phonological inventions (replacement of [r] with [l], e.g., “tomollow”; and insertion of vowels [i] or [u] to word endings, e.g., “lookee”). Its vocabulary draws from English, Portuguese, Hindi, and Cantonese: A Mandarin, a government official, comes from the Portuguese verb “mandar” (to command); joss derives from “deös.” Lac is from the Hindi number for one hundred thousand. A chop, from the Hindi “chhap,” for seal, or stamp, is a document of any kind—an invoice, an imperial edict, a receipt, a bill of lading (the latter a chop boat). A servant sent on an urgent errand is told to go “chop chop”—a clever combination that uses the likely object of the errand (fetching or delivering a document) with the Chinese syntax of repetition, recalling kuai kuai (lit. fast fast), or hurry. Chinese Pidgin English, in service of European-Chinese business in the exchange of tea, silks, opium, hemp, and silver that was the stuff of the early colonial China trade, was linguistically creative and vigorous.¹⁸

Outside of the trading house, however, pidgin had limited uses. It was spoken in the colonial household with servants but did not carry over to judicial or diplomatic venues, where precision and nuance in language carried a high premium. Under the colonial convention of extraterritoriality, Europeans living in China’s treaty ports were not subject to Chinese law, but when they had occasion to appear in a Chinese court as plaintiffs or as witnesses, interpreters were used. In diplomacy and treaty writing, the British were scrupulous about controlling language. Their diplomats spoke only through their own interpreters, and they wrote into the Treaty of Tianjin (1858, following the Second Opium War) a provision that the English-language version, and not the Chinese, would determine the final meaning of official communications.¹⁹

The pidgin spoken by Chinese migrants in California was similar to that used in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, but there seem to have been important differences. While the syntax was similar, not surprisingly American English and American social practices shaped Chinese-American pidgin. There were local word forms and importations from other ethno-racial vernaculars, like “askum” and “sarvie” (savvy).²⁰ More important, nineteenth-century American-Chinese pidgin seems much less robust than its colonial antecedent. It did not evolve from sustained interactions between Chinese and whites as it had in China, but was mainly the product of Chinese migrants’ efforts to engage with their new environment, by learning, as one observer described, the “few necessary words and sentences, to assist in mining, traveling, bartering, marketing, and procuring various kinds of employment.”²¹

White Americans engaged with Chinese occasionally but not regularly or in sustained engagement, as in China’s treaty ports, and may have acquired just a passing familiarity with pidgin. At Ah Jake’s trial, the judge and district attorney speak pidgin awkwardly. They mimic imperfectly its syntax, do not use pidgin’s novel vocabulary or phonology (“killum”), and resort to clumsy repetition: “You don’t want to ask him any questions? You like to ask him some questions this man. You don’t want to ask any question this man.”²² Arguably they are not speaking pidgin at all. Linguists contend that pidgin, like any language, must be learned and “cannot be produced by an ad-hoc simplification of his or her own language.”²³

The pidgin of late-nineteenth-century Sierra County denotes the social location of Chinese as a group of ethnic outsiders with regular but limited contact with the mainstream of society. It is a contact language at the very margins of society and not, as in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, a central constituent of a vibrant market where parties met, if not as equals, as contenders. The limitations of Chinese-American pidgin English are manifest in the California courtroom: it simply does not have the depth to express complex ideas or to address the contingencies of a trial court examination. At Ah Jake’s hearing, linguistic confusion and misunderstanding at times overwhelmed the parties’ ability to communicate. If the British deemed pidgin inadequate for legal proceedings in China, its appearance in a Sierra County court of law suggests the extreme marginality of its Chinese residents.

Insofar as the court did provide an interpreter—the pidgin-speaking Lo Kay—the transcript does not record the primary testimonies given orally in Chinese, only the interpreter’s translation into pidgin. Those voices are forever lost, unavailable to an appeals court and, beyond, to history. Here we come upon an important difference between the translation of written texts and that of oral testimonies. In either case, a “good” translation, that is, one that is faithful to the original, is not a mere transfer or substitution of words from one language into another. Translation is not a replication but the production of yet another, wholly different text, in which the meaning of the original is expressed anew. But, whereas the fidelity of a translation of a written text may be judged by comparing it to the original, in oral accounts and testimonies the original vanishes as soon as it is uttered. The written original retains its status as the original and hence its authority; in oral interpreting the translation usurps the authority of the original utterance. No wonder, then, that the monolingual migrant often feels himself or herself to be at the mercy of the court interpreter.²⁴

Ah Jake, whose English/Chinglish was comparable to Lo Kay’s, realized that he would gain nothing from Lo Kay’s interpreting, so he spoke for himself. But Ah Jake’s limited knowledge of English was compounded by his lack of proficiency in yet another language: law, the language of the court. He attempted to show how Wah Chuck and Ah Ting assaulted and robbed him, but he did not know how to make his case through the conventions of a criminal proceeding. He declined the opportunity to cross-examine Ah Ting, dismissing him as a liar and not understanding the necessity of revealing his lying through cross-examination.

Perhaps because of Lo Kay’s linguistic limitations and owing to the gravity of the charge against Ah Jake, the court hired the services of a professional interpreter for the trial. The interpreter was Jerome Millard, a Euro-American who worked for the criminal court in San Francisco.²⁵ Millard had come to California during the gold rush, traveling from Michigan by oxcart on the “early road.” He befriended and worked with Chinese miners, favoring them over whites, he said, because they did not drink alcohol, and learned Chinese. In the 1860s he supervised the first Chinese labor gangs hired by Charles Crocker and Company for building the transcontinental railroad. By the 1880s he was working full-time as a translator for the criminal court in San Francisco, one of some twenty-odd professional foreign-language interpreters (French, German, Russian, Japanese) employed in the city’s courts and customs house. Millard welcomed occasional assignments to “the country” to translate for “important case[s].”²⁶

Millard, who was nearly six feet tall and wore a large handlebar mustache, must have cut an imposing figure in the courtroom. Witnesses testifying through the interpreter Millard speak in standard English and, possibly, assume some of his bodily authority. Ah Jake appears to be a different person than the Chinglish speaker in the previous examination transcript: “I have worked at cooking for whites whenever I could get work, and other times I have worked at mining.” “He pulled me down by the cue on the ground, as I have here shown [showing] and struck me again. I then got up and he struck me again and it hurt me and I fell in the road. … I was then very mad and says I: ‘You got my money and won’t pay me and strike me’ and he says: ‘I like to strike you.’ ”²⁷

Ah Jake also had legal representation: two lawyers, A. J. Howe, a local retired judge, appointed by the court, and Bert Schlessinger, a young attorney new to Downieville, hired by Ah Jake’s clan association. They contended that the defendant, overwhelmed, assaulted, and robbed by two men, acted in self-defense. Unfortunately the only eyewitness to the event, Ah Ting, did not support that account. The prosecution argued that Ah Jake had robbed and killed Wah Chuck and then returned to the scene of the crime, where he created marks in the road to give the appearance that a scuffle had taken place. As evidence of this theory the district attorney produced two white witnesses, who testified that they had seen Ah Jake shortly after the incident and that he did not have dust on his clothes or in his hair or face, and also that he was pretending to cry.²⁸

The jury convicted Ah Jake of murder in the first degree, apparently finding the testimony of the defendant unpersuasive in light of contradicting testimony by Ah Ting and the two white witnesses. The jurors also seem to have heeded the judge’s instructions that the “will, deliberation and premeditation” required for a first-degree conviction applied even if only a few seconds lapsed between thought and action.²⁹ The court sentenced Ah Jake to death by hanging; a motion for a new trial was denied.³⁰ It would appear that Ah Jake fared no better with the aid of professional translation and legal counsel than he did representing himself in pidgin. The conviction and sentence strike us as an unsurprising outcome of a trial in which Ah Jake had only a “Chinaman’s chance.”

As it turned out, though, Ah Jake was not hanged. Prominent white citizens of Downieville appealed to Governor Robert Waterman to commute the sentence to life imprisonment. They included Jerome A. Vaughn, editor of the Mountain Messenger and a county supervisor, and Charles Kirkbride, the Methodist minister, who wrote letters; some fifty others signed two petitions, citing “grave doubt” as to the guilt of Ah Jake, including among them the town’s elites and middling citizens: merchants, lawyers, the superintendent of schools, a notary, miners, a cabinet maker, a jeweler, a surveyor, the telegraph and express agent, and the court reporter. Six of the jurors, including the foreman, asked that the sentence be commuted. Two local citizens who had been at the crime scene shortly after the incident and testified at trial as witnesses for the prosecution wrote the governor to say that they believed a scuffle between Ah Jake and Wah Chuck had taken place there.³¹

Of greatest consequence was an affidavit submitted by Sheriff S. C. Stewart. That document offered a detailed explanation of his examination of the crime scene and his opinion that the marks in the road showed not only that there had been a fight but also that Ah Jake’s footprints (he was barefoot after his assailants took his boots) did not track back to the scene of the crime. Judge Soward wrote a letter in support of the sheriff and stated that Ah Jake’s lawyers did not mount a proper defense, as they did not elicit full testimony from the sheriff at trial and, moreover, argued with each other in open court.³²

What accounts for this outpouring of support and the sudden appearance of evidence not adduced at trial? Many of the petitioners stated that they did not know Ah Jake personally but that they were moved to speak out because a grave injustice had been committed. Although Ah Jake was surely not the first Chinese miner in Sierra County to be wrongfully convicted of a crime, the case did give a strong appearance of self-defense. Still, someone had to mobilize the community to produce the petitions, letters, and affidavits. I believe that person was Stewart, the sheriff, aided by Vaughn, the newspaper editor.

Sheriff Stewart was a longtime resident of Goodyears Bar. He was a former lumberman at the sawmill there, and he testified at trial that he had known Ah Jake for some number of years. He may have regretted that his testimony about the track marks on the Downieville stage road was not fully elaborated when, after the conviction and sentencing, the judge issued a death warrant that “command[ed] and require[d] [Stewart] to execute the said Judgment … by hanging the said Ah Jake by the neck until he is dead.”³³ Only four people had ever been officially executed in the history of Sierra County—three in the 1850s (including an Indian named Pijo who had killed two Chinese miners) and the last in 1885, James O’Neill, as punishment for murdering his employer. As sheriff, Stewart was committed to enforcing the law, and he had in fact hanged O’Neill.³⁴ But Ah Jake’s case seems different: Stewart knew Ah Jake, and he knew Ah Jake was not guilty of first-degree murder. Perhaps the prospect of hanging him was chilling. Stewart brought his concerns to Judge Soward and to Jerome Vaughn, editor of the Messenger.³⁵

If pidgin was the contact language that marked the space where Chinese and Euro-American social worlds overlapped in Sierra County in late 1880s, that space had been under construction over the course of some thirty years, since the time of the gold rush. Various points of engagement developed and persisted among these “longtime Californ’,” both Chinese and white: selling vegetables, buying grub, changing gold dust to coin, cooking and domestic service, missionary work. Such contact did not (and could not) produce among the white people an intimate knowledge of the Chinese around them, but neither did the former regard the latter indiscriminately as anonymous Chinamen. Ah Jake had worked as an occasional cook for white people, including Vaughn, the newspaperman,³⁶ and his relations with white people seemed to be friendly.³⁷

But whereas at least some local white citizens considered Ah Jake to be a good man and spoke in the language of clemency on his behalf, no white people described the dead man, Wah Chuck, as a good man and none demanded justice for him. Wah Chuck was even more marginal to white society than was Ah Jake. Unlike Ah Jake, he did not work for white people. He lived farther out of town, at a small Chinese mining encampment at China Flat, along the South Yuba River, about halfway between Downieville and Sierra City. He came into Downieville occasionally to buy provisions for his “company” and to visit the Chinese gambling house. His patronage there may have prompted the Mountain Messenger to declare, “Ah Jake bore an excellent character, whereas that of the deceased was notoriously bad.”³⁸

Wah Chuck did have powerful Chinese advocates: handsome rewards were offered for Ah Jake’s arrest and, later, for his conviction, with the size of the reward pegged to the severity of the conviction. (Indeed, the pidgin interpreter Lo Kay reportedly paid out a $100 reward to Sheriff Hartling, who had arrested Ah Jake in Forest City, although the court apparently did not consider Lo Kay’s affiliation with Wah Chuck’s people a conflict of interest.) Local whites said that Wah Chuck belonged to a bigger and more powerful native place association than did Ah Jake, but in fact they both were members of same association, the Hop Wo Company (Hehe huiguan), which represented several clans from the siyi region. They even may have been from the same lineage, with “Jake” and “Chuck” being transliterations of the same surname.³⁹ But Wah Chuck also may have been affiliated with the sworn brotherhood society, the Chee Kong Tong (Zhigongtang). Sworn brotherhoods in China were mutual aid societies found mostly among socially marginal men with weak familial and native place ties. During the early nineteenth century, sworn brotherhoods in Guangdong and Fujian provinces, the Hongmen (lit. flood gate, or vast family) and Tiandihui (heaven and earth society), respectively, were fervent anti-Manchu activists. The Zhigongtang was formed in Southeast Asia, Hawaii, and North America in the 1850s and 1860s by Hongmen and Tiandihui members, who fled China as the Qing suppressed the Taiping Rebellion.⁴⁰

A few bits of evidence suggest Wah Chuck’s affiliation with the Zhigongtang. In Downieville, as in other small California towns, the largest and most well-appointed building in the Chinese quarter was the lodge of the Zhigongtang, which likely gave Euro-Americans the impression that it was the most powerful organization among the Chinese.⁴¹ Zhigongtang lodges typically housed an altar for the brotherhood’s patron gods and halls for ritual exercise and meeting. In California the secret societies also controlled gambling and other vice industries, and Wah Chuck was an inveterate gambler.⁴²

Even more provocatively, Wah Chuck was a partner in a “company” of seven miners that appears to have functioned collectively. One of Wah Chuck’s partners, Ah Fock, testified at the trial that as treasurer of the group he had sent Wah Chuck to town on that fateful day to purchase provisions from the butcher and grocer. He clarified that he was not the group’s “boss” but “merely” its “treasurer … at the time,” who “took charge of the [gold] dust as it came out” and kept the groups accounts with local merchants.⁴³ The company described by Ah Fock bears a canny resemblance to the egalitarian labor organization common among Hakka (an ethnic minority in southern China) in Southeast Asia, especially on the gold fields of West Borneo. Called kongsi (gongsi, company), their partners held equal shares and had no boss or headman, but elected officers to serve on a rotating basis. And they were associated with the Hongmen.⁴⁴

There is evidence of small “cooperative ventures for river mining” in California during the 1860s and through the late nineteenth century. Federal census enumerators in 1890 wrote of some one hundred Chinese working at mining along the North Yuba River—in the vicinity of Downieville—“scattered in about a dozen companies” with modest equipment (wing dams, water wheels, rotary pumps, sluices, and the like) and with aggregate net earnings of $10,000 to $20,000 a year (or $200 per man, about $4,500 in current dollars).⁴⁵ Wah Chuck must have belonged to one of these companies. More broadly, the state mineralogist reported in 1889 that two-thirds of the 10,000 to 12,000 Chinese miners in the state worked “on their own account [individual prospectors] or for companies composed of their own countrymen,” with the balance working for whites.⁴⁶

If, as we know, the Zhigongtang throughout the Pacific world shared identical ritual symbols and practices, its mode of labor organization also seems to have traveled across the diaspora. Chinese mining cooperatives in both Southeast Asia and North America derived from southern China, where itinerant groups of independent miners operated with internal principles that were egalitarian: they drew no wages but shared profits, and were often members of sworn brotherhoods.⁴⁷ Chinese miners in California may well have drawn from these traditions, whether from general knowledge or from direct experience.⁴⁸

The small companies noted in the mineralogist’s report also drew from antecedents in China. These were typically formed by a local merchant who acted as investor and manager, and which operated either with cash wages or, more likely insofar as yields were meager and sporadic, in shares. A minority of Chinese miners worked for wages for white-owned hydraulic, ditch, and even deep quartz mining companies. Rossiter Raymond, the U.S. Commissioner of Mining Statistics, wrote in 1871 that the charge that Chinese were unfree was born of politics, not fact. “Chinese here are not coolies,” he wrote emphatically. “They are quite ready to accept the best wage they can get. They even combine, like other folks, in unions, where that is possible.”⁴⁹

If Raymond understood that Chinese were not coolies, his readiness to generalize that they were “like other folks” (i.e., free-white labor) remains invested in the norms of liberal individualism. While I appreciate Raymond’s antiracism, I believe we need to think beyond the unfree-free binary to understand the subject positions of nineteenth-century Chinese. Chinese gold miners seem to have combined in their practices and in their thinking elements from non-bourgeois collectivities like the sworn brotherhoods and the modern capitalist-labor market.⁵⁰

* * *

The white support for Ah Jake is particularly remarkable in light of the anti-Chinese “driving out” campaigns that swept the Pacific coast during the middle and late 1880s. Mob violence and threats of mob violence enforcing “sunset” resolutions were ubiquitous in California and other western states, a veritable second wave of extralegal terror that recalled the violence against Chinese in the mining districts in the 1850s and 1860s. In the 1880s campaigns had far broader reach, targeting Chinese laborers brought in on seasonal contracts for mining, lumbering, and fishing, as well as established Chinese communities. During the spring of 1886 anti-Chinese associations in the mining areas of Sierra County agitated for the firing of Chinese from all local establishments and for boycotting those that persisted in employing Chinese. In fact by this time the local quartz mines and sawmills in Sierra County employed Chinese only as cooks or launderers; all the waged production workers were Euro-Americans. But the campaign did succeed in pressuring Downieville hotels to fire Chinese kitchen workers.⁵¹

Yet there also were white residents who were not antagonistic toward the Chinese because the latter performed useful services at low cost—cooking, laundry, and garden farming. Some thought the anticoolie leagues were “abusive”; others complained they simply could not afford the products or services of white labor.⁵² Ah Jake’s case reminds us that anti-Chinese agitation was the work of a specific political movement and was not hegemonic among white Californians. It suggests also that even as Chinese labor was driven out of many areas, Chinese remained in towns and counties throughout the California interior, living at the margins of society but nonetheless part of the local fabric, and still engaged with whites as employers, customers, and neighbors.

In November Governor Waterman commuted Ah Jake’s sentence to life in prison. Citing evidence not adduced at trial, a lack of competent counsel, and petitions from prominent citizens, the governor concluded that Ah Jake had acted “to a certain element in self-defense” and that there was a “reasonable doubt” as to whether he had committed murder in the first degree. On November 28 Ah Jake was committed to Folsom Prison.⁵³

About a year later Lo Kay, the occasional interpreter, told Sheriff Stewart that Ah Ting, the deceased Wah Chuck’s traveling companion (who had since returned to China) had given him a different version of the killing than the story he told at the trial. There were also rumors in Downieville that Lo Kay had been promised a large sum of money for Ah Jake’s conviction. In light of this information Judge Soward asked the governor to grant Ah Jake a full pardon.⁵⁴

Ah Jake also wrote to the governor directly. His letters were written in formal English in a neat hand, perhaps by a prison scribe or minister. “I was sent to Folsom Prison for defending my Life and Property for life,” he wrote. And, “My friend Mr. Spaulding writting [sic] from Downieville tells me that all of my papers are in your hands and Dear Sir I do hope that you will let me go as I have borne with as much fortitude my punishment one possible could do.” He added that he was in poor health and submitted a letter from the warden attesting to his good behavior.⁵⁵

Finally, on December 30, 1890, a few days before the governor left office, Ah Jake received a full pardon. In his statement, Waterman said that he was “convinced that Ah Jake is an innocent man and should be restored to his liberty.” On January 1, 1891, Ah Jake walked out of prison a free man.⁵⁶

Ah Jake was not the only Chinese person in nineteenth-century California to receive an executive pardon.⁵⁷ Chinese prisoners received pardons for good behavior,⁵⁸ for serious illness,⁵⁹ and, most frequently, as Ah Jake’s case, when conviction was based on insufficient evidence or perjured testimony.⁶⁰ Prosecutors often had little evidence to bring a conviction, and white people in general professed difficulty distinguishing one Chinese person from another, especially when trying to recall the details of a crowded scene. Contemporaries routinely cited language and cultural barriers as the main problems in trying criminal cases involving Chinese. Some local prosecutors dismissed charges against Chinese for want of evidence, while others were determined to “round up the usual suspects” and press for a conviction even when evidence was weak and witnesses lacked credibility. In granting pardons, the governor often referred to “doubt as to his guilt,” “a conspiracy on part of Chinese witnesses,” “circumstances [that] have come to light which tend to establish his innocence,” and the like.⁶¹

In bringing a motion to dismiss charges against one Ling Ying Toy in 1897, Sacramento district attorney F. D. Ryan stated that “Chinese cases” were the “most difficult to try, because they involve a character of witnesses that … makes it almost impossible to get a fair understanding of the testimony, because it necessarily has to come through an interpreter; and it has been my experience in Chinese murder cases, that, usually, it is one society or organization against another. … [I]n dealing with this class of people, the crime of murder is committed as a matter of revenge … and that the killing of one Chinaman usually results in the killing of another.”⁶²

Ryan referred to the so-called tong wars that periodically erupted among rival Chinese brotherhoods in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the tong wars practiced the idiom of blood feuds, common to many premodern corporatist cultures, more practically they involved jurisdictional conflicts over control of the vice trades (opium, prostitution, gambling).⁶³ Although the dispute between Ah Jake and Wah Chuck does not appear to have been related to a tong war, the case did involve a problem of perjured testimony from the witness Ah Ting, as well as an effort by Wah Chuck’s people to influence the proceedings by promising a reward to witnesses who helped achieve a conviction. The revelation of Ah Ting’s perjury (as Ah Jake had declared, “he talk lie”) was one of the key justifications for the governor’s pardon.

The practice of granting pardons to convicted Chinese on grounds of perjured testimony is an ironic outcome of broader contemporary judicial opinion that Chinese could not be counted on to tell the truth. During the nineteenth century a body of law evolved in western territories and states that restricted or excluded testimony from Chinese witnesses and defendants in both criminal and civil cases. In California, People v. Hall (1854) established testimonial exclusion on simple grounds of racial inferiority—like blacks and Indians, Chinese victims and witnesses could not testify against white defendants.⁶⁴ Courts also justified testimonial exclusion, more generally, even when defendant and victim were of the same ethno-racial group, on grounds that Chinese did not understand the sanctity of the Christian oath. In a somewhat mechanistic way, some courts disallowed Chinese testimony because the court could not properly swear in Chinese witnesses. Some judges conceded that Christians were not the only people who valued “truth” and allowed non-Christians to be sworn in according to their own cultural precepts regarding truth telling and lying. But, more often, a proclivity toward lying was deemed to be a racial trait of the Chinese, a critical index of their barbarism. Testimonial exclusion was a pillar of racism against Chinese and Native American Indians in the criminal justice system in nineteenth-century California and other western jurisdictions.⁶⁵ That this widespread racist belief should come full circle to vindicate Chinese convicted for capital crimes is a small wonder of history’s unintended consequences.

After Ah Jake received his pardon he returned to Goodyears Creek and there he remained for the rest of his days, even after fire destroyed the main Chinese settlement in Goodyears Bar in the 1890s and most Chinese relocated to San Francisco. He continued to mine for gold, scratching out a bare living, going to Downieville once a month to sell what little gold dust he accumulated. He remained dogged by the notoriety of the murder trial, his reprieve from the gallows, and his eventual pardon, but his reputation was surprisingly uneven. In 1927 the town constable John Mason wrote that Ah Jake “always was an all around bad man,” citing the time that he robbed the Chinese gambling house in Downieville of $1,700 in coin and pledges. When confronted by Mason, Ah Jake gave himself up immediately and took the constable to an abandoned mine where he had buried “the loot.” The constable also recalled that Ah Jake recently had been injured by a large fallen rock and lay pinned for two days until someone found him.⁶⁶

In Mason’s telling, Ah Jake seems less like an “all around bad man” than a hapless and pathetic creature with limited and failed acts of agency. Here we might find in Ah Jake a resemblance to Ah Q, the iconic character of the famous short story by Chinese modernist writer Lu Xun. Ah Q was a foolish figure, whose extreme ineptness and rationalizations for his failures symbolized China’s flaws during the interwar years.⁶⁷ Both Ah Q and Ah Jake stand as a figure for the Chinese “every man.” What had been Orientalized as barbarous and backward in the nineteenth century had become, in the twentieth, dangerous only to the Chinese themselves. Indeed, if at Ah Jake’s trial in 1887 the judge and district attorney spoke pidgin without irony, by the 1920s white society considered pidgin undignified and parodic, its speakers stupid. After many years of exclusion and marginalization the racial image of Chinese had shifted from that of racial menace to that of racial children, whose use of pidgin—tellingly also called broken English—signaled limited intellect and stunted psychic development. At best, stereotyped pidgin conveyed a picturesque exotic. In Hollywood’s Charlie Chan movies (1920s–1940s), the detective (played by white actors) sprouted Confucian-like aphorisms in pidgin—“joy in heart more desirable than bullet,” “perfect case like perfect donut, has hole.”⁶⁸

In a similar vein, Albert Dressler, a German American resident of San Francisco, published in 1927 a little book called California Chinese Chatter. The book comprised documents Dressler had found in Sierra County—including the transcript of Ah Jake’s court hearing and a cache of telegrams exchanged by Chinese to and from Downieville in 1874. Dressler wrote that although the documents at times appeared “comical,” it was not his intention to “lampoon.” Rather, he said he wished to show a “heretofore unnoted aspect of California’s melting pot.” Notwithstanding his proto-multiculturalism, Dressler was clearly taken by the “color abundant and diversified”—that is, the picturesque—in the pidgin documents; an aspiring artist, he also illustrated Chatter with cartoonish Chinese figures (Figure 7.1). Framed in this way, the courtroom transcript morphs into racist caricature. Underscoring the sense of the project, the California state librarian acknowledged Dressler’s telegrams as the “basis for a series of ‘queer queue tales.’ ”⁶⁹ It would not be until the second half of the twentieth century that Asian American writers, notably Louis Chu, Milton Murayama, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Lois Yamanaka,⁷⁰ produced a literary Chinglish, weaving it into the dialogue of their novels, rescuing it from its debased status of shame and stereotype and transforming it into a language that, as literary critic Evelyn Chi’en proposes, “refuses ventriloquism and becomes a voice of self-affirmation,” that is, a language that is constitutive of ethnic identity.⁷¹

Ah Jake’s fuller voice and life still elude us. We’ve never heard his voice in his native tongue, in Chinese, only in Chinglish, or through the interpreter Millard and the Folsom Prison scribe, described as a good or bad man by his white neighbors, or, in Dressler’s hands, as a stereotype of the West in its “rough and ready days.” Today, Ah Jake is remembered on the Internet for being the last Chinese to live in Goodyears Bar. He was “much loved and respected by the local people for his helpfulness,” including the time he helped a white lady when she was thrown from her horse into the snow.⁷² Such stories of the last Chinese man, imagined as the lonely object of white people’s love, befit the websites promoting tourism to the ghost towns of Sierra County.

Through these various mediated voices in the historical record, “Ah Jake” emerges as a series of ethno-racial subjectivities imposed upon him from without. And yet, Ah Jake struggles mightily to be heard above the cacophony of voices that claim to speak for him, even as him, and about him. His agitation in the courtroom—his interjections, his excited speech in Chinglish, and his acting out of the deadly fight with Wah Chuck and Ah Ting on the courtroom floor—reveal his agency, his acts of self-defense on the stage road and before the law. There may not be much more to know about Ah Jake’s life and travails or his worldview. But the traces of history apprehended from his trial and pardon, when considered within the frame of transpacific circulations of people, language, and organization, produce new knowledge about social relations in the late-nineteenth-century California interior.