Ghosts of Gold Mountain

by Gordon H. Chang

  The Siyi people spoke different dialects of Chinese that were incomprehensible to other Chinese not from the same region. These widely varying ways of speaking came to be known generically as “Cantonese,” which masks their considerable variability. The cultural, social, and ethnic mix of the region was rich and complex. Schooling was rudimentary for most but widespread. A few young men, including some who ventured to America, attained considerable learning, though most had only a very basic education.

  Guangzhou city, whose roots go back two hundred years before the Common Era, lay within reach by small boat along the lattice of waterways that ran through the delta. Since AD 226, it served as the center of imperial authority in southern China and over the centuries became one of the commercial hubs of Chinese life. It helped anchor the so-called ancient maritime silk road, the vital and rich seagoing trade route that linked the Chinese empire with Southeast Asia, the lands of the Pacific, South Asia, the Islamic world, and even faraway Africa.

  The Portuguese were the earliest Europeans who came by way of the ocean and initiated regular contact with Chinese along the Guangdong coast in the early sixteenth century. By mid-century they made Macao, a collection of small islands and a peninsula, the first permanent European settlement in East Asia. It was just about within sight from the coast of the Siyi.

  A hundred other small islands lay along the crenulated Guangdong coast. The waters provided a rich bounty of sea life, which the Pearl River delta people harvested with nets cast from their boats. They processed their catch for the fresh markets but also preserved it with salt and sun. They would do so similarly when they came to California. Their rice-based diet also drew from a huge variety of dried, salted, and fermented vegetables, preserved fruits, herbs, fungi, dried flowers and buds, teas, nuts, legumes, and spices, all of which enlivened their meals, the center of family and social interaction. The southern Chinese remained strongly partial to their food for reasons of taste as well as social custom after they came to America.

  The geography of the Guangdong coast made close central governmental control difficult and thereby promoted strong localism. Its proximity to the ocean and the possibilities it provided for distant travel also prompted an adventuresome spirit in its natives. The coastal region was a place from which one ventured out, but it also attracted smugglers, pirates, and foreigners who plundered, pillaged, and invaded, sometimes together symbiotically. The illicit opium trade promoted by the British beginning in the early nineteenth century first flourished in this very region. Opium brought from British colonial India flowed into the country along the porous shoreline. The accompanying banditry corrupted officials, debased society, and ruined the economy. Eventually millions, including many of those who migrated overseas, became addicted to the debilitating drug. The Anglo-Chinese War of 1839–1842, known as the First Opium War, began close by. The Siyi fishermen could easily hear the raging, thunderous cannon blasts and witness the sea battles between Chinese and British forces. In the Siyi’s “good earth,” human mobility, profound attachment to home, and social upheaval were all inextricably linked.

  The Siyi people rarely felt what a North American might describe as cold weather, as the southern China coastal climate was semitropical. Intense sunshine was the daytime default condition for most of the year. Temperatures ranged from an average in the high 80s Fahrenheit in the summer to the 50-degree range in the winter. Ample humidity made the air thick and heavy through much of the year. Rainfall could be torrential. Even in the months of November and December, rain might continue for days on end. Snowfall might occur once in a century. The weather allowed continuous farming throughout the year, permitting farmers to enjoy two or three crops annually. As befitted the climate and their labor, Siyi people for most of the year wore light, loose-fitting garments made from cotton, straw sunhats, and the barest of footwear to traverse the wet or dusty fields. Children ran around barely clothed at all. The Siyi people may have worn padded jackets in the winter, but they could not have imagined donning the thick woolens, heavy leather boots, dungarees, and protective outerwear that California’s mountains required for survival. Freezing temperatures and snow, and parched deserts such as those in Nevada and Utah, were known to them only from folktales and legends.

  The Siyi have distinct seasons and storms that can be especially ferocious. Monsoon storms occur seasonally: in the winter and summer they hit the coastal area with tremendous force and torrential rains. These make sailing difficult, especially in the winter months. Most fearsome is the typhoon, a circulating tropical cyclone that whips wind around at fifty to one hundred miles an hour. Winds in Hong Kong have been recorded as reaching 150 miles an hour. Typhoons were an annual occurrence, usually during the summer, and regularly caused widespread death and destruction. They also determined travel patterns. Early spring, right after the Lunar New Year, was a good time to leave because of weather conditions. During the holiday, gathered family members could express best wishes for safe travel and for finding good fortune across the seas.

  The people of the Siyi had deep attachments to their lands, but they knew they had not always lived there. It had been a frontier area in China’s long historical terms, and family genealogies and village histories documented that their ancestors had migrated from elsewhere in China long ago. Many had arrived from northern or central China centuries earlier. The Siyi people closely recorded their family lineages, which for them meant the male lines, in order to conduct the rites to properly revere one’s departed ancestors. By so doing, they also hoped to ensure that descendants would honor their own spirits for eternity. This central existential requirement shaped Siyi social life and culture and was faithfully continued in America. This focus on the family and ritual also meant that there was much shared knowledge about friends, families, and neighbors, including about those who emigrated.

  There is no known full description by any railroad worker of mid-nineteenth-century village life in the Siyi, but a remarkable memoir of a Siyi man named Huie Kin, who came to America in the same era as the Railroad Chinese, tells us what his village life was like in the 1850s and 1860s, when he was a child. Much later, in 1932, when Huie Kin was almost eighty years old, he reflected on his life in China and America and published his “reminiscences” to help others understand the history of Chinese in America. During much of his life, he served as one of the most prominent Chinese Christian ministers in the country.

  After coming to the United States, Huie, unlike most other Chinese immigrants, received a Western education and then settled in New York City, where he was the pastor of the First Chinese Presbyterian Church for almost forty years. He was never employed as a railroad worker, but he was well aware of the Railroad Chinese. He originated from the very same area as them and was raised in similar circumstances. His description of his childhood home, village, and local customs, presented in sensitive and poignant detail, is more than an individual story. It provides insight into a broadly shared experience. He arrived in America in 1868, just as the Transcontinental line was nearing completion.

  Huie Kin was born in 1854 in Wing Ning, a small village in Taishan County. The Huie (also known as Xu) clan had come from northern China two hundred years earlier, in the seventeenth century. His village was “not far from the sea,” as he described it, and was “tucked away among rice fields” and “hidden by mountain ranges.” The clues he provides suggest that his village, like many in the hills of Taishan, was humble but not destitute. He claimed that its isolation provided a bit of protection from the rampant social turbulence in southern China during his childhood. Though his home was “only ninety miles from the provincial capital of Canton [Guangzhou], we were almost entirely isolated from the rest of the country.” He knew nothing about the great events that were occurring not far away, including the devastating Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s that ravaged much of the province and the Second Opium War of 1856–1860, during which the British and French occupied Guangzhou for three years. Whether his igno
rance of the turmoil was a result of the village’s isolation or the innocence of youth is impossible to say.

  His family’s brick home was typically modest. He, his two brothers, and his father, along with the family cow, occupied one room that also served as the kitchen. His mother had the other room, and because the place was small, his two sisters slept in an ancestral temple at night or in the village home for unmarried girls. It was a place where they learned traditional female skills, arts, and ways from about six years of age. It was also where they had their feet bound, a torturous practice that many among the Han, the majority ethnicity in China, considered necessary to make girls attractive for marriage. Huie’s sisters joined their parents and brothers during the daylight hours to work in the rice fields. Shrines to three local deities (one that protected the family, one for the welfare of the animals, and one for the kitchen, the place of family sustenance) had their own dedicated spaces in the house. Protected rice chaff embers were always at hand for starting a fire in the coarse brick stove. The family was middling in socioeconomic terms, as were many that sent young men out to work overseas.

  Huie’s village, a hamlet really, was small—just fourteen households in total, or about seventy people who lived in close physical proximity. They were all related. The houses were alike in appearance and construction. Made from sun-dried bricks and covered with thatched roofs, they were built in a U-shape and housed two or more related families. This extended family, usually consisting of several generations, shared a common space, the central courtyard, where chickens and pigs also resided. The homes were built on a north-south axis, with the front opening to the south. A central hall physically connected the living units. It served as a place for worship, special functions, and receiving guests.

  The principles of feng shui, a belief system about the relationship of human and natural forces and their proper ordering, governed not only the placement of doorways, alleys, and home interiors but also the deliberate arrangement of the entire village itself. At its north end, considered its “back,” a thick bamboo grove protected the village from undesirable natural forces. Village common property lay at its “front,” and included a playground, communal well, and fishpond. Every three years, the right to raise, and then market, fish from the pond went up for public auction.

  The villagers, bound closely together by lineage and tradition, believed in a complex cosmology of the given world and human existence, which they took with them wherever they went, including to America. They believed that human effort could positively affect what the uncertain future might bring. Before making any major decision, however, they would faithfully consult the heavens and spirits for guidance so they might act in accordance with powerful forces beyond their control. The Railroad Chinese tenaciously and openly practiced their traditional ways and rituals wherever they went, to the bewilderment of many Americans, who dismissed Siyi spiritual practices as superstition or paganism. Belief and ritual provided the Siyi people solace, if not actual help, in facing a precarious and insecure existence.

  Spiritual practices occupied a prominent place within each family home but also for the entire village, which would maintain a village shrine (shenkan) and ancestral hall (shentang). The shrine was a small structure containing a platform for images of traditional gods and patron saints. Some villagers in the Siyi even claimed a new goddess, Songjiu Funu, who would care for the welfare of their many menfolk who went overseas. The village hall was a larger structure that held memorial tablets for many generations of clan ancestors and residents, as well as lists of village births and deaths. The hall also served as a small school for boys. Huie Kin attended a village school for a few years and learned basic reading, writing, and literature. Rudimentary literacy for males, even from small villages, was not unusual. For girls, education was rare, if not unheard of. Illiterate girls and women were said to be “blind,” as Huie Kin sadly recalled, for they had to rely on males to read and write letters for them.

  Life was structured around the rhythms of farming and the milestones of birth, marriage, death, and mourning. Everyone worked from an early age. Even the local wildlife seemed to prompt the work ethic: villagers construed the lyrical call of a local bird as saying, “Everybody work, everybody dig.” Life did not allow for slackers. The missionary William Speer identified the industry the Chinese exhibited in California as inherent: “Ages of toil seem to have tamed the nature of the Chinese till now patience and diligence have become elements of both mind and body. They work because they love work, honor work and maintain happiness and self-respect by work. Work is a necessity of the muscular and mental, like food for the digestive, or air for the pulmonary system.”

  Huie Kin recalled that playtime for children was nevertheless still joyful, if sporadic, and community festivals were major happy events. The spring Dragon Boat Festival; a special girls’ celebration in the summer; the Harvest Moon Festival in the fall; and, most important, New Year’s (or Spring Festival) in the early spring according to the lunar calendar, structured the year. Everyday food was simple: basically rice, root crops, green vegetables, and some meat or fish a few times a month. Travel was by foot. Nothing was mechanically powered in any way. There was only human strength, fire, or elemental water or wind power.

  Located a little farther away was a larger town where Huie Kin’s father occasionally traveled to purchase salt, fish, and fruit, which he would in turn sell to neighboring farmers. Whether it was raising fish in the village pond for sale, buying and selling goods gathered from afar to neighbors, selling a surplus of the crop in the market town, or regularly using cash, many of the Siyi people were familiar with the basics of commerce. Experience with a rudimentary market economy, a varied mix of agriculture, handicraft, commerce, and fishing, prepared many of them for their ventures overseas.

  Huie Kin might not have left behind the affection of his family and the familiarity of the village had forces far beyond Wing Ning not conspired to draw him away, for his world was not as isolated as he claimed at the beginning of his memoir—as Huie himself well knew. The European intrusion into China that intensified in the 1830s hit the southern region with special force, disrupting long-standing patterns of life, social relations, and the economy. As a young man in the late 1850s, Huie Kin also heard about ferocious ethnic fighting between “our people,” the bendi, or the locals, as they called themselves, and the kejia, or Hakka, “guest” people, who spoke differently and loyally followed a dissimilar way of life. The kejia did not bind girls’ feet, for example. The two had lived in close but hostile proximity to each other in Guangdong for hundreds of years, but in the mid-nineteenth century, their conflict erupted into wide-scale bloody war. Hundreds of thousands in the region died in the fighting. The region suffered terrible devastation.

  The bendi-kejia conflict was linked to an even greater upheaval. From 1850 to 1864, the Taiping Rebellion, a millenarian peasant movement, challenged the ruling Qing dynasty founded by Manchus after they conquered China in 1644. The violent movement arose in the province next to Guangzhou and assumed control of most of China south of the Yangzi River for years. The civil war claimed upwards of 25 million lives. Another upheaval, the Red Turban Rebellion, named for the red headscarves worn by the fighters, also swept Guangdong during the 1850s.

  The bloodletting associated with these conflicts was horrendous and infamous. Yung Wing, the most famous early Chinese to come to America, and 1854 Yale graduate, recalled seeing the gruesome execution grounds in Guangzhou where the provincial Qing viceroy put tens of thousands to death as punishment for their rebellion. The migrants from the Pearl River delta brought their fierce ethnic, regional, and political loyalties to the United States and continued their feuds in the hills of California in the 1850s and even during the construction of the railroad.

  Huie Kin recalled that when he was young, he heard other, certainly more encouraging stories about the outside world from a young relative who had ventured overseas and returned to the village. H
e told “of strange cities, of people with red hair and blue eyes, and of solid gold nuggets in the mountains.” A cousin who came back from California spoke about the riches at “Gold Mountain” (jinshan), so named because of the Gold Rush of 1849. (Australia, where Chinese went for gold later, became “New Gold Mountain.”) These tales bewitched the young Huie Kin, who recalled that his mother had told him that once when he was in a feverish delirium, he babbled incessantly about nothing else but wanting to go to “Gold Mountain.” He had contracted “gold fever.” In the early days of out-migration from the villages, the lure of finding gold was a common incentive to leave home.

  In this, Huie Kin was not alone. California in the mid-nineteenth century was a place of awe and wonder. “Gold Mountain,” the extravagant but fitting name Chinese gave it, was sparsely populated, with fewer than 93,000 persons in 1850, when the state joined the Union, but it was clear to all that the land possessed a future of enormous possibilities. Its population grew quickly. Texas was larger in size, but what could compare with the magnificent harbor of San Francisco, the more than eight hundred miles of coast on the Pacific, the oceanic highway to Asia, the fertile soil of the Central Valley, the magnificent river systems, and astonishing sights such as Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, the redwood forests, and the towering Sierra Nevada mountain range? And then there was the lure of precious gold, discovered in the streams flowing out of the Sierra in 1848. No other place in the world then possessed such unspoiled wonders and attractions.

  For Chinese, “Gold Mountain” meant the northern part of the state for much of the nineteenth century. The development of the southern region would come later, as the north was the location of seemingly inestimable opportunities and quick riches. It was also a very attractive place to reside. Its climate was temperate along the long coastal areas. Protected from the Pacific Ocean by a range of hills, the Central Valley, with some of the richest arable land in the world, could be hot and the air moist, much like the climate of Guangdong province, and attractive to anyone with farming in their blood. Unlike their home region in southern China, which had been densely populated and cultivated for more than a thousand years, California’s extensive lands in the mid-nineteenth century, except around the settlements of Native peoples, were still largely untouched, their abundant resources untapped.