Ghosts of Gold Mountain

by Gordon H. Chang

  Two great rivers flow through the core of the state: the Sacramento, fed from the rivers coming out of California’s northern mountain ranges, and the San Joaquin, with waters from the central and southern Sierra. Both rivers come together to form a broad delta that replenishes San Francisco Bay. The rivers were navigable for long stretches into California’s interior and provided plentiful fresh water for life and irrigation. A short riverboat ride made the newly founded interior towns of Sacramento, Stockton, and Marysville easy destinations from the port of San Francisco. Other river systems, such as the American, Merced, Feather, and Yuba, offered further access into mining regions.

  Chinese also settled along the Pacific coast, where they fished and harvested the ocean’s bounty. Even San Francisco Bay itself provided natural riches for the picking. The Siyi people were well acquainted with fish, oysters, clams, abalone, crab, and sea vegetables. Their fishing villages—“China camps,” as they were called—and farms supplied fresh and preserved food for the state’s growing population and for markets back in China. Travelers to the young state reported seeing Chinese everywhere they went. From California, Chinese ventured out into Oregon, Nevada, and beyond. But it was luminous gold, coveted and esteemed in Chinese civilization from time immemorial, that first attracted them to America, and especially to California’s mountain regions where the ore rested, waiting to be found. Over time, “Gold Mountain” became a metaphor for real and imagined places away from home where there were riches of all kinds to enjoy.

  Though the Qing empire officially prohibited emigration from China, and—for fear of sedition—threatened with execution anyone who returned from abroad, many Qing subjects were undeterred by the edicts and left anyway. Over time, local officials gradually ignored the outflow. Migration to Southeast Asia, not very distant from Guangdong, had already long been a feature of the region’s history. Making their way to and from the foreign-controlled ports of Macao and Hong Kong, Chinese travelers found ways to evade the authorities.

  Eventually millions, the great majority being male, left, principally for Southeast Asia, but also for the Americas. “We youngsters were also caught in this fever for emigration,” Huie Kin recalled. From the early 1850s, when they began to arrive in significant numbers, to 1868, the year when Huie Kin emigrated, an estimated 107,000 Chinese came to the United States. About 33,000 returned home, leaving about 70,000, the great majority from the Siyi. Few intended to stay on as permanent immigrants. Their original plan was to work, accumulate earnings, and return to live comfortably and die in their home villages. But the attractions of California, including work on the railroad, would amount to reason enough for many to stay abroad. Huie Kin and the Railroad Chinese were of a generation born and raised amidst war, rebellion, and the call of opportunity abroad.

  For many Chinese who came to America, the journey was not an individual endeavor. Some traveled with close kin. For others, travel was a well-organized social process at every juncture, especially as migration became more routine and common. Future migrants would hear of the availability of work in America from fellow villagers or clansmen. They would follow the path taken earlier by other family members or fellow home villagers. Family, clan, and village connections formed the core of Chinese identity, and these connections continued long after emigrants left home. In America, blood ties and native place connections anchored Chinese work and commerce, and provided emotional support and sustenance.

  Chinese labor recruiters and merchants arranged travel for many migrants, and associates of the recruiters or ethnic associations received the migrants in San Francisco. Some arrived on ships owned by Chinese in Hong Kong, but the great majority took passage on American or British vessels. The best-known lines, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company (PMSC) and, later, the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company, formed directly by railroad companies, profited handsomely from the travel. From 1860 to 1874, more than 112,000 Chinese left from Hong Kong for the United States. Almost all of them arrived through the port of San Francisco.

  The ship companies themselves encouraged emigration from China. In 1867 the PMSC began regular service between Asia and San Francisco and published its own newspaper, which promoted Pacific commerce and travel. In its first issue, dated January 1, 1867, the newspaper featured a long article in Chinese that told of glorious opportunities waiting for hardworking Chinese in the United States. Gold—and the country’s nascent railroads—featured prominently.

  A railroad company needed “the labor of thousands of workers,” the article declared, to construct a transcontinental line from the town of Sacramento all the way to the distant Mississippi River. Ten thousand more men were needed to join the eleven thousand already employed, and there would be work for another three or four years. The construction of connecting rail lines into Arizona and Oregon had also begun. Moreover, there was work to be had in agriculture. The article also pointedly reminded readers that California was the “vast land where gold nuggets were discovered.” The newspaper assured readers that monthly wages in America were $20 to $35, a grand sum for simple farmers. Steam-driven vessels would cut their travel time to half of what it would have been with sailing ships. Even better, Chinese businessmen would assist them in making specific arrangements. “The easy trip and large demand for workers,” the newspaper explained, “makes San Francisco the best place in the world for the benefit of workers.” It was an enticing message that reinforced what one heard through word of mouth. The promise of well-paying work on the railroad brought another Chinese teenager named Law Yow to America. Gold Mountain, his friends and cousins had told him, was where one could “make lots of money, work on railroads.”

  The Chinese who were enticed by these announcements were mainly young men, who usually embarked on their long journey alongside others who shared their family and regional backgrounds. Two surviving passenger lists of ships from China that arrived in San Francisco in 1875 and 1876 provide insight into the collective identities of migrants from China in these years.

  On February 15, 1875, the steamship Alaska docked in San Francisco with 801 passengers from China. Owned by the PMSC, the vessel had set out from Hong Kong, stopped at Yokohama, and then made its way across the Pacific. The captain and U.S. immigration officials compiled the list for the company on the basis of interviews with the passengers. All, or certainly most, were Cantonese, and the order of names is telling. Officials ordered these passenger lists not alphabetically but according to village of origin, or what was listed as “place of birth.” Other identification information included age, occupation, sex, and last place of residence, which for all was simply given as “China.”

  The 801 passengers, all male, said they were from approximately 110 different villages, most being the home of five men or fewer. But the great majority of passengers, about 80 percent, traveled with a large number of others from the same village, and many shared the same surname. The largest group, for example, was from Sun Hing village, Seong Chun district, with fifty-three passengers. Of this number, thirty-two had the surnames Le or Lee, and ten were named Hong or Hung. The rendering of Chinese words into English was grossly inconsistent at the time, so it is possible that these two surnames were actually just one. All the passengers declared themselves to be “laborers,” except for twenty-two youngsters who were listed as “student” and whose ages ranged from eight to twelve. These boys may have been on their way to join the Chinese government experiment known as the Chinese Educational Mission (1872–1881), which brought 120 young Chinese to New England for schooling. The oldest passenger was fifty, but the average age was early twenties, with many in their teens.

  A second passenger list is from the Gaelic, originally from Liverpool, England. In August 1876 it landed in San Francisco with 192 passengers, mostly Chinese, though the ship could carry almost 700. The U.S. government official in Hong Kong responsible for determining emigrant status certified that all were “free and voluntary.” Of the 192, one, a married woman, or possibly
two are listed as adult females. (One child, Mock Kow, is described as being five years old “with its mother.”) There is one female “student,” and the rest are males, with the average age in the early twenties. Like the passengers on the Alaska, the Chinese are clustered by village name, the largest being Sun Neng village, Ha Chin district, and dominated by one or two surname groups. Chinese migration to the United States, these passenger lists confirm, was collective, closely connected to family, clan, and place of origin, overwhelmingly male, and young.

  The migration experience of these passengers was probably similar to that of Huie Kin. Gold and the prospect of finding easy wealth inspired him, not work on the railroad, and individual ambition, not desperation, better explains his decision to leave the familiarity of home. As Huie would later claim, it was he and three male cousins, not their parents, who actually came up with the idea of leaving their village to go overseas and seek their fortunes. They devised ways to tell their fathers about the risky endeavor they were planning. While two of the boys were in their early twenties at the time, Huie Kin and the third of his cousins were only fourteen years of age.

  None of their fathers objected. In fact, their families borrowed money to cover the $30 steerage fee for the young men’s journey. Huie Kin’s father put the family farm up as security for a loan. Huie remembered that his father actually said very little about the ambitious idea of leaving home, believing that his father “had quite a good business head” and understood the venture as an investment. Indeed, wrote Huie, his father had relatives who “went away poor as himself but came back with beautiful gold pieces in their pockets.” The story could have been apocryphal, but it was repeated enough that it had the power of truth. It is also consistent with the conclusions of other historians that the out-migrants from the Siyi who came to the United States were not “the poorest of the poor” but were commonly mid-range in their socioeconomic position. It took resources to be able to travel. Loan contracts in the Siyi in those years often show that families like Huie’s were able to put up some capital, usually land, as collateral for funds to support the efforts of young family members to travel abroad.

  Huie Kin and his cousins assumed that their journey would be short-lived and they would soon return home better off. Huie, with his family indebted rather than himself personally, enjoyed more latitude in his choices overseas than did others who had to contract their future labor to pay for their passage. That form of travel became known as the “credit ticket” system, in which a contractor or employer advanced the cost of an individual’s passage and was repaid, with interest, from the borrower’s income in the United States. Though many European immigrants financed their passage to the United States in similar fashion, the practice itself became controversial for its alleged connections to systems of indentured servitude. The most vociferous and hostile forces against the Chinese in America often unfairly described them as servile and slave-like, exploited by Chinese merchants and contractors who used the hapless Chinese workers as coerced labor. This false characterization largely emanated from racial prejudice. As Huie Kin’s memoir and other abundant evidence make clear, the male Chinese in America came as voluntary, free laborers.

  The young Huie Kin and his cousins knew they had to be blessed with good luck to succeed in their venture, marked as it was by risks and uncertainties, but they could not know just how tragic and painful the costs would be.

  Huie and his three cousins left their village before daybreak on a fine spring day in 1868, each with just a bedroll and a bamboo basket for their few personal belongings. The four travelers made their way to the sea, where they took a small boat to Hong Kong, about a day’s journey from the Taishan coast. Sitting at the mouth of the Pearl River delta just downriver from Guangzhou, the port city had become a bustling trading center under British colonial rule, and its harbor had become the main point of departure for Chinese leaving their homeland for the United States. It was also surely the biggest agglomeration of buildings, ships, businesses, and people that a country boy like Huie had ever seen.

  The trip to this staging ground had been brief and uneventful, unlike the next segment of Huie’s journey. His little group had to spend a month in Hong Kong before they could book passage to the United States. They idled away their time along the busy piers in the harbor, observing, among other curiosities, Europeans. They had never seen such people before, with their “fiery hair and blue-grey eyes,” as he put it. Though he did not mention them, Huie would also have encountered other fantastic sights, sounds, and people. Ship crews, passengers, and adventurers from Africa, the Pacific Islands, South Asia, and South America abounded. There would have been languages, music, dress, mechanical devices, foods, and displays of ways of living and wealth that were completely unfamiliar to the simple young villager. He would have seen guns, massive iron cannons, and disciplined military personnel keeping order. He could never have imagined the numbers of people, sailing vessels and warships, and the tall buildings and open public places in the central part of a rapidly growing Hong Kong.

  When they finally boarded a ship to begin their journey, the vessel was every bit as striking as these new surroundings. Though paddlewheel steamships crossed the Pacific at this time, Huie Kin’s was a tall sailing vessel with “three heavy masts and beautiful white sails.” The entire crew was white, he recalled, though Asians, Pacific Islanders, and other non-Europeans frequently worked on board ships in the Pacific at the time. Many of Huie Kin’s fellow passengers were other Chinese; others may have been Europeans or white Americans. Huie writes that he had no idea of the ship’s route but only that the weather was warm and the ship made no stops along the way.

  There were days when the doldrums, or windless days, left the sails limp, and the ship languished in the calm ocean waters. Headwinds occasionally pushed the ship backward, while storms dumped heavy rains on the wooden vessel, providing fresh water for drinking and washing. On one occasion, frightful rumors circulated among the passengers that the ship’s officers had lost their way on the boundless high seas. Indeed, travel routes varied and had not yet been regularized because of inexperience with seasonal variations in winds and currents. Vessels typically relied on the clockwise circulation of currents in the northern Pacific: from Hong Kong, vessels went north past Taiwan, passed the east coast of Japan, and then turned eastward. They sailed north of the Hawaiian Islands. The return trip from San Francisco started out down along the California and Mexico coast to capture the equatorial current south of Hawaii that flowed westward.

  Sailing conditions conspired to test the confidence of the young Huie Kin and the others. But nothing could prepare them for what happened next.

  Suddenly, mid-trip, the eldest of the cousins and their selected leader died in an agony of fever and convulsions. Though Huie provides few details of the circumstances of his cousin’s death, he does record his devastation. He remembers staring for hours into the inky blackness of the ocean, which received his cousin’s shroud-wrapped body. His remains would never be returned to the village, which meant that his ghost, his spirit, would be lost forever in the bottomless sea. Later, the ghosts of Chinese who died in America and whose remains were not returned to their homes would likewise be stranded in a foreign land. It was a terrifying vision. “What was to become of the party now that our leader was gone?” Huie Kin wondered. “There was an uneasy feeling that his death could not but cast an evil shadow upon our venture.”

  The death of his cousin hangs over the rest of Huie Kin’s account of his experience during his months in transit, and he provides few details about the mundane aspects of ocean travel. One wonders about the food that was available, the social dynamics among the cramped and anxious passengers, or their treatment by the white crew likely already possessed of a sense of racial superiority.

  One journalist’s report in 1870 about the voyage of Chinese to America tells that they were largely confined to quarters belowdecks, where they divided themselves into different so
cial groups. They selected one from among them to cook and obtain rations from the crew. After the meal was finished, a Chinese passenger, it was observed, “reclines upon his couch, stretched on bamboo poles between decks, where he smokes his long-stemmed pipe, and goes to sleep to the sound of a Chinese guitar.” They played cards and other games. Quarrels and fights occasionally broke out, but peace generally reigned, and they put on their best clothes to practice their rites. The Chinese “never fail to have altars, where they can offer their prayers.” Reports of other voyages tell of considerably more stressful conditions, including agonizing seasickness, serious illness, terribly overcrowded quarters, and fighting. We can surmise that, much as with the lives these Chinese led before setting out for America, conditions on the passages varied widely.

  Huie Kin’s story speaks to several central issues that many scholars have considered over the years. For one, his village, though remote even in isolated Taishan county, was intertwined with the greater Pearl River delta, which had in the mid-nineteenth century one of the oldest and most developed market-oriented economies in China. Though of modest means, its people contributed to a larger agricultural economy and were not wholly ignorant of the transformation of East Asia. A culture of risk-taking and moneymaking encouraged individual economic ambition. Merchants bought and sold citrus, rice, seafood, silk, and handicrafts for profit. The nearby city of Foshan had produced metalwork and ceramics for domestic use and foreign trade for centuries. Huie Kin’s description of life in his village, modest as it was, and his father’s own supportive attitude, demonstrate his home’s proximity to commercial culture and a broader motivation for him to try his luck. Indeed, scarcity alone does not explain out-migration in all cases. Rather, for Huie Kin and many others like him, opportunity beckoned, and they followed.