This public and private outcry against Chinese prostitution elicited much personal testimony from those caught up in the trade. Some came forward to offer moving accounts that exposed the human tragedy; these are among the most numerous first-person reports collected from Chinese about their lives in nineteenth-century America. Even if we allow for an element of sensationalism, the accounts are still heartbreaking. The Reverend William Loomis, a leading Christian missionary among Chinese in America, recorded one unusual report from a man named Chen Ha, who recounted his tragic story on a long poster publicly mounted in San Francisco in 1868. Two years earlier, in 1866, he declared, bandits overran his home village of San. They killed many male villagers and took women and children captive, including his sister Ah Shau. He learned from his father that Ah Shau had been taken to California, where she was forced into prostitution. Chen Ha, tormented by the anguish he imagined she suffered, cried out in his circular: “Alas! Alas! Who that has a sister would endure the thought of her being taken to a brothel? A thousand shames!” Chen Ha, directed by his father, implored his village brethren in America to help him locate his dear sister and return her home. He implored his countrymen to help “rescue her from the torments inflicted by the keepers of the brothels” and “avert dishonor and shame from our native town.” Despite valiant efforts, Chen Ha never succeeded in finding her.
A few years later, the moving testimony of Sing Kum, a young woman forced into prostitution at seventeen, came to the public. She had arrived in California as an indentured prostitute in 1871 and over several years was bought and sold four times. “My last mistress,” she reported, “was very cruel to me; she used to whip me, pull my hair, and pinch the inside of my cheeks.” Unable to endure her life any longer, Sing Kum escaped and took refuge in a Christian mission home for Chinese prostitutes. She later became a church worker. Hundreds of Chinese prostitutes fled to these mission sanctuaries to escape their sexual slavery, and many eventually married Chinese Christians.
Some Chinese prostitutes appear to have had less agonizing experiences. Women sometimes entered into agreements with dealers to prostitute themselves for a period of time, such as four years, in return for a cut of the income or to pay off a debt. Though it is sometimes unclear whether contracts were voluntary and free from coercion, there is evidence that women on occasion could be released from their contract once its terms were met. Afterward, the former prostitute might even become a madam herself, owning other Chinese women.
In the mid-nineteenth century, one woman became infamous in America in such a way. Ah Toy, who is sometimes identified as the first Chinese prostitute in America, arrived in the United States in late 1848 or early 1849 from Hong Kong at twenty years of age. She was married in China but left for America to become an independent prostitute. Described at the time as tall, English-speaking, and alluring, she quickly gained fame as the most beautiful and successful Chinese courtesan in San Francisco. After a couple of years of this, she started peep shows that catered to white men, opened her own brothels, and allegedly imported many young women from China to work in the business. Reportedly, she traveled to China and purchased young women for $40 each, paid their $80 passage across the Pacific, and then sold them for $1,000 to $1,500. Her notoriety spread to the city’s social and political elites, and she sometimes personally appeared in court to argue her case in legal disputes. She eventually retired to Santa Clara County in 1868, where she lived quietly with a new husband, and then after he died, sold clams by the bay. She died in 1928, just three months shy of her one hundredth birthday. But Ah Toy’s story was unusual. Violence and degradation characterized the lives of the vast majority of Chinese prostitutes in America.
Outrage among whites about Chinese prostitution and curiosity about Chinese sexuality were closely associated. Official investigations into Chinese morality, including the details of brothel operations, the “corruption” of white boys who went to Chinese brothels, and the physical appearance of Chinese women, sometimes bordered on the prurient. A prominent anti-Chinese political figure in San Francisco claimed at a public hearing that Chinese female prostitutes were actually “insufficient” in numbers “required for the health of the Chinese.” From a “hygienic view,” Frank Pixley suggested, “they have not their adequate supply,” seemingly sympathetic to what he thought were the sexual appetites and physical needs of Chinese men. White journalists and observers often paid special attention to the allure of Chinese women, as they saw it. Ah Toy exploited this white male fascination.
Occasionally, white observers expressed interest in homosexual activity among the largely male population of Chinese who went abroad for work. Immigration inspection agents were asked about evidence of homosexual practices among Chinese who landed in San Francisco. During a U.S. Senate investigation, a visitor returned from China was queried about the “habits” of the Chinese “so far as sodomy is concerned, the connection of man with man.” The witness provided little help with the question. Other odd bits of information sometimes appear in the historical record. The 1870 census of Truckee, for example, tells us of a person named Ah John, who is listed as male, eighteen years of age, and living with three older Chinese female prostitutes. Curiously, his occupation is also listed as “prostitute,” though this may have been an error. In 1870, as hundreds of Chinese moved to the American South for railroad work after the conclusion of the Pacific Railway, a local newspaper described them to its readership, who were curious about these unfamiliar people. The appearance of one fellow, who might have just come off work on the CPRR, especially caught the eye of the reporter. “We saw one who certainly had the elements of a dandy in him,” the journalist wrote. “His cue [sic] was braided in with silk, and so elongated and increased in size that it completely threw his brethren in the shade. He might have vied with almost any lady of fashion in the perfection of his back hair.”
Despite the lurid reports on Chinese prostitution and sexuality, the most important connection most Railroad Chinese had with women was with those they left behind in China. Women there who were mothers, wives, or potential mates were an important reason for Railroad Chinese to toil as they did. Their aim was to accumulate savings to send back to families or to establish themselves one day with sufficient resources to marry. Marriage and having children to serve as one’s future filial descendants formed the core of their existence. They saw themselves not as autonomous individuals but rather as dutiful family members with obligations to their birth family and their own future family.
Chinese males assumed that they would marry one day, as a wife was essential to produce legitimate offspring, especially males, who would be expected to carry on the ancestral surname line and ensure that the proper cultural and spiritual practices for venerating the dead would be conducted when they had passed on. Peace of mind for the living required at least one male heir. Wives were commonly valued largely for childbearing purposes and as a human resource for the husband and his family. Arranged marriages were the norm in China. Treatment of females was often harsh, even cruel, across class lines, but many personal accounts also tell of affectionate and loving relationships that developed over time.
Wives of farmers typically labored in the fields or in handicraft production, while wives of the wealthy might be pampered but sequestered in loneliness. Many Han families that could afford limiting a daughter’s mobility would bind her feet beginning at a young age. The painful practice deformed the foot by curling the small toes beneath the arch but leaving the first toe and heel untouched. In adulthood after years of binding, a woman’s foot might be only four inches long, with a broken arch. Dominant norms considered young women with these small “lotus” or “lily” feet, as they were called, more attractive or erotic, and thus enhanced marriage material. Some ethnic groups such as the Hakka and Manchu, and poor families, eschewed foot binding. Their girls had “big feet.” Both kinds were seen in California.
There is no evidence that Hung Wah married either in China before he
came to the United States or after he arrived, but other Chinese men had wives who remained in the village or were married to them in absentia while they were away. Families hoped the tie of marriage would bind the migrant worker more closely to home and make it more likely that he would one day return. A common practice in the Siyi area was to conduct a marriage ceremony with a live rooster standing in for the groom. The unfortunate bride would accept all the same traditional restrictions on wives and obligations to her in-laws as one who had an actual husband present. A woman who married a Railroad Chinese might live her whole life and never see him. She would be known as a “Gold Mountain wife,” might adopt a child or two who were supported by the absent father, and then even die a “virgin widow,” as such women were pitifully called. Other young wives might be left behind right after marrying. Laments for their sorry state are heard in many unattributed folk songs originating in the region. One tells the woeful story of a young woman left behind by her husband who goes to America:
How could you bear parting with me?
Standing tall and going forward to a foreign land.
Sailing across the Pacific Ocean,
Leaving me alone, cold, and inconsolable on my pillow.
I am young and afraid to sleep alone,
Why should you go and stay abroad?
Yet you still travelled to America,
I regret that we are separated by thousands of miles.
Let me ask you,
How long can one’s youthful beauty last? . . .
No matter how much money is brought back home,
You cannot buy back our youth.
The quandary for unmarried male Chinese who came to America was the dearth of potential mates. Though increasing through the years, marriages to non-Chinese remained rare in the nineteenth century. Most assumed, because of their respect for tradition and the separation by race in the United States, that a wife had to be Chinese; certainly it was a given that future life and family meant an eventual return to the village. Chinese women migrants to America, however, were few in number. In the mid-1850s, for example, there were one to two thousand Chinese miners in the Weaverville area in the northern part of California but just four Chinese women. In 1850, more than four thousand Chinese lived in San Francisco but only seven were women. Their number increased to almost seven hundred in 1860, accounting for 37 percent of all Chinese women in the entire country. Even after a decade of immigration, approximately 95 percent of the Chinese in California in the 1860s still were male. The Chinese male-female ratio in California was 39 to 1 in 1850. Between 1850 and 1924, fewer than 5 percent of the Chinese in the United States were female.
Many Railroad Chinese, at least the responsible ones, supported wives and families in their home villages with their ghost money, which they were able to accumulate over time. After paying his living expenses, however, the average Railroad Chinese saved little from his income, especially if he had an opium or gambling habit. Bandits and hoodlums also preyed on Chinese in rural areas because they were thought to have caches of gold or coins they were collecting to send home. Chinese gangsters victimized the workers as well and further reduced the amount of remittances sent home. The Six Companies reportedly rounded up hundreds of them and sent them away in the early 1870s.
The methods used to send money home are still not well known, especially in the early years of Chinese immigration. International banking and remittance systems were in their infancy in the Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century, but it appears that Chinese in America would either take the money back to China with them on their person or have couriers do so. Companies associated with merchants also offered transfer services. Merchant stores in San Francisco and other towns served as proto-banks to hold the money for the workers. Gold was converted into silver, on which the Chinese monetary system was based, especially into Mexican silver dollars. Another less risky way of transferring wealth was to purchase goods or commodities in the States to send back to China rather than sending specie. Very little evidence of gold from America, including coins, is found in China today.
The flow of remittances to China over the years mounted, and sophisticated systems of money orders and funds transfer developed to support it. Many overseas Chinese regularly sent remittances to support parents and immediate families. The funds were also used to construct schools, village halls, and the famous diaolou guard towers of the region. Whole new villages might even be constructed with remitted funds. The Siyi region over time became dependent on these remittances, which came from North America, Southeast Asia, Australia, and elsewhere from the workers who went overseas.
Just as Chinese made their mark on California and throughout the United States following their immigration, so too did the Siyi migrants take with them aspects of California when they returned home. The inflow of money into the home villages of the Railroad Chinese transformed the area, but so did the return of the men who brought back foreign-made goods, sometimes items from along the railroad itself, foreign words, new cultural and artistic visions, and new behaviors. These all helped make the Siyi region hybrid and one of the earliest areas of modern China to be linked to the greater world. Examples of this influence, including architectural forms, home ornamentation, handicrafts, and work implements brought back from abroad, can be found today all around the Siyi in homes and museums.
The complexities of the relationships between the Railroad Chinese and their loved ones back in China can also be discerned in the folk culture of the Siyi region itself. One popular art form, known as “wooden fish songs” (muyu ge), give expression to heartfelt emotion. Many of these songs reveal the dreams, anxiety, fears, and joys of those who stayed in the villages, but also of those who went overseas for work. They provide a sense of the actual feelings of the Siyi people. The unusual name of the art form may have come from the use of wood clappers used to keep a rhythmic beat for their recitation. Lyrics, not musical notes, were the important element in these songs or poems, which are akin to what today would be called spoken word. Some singing almost sounded American country-western in style, with high nasal notes and sentimental stories to share. Lyrics collected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries give voice to a range of emotions, from overblown ambition and sexual longing to lamentations over the separation from lovers, wives, sons, and parents.
Getting to America might inspire special hopes for future prosperity for the family left behind. A child’s voice at home calls out:
Father, send money back from Gold Mountain more often;
Everyone here is getting new outfits made for the New Year holiday.
The family buys a fat goose to usher in a prosperous new year.
Blunt and humorous advice is given to parents on selecting the right marriage partner in this song, which also reveals the high expectations laid on those who went to America:
Don’t marry your daughter to a scholar,
Who would isolate himself to sleep alone;
Don’t marry your daughter to a baker,
Who would not have enough time for sleep;
Don’t marry your daughter to a farmer,
Whose earthy smell would be repellent;
Marry your daughter to a Gold Mountain guest,
They would come back home with glory and wealth.
Other songs are more plaintive and told from the position of one who went to America. On a warm, quiet evening, a Railroad Chinese long separated from a lover might have wanted to express his sadness. His song begins on a slightly bawdy note but ends with expressions of missing his true love:
The lychee fruit has red skin
And white meat.
When I put it in my mouth,
It’s honey-sweet.
If I could talk to you, my love—
One word repeat—
That would be sweeter far, my love,
Than lychee to eat.
His companions, now stirred, might then have broken out in ribald verse that coarsely recounted epis
odes with prostitutes. Graphic and crude references to sexual acts, lust and passion, and female and male body parts richly seasoned the country dialects of the Railroad Chinese. Far from the Pearl River delta, there was the possibility of new sexual adventure. One worker might have teased his listeners:
We’re guests stranded in North America;
Must we also give up the fun in life?
Girls of the Flowery Flag Nation [United States], all superbly beautiful and charming;
By all means, have a taste of the white scent while there’s time.
If both sides are willing,
Why not share a dream in bed?
If you betray your youthful vigor and such wonderful delight,
Just remember, you may return to the old country as a wealthy man, but you won’t have this chance again!
Other, more proper songs beseeched or scolded the young men, separated from the grounding of family and tradition, reminding them to behave, honor their mothers and fathers, and be faithful to wives. In the song “A Letter to My Son,” a father invokes the sorrowful image of a loving mother who cried at her son’s departure ten years past. She is now “old and weak, like a candle in the wind.” The family seldom hears from the ungrateful son and imagines the young man “but gambling and whoring,” separated from his wife, who is also filled with “loneliness and unhappiness” and without children. The father pleads with his son to return home soon:
Ghosts of Gold Mountain Page 21
