by Iris Chang
The most adventurous pioneers pushed across the plains to California, all the more swiftly after news of the discovery of gold there in 1848 spread across the world. To reach the West Coast, pioneers had to cross first the Rocky Mountains and then the Sierra Nevada by wagon or stagecoach, relying on guides and scouts to lead them through traversable passes. In fact, so treacherous was this journey that some who were intent on reaching California opted instead for one of two indirect routes, each thousands of miles longer than the direct one. The first was to sail all the way around South America, a sea voyage of more than ten thousand miles. The second was a combination of land and sea routes: booking an ocean voyage to Central America, crossing by land to the Pacific Ocean, then proceeding by ship north up the West Coast.
For the Chinese headed for California from across the Pacific, the greatest threat would come not from the harshness of nature, but from the cruelty of fellow humans and the racism endemic to their beloved “Gold Mountain.” When the founding fathers of the United States “ordained and established” a Constitution intended, in the words of its preamble, to “establish justice ... and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” they excluded blacks from those blessings and saw no place in their society for the people living on the land before the arrival of Europeans. As the white population expanded and moved westward, both the federal and various state governments waged a campaign against those Native Americans whose usefulness as trading partners had ended. In the early nineteenth century, the U.S. government used its military superiority to force Native Americans to sign treaties ceding, tract by tract, the richest part of the land to whites, and then banished them to desolate reservations. The tacit process of extermination took even more direct and brutal forms. In California, the state legislature at one time offered bounty hunters a fee for each Indian scalp turned in. Eventually murder, hunger, heartbreak, and disease had their desired effect. In 1790 there were almost four million American Indians, but by 1844, fewer than thirty thousand remained east of the Mississippi, a much more manageable inconvenience for the white man.
Yet, by the mid-nineteenth century, some of the oppressed groups in America were starting to find their voices. Working women organized strikes, some violent, smashing through eastern factories with brickbats and stones. They demanded access to education. The era saw the first woman graduate of a medical school, and the first medical school for women established in Pennsylvania. A few daring women abandoned their confining corsets and petticoats for a new style called “bloomers,” baggy, gownlike pants that allowed them a new freedom of movement that did not expose them to the charge that they were flashing views of their legs as they went about active lives. In 1848, the first American convention to discuss women’s rights convened in Seneca Falls, New York, launching the female suffrage movement. The delegates issued a manifesto modeled after the Declaration of Independence, demanding that the legal right to own property, pursue education, and vote be extended to women. In the coming decades, the most oppressed population—the enslaved blacks—would see their cause taken up across the country. Inspired by the words of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, American abolitionists forced their fellow citizens, many far removed from those states where it was practiced, to face the evil of slavery. In 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an anti-slavery book that focused the world’s attention on that horrendous institution.
Although the Chinese came from the most populous nation on earth, at the time of the gold rush perhaps fewer than fifty of them lived in the continental United States. This tiny population included merchants, former sailors, and a handful presented to the American public as sideshow curiosities. Their limited number made them highly marketable commodities in a country captivated by the mystery and exoticism of the East. Afong Moy, the first recorded Chinese woman in America, came to New York City in 1834 as part of a cultural exhibit. Museums in New York and Brooklyn displayed the sixteen-year-old Moy in a life-size diorama, seated on an oriental latticework chair, wearing a silk gown and slippers, as if she were a rare zoological specimen. Audiences watched with fascination as she ate with chopsticks, counted in Chinese and did computations on her abacus, and minced about on her “monstrously small” four-inch-long bound feet. A few years later, a second Chinese woman, starring as a museum showpiece under the aegis of American circus pioneer Phineas T. Barnum, attracted twenty thousand spectators in only six days. A “double-jointed Chinese dwarf Chin Gan” also appeared before huge crowds in America. But the most successful performers were Chang and Eng Bunker, the eponymous Siamese twins, who shared a liver and a five-inch ligament of flesh connecting their torsos. Even though the Bunker twins gained wide renown for their deformity, which reinforced the popular image of all Asians as freaks of nature, they should be remembered today for their formidable entrepreneurial skills and ingenuity in self-promotion—and, possibly even more significant, their ability to find acceptance in America.
The story of these twins contains elements of the American Horatio Alger legend. Born in 1811 in Siam (today Thailand), sons of a poor ethnic Chinese fisherman, their bizarre appearance was so disturbing to their fellow countrymen that the authorities considered condemning them to death. Later, a British trader discovered the twins and persuaded their family to send them on a world tour, starting in 1829, for a fixed monthly salary. When their contract expired on their twenty-first birthday, the twins went into business on their own. For the next seven years, they made a fortune touring the United States and Europe, rubbing elbows with European royalty and the cream of Western society. In 1839, the twins visited Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and, falling in love with the region, decided to retire from show business and live there permanently. Wholeheartedly adopting southern culture, they ran their own plantation, complete with thirty-three black slaves, and established themselves as two of the wealthiest men in the county. Though legally nonwhites could not become naturalized U.S. citizens under a 1790 statute, the twins managed, nonetheless, to establish themselves as U.S. citizens in their new community, adopting “Bunker” as their official surname to honor one of their friends. The Bunkers also married two local white women and fathered twenty-one children between them. (During the Civil War, two of their eldest sons enlisted in the Confederate army the moment they came of age.)
The Bunkers might have been tolerated, but were also protected by their world fame and especially by their great wealth. Their neighbors seemed to have viewed them as friends and contributors to the community; being only two, not an immigrant group, they posed no threat to established ways. Their ownership of black slaves reinforced the notion that, however odd they looked, they were of one mind with their fellow plantation owners. Had they been forced to endure the brutal realities of being industrial wage-earners or small farmers in nineteenth-century America, they might not have been so kindly disposed toward those who lived so splendidly off the labor of others.
Such was the America the first wave of Chinese immigrants entered. If the Chinese were not part of the focus of the debate on racial politics, it was probably because there were simply too few of them to arouse much fear and suspicion. Their time would come.
CHAPTER THREE
“Never Fear, and You Will Be Lucky”: Journey and Arrival in San Francisco
Americans are very rich people. They want the Chinaman to come and make him very welcome. There you will have great pay, large houses, and food and clothing of the finest description. You can write to your friends or send them money at any time and we will be responsible for the safe delivery. It is a nice country, without mandarins or soldiers. All alike; big man no larger than little man. There are a great many Chinamen there now, and it will not be a strange country. China god is there, and the agents of this house. Never fear, and you will be lucky.
—A nineteenth-century circular translated into the Chinese language, posted in the Canton region by a Hong Kong brokerage office
Flush with hope, dazzled
by tales of immediate riches, the Chinese who dreamed of what they would find in California were not warned that many grave dangers lay between Guangdong and Gold Mountain. For the unsuspecting, the first danger—and perhaps the worst—lay waiting just a few miles away, in Guangdong’s own busy port city, Canton.
In Chinese the term k’u-li literally means “hard strength.” Foreigners living in China often employed it to describe household help or menial Chinese laborers, but the term would take on a different coloration in the 1840s, when European capitalists experienced labor shortages on colonial plantations in regions like South America and the Caribbean. With the help of unscrupulous Chinese recruiters, or crimps, as they were called, a devil’s bargain was struck to replace African slave labor with Asian slave labor. Coastal cities, such as Amoy, Macao, Hong Kong, and Canton, served as major ports where men were bought and sold as human traffic. When the practice finally ended in the 1870s, following an investigation by the imperial Qing government, an estimated three-quarters of a million Chinese men had been either decoyed into or physically abducted and then sold into slavery, in what became known as the “coolie” trade.
The Chinese crimps used a variety of methods to fill their quotas. Men in debt, men imprisoned after clan fights, and men eager for work to avoid starvation all served as ideal candidates for entrapment, but for naive youths arriving in coastal cities fresh from the villages, the danger of entrapment was greater still. Some victims were lured into teahouses, regaled with stories of fortunes to be made overseas, and deceived into signing labor contracts for work in South America. When persuasion failed, the crimp resorted to outright abduction, and a British consul observed that even in broad daylight men could not leave their houses “without a danger of being hustled, under false pretenses of debt or delinquency, and carried off a prisoner in the hands of crimps, to be sold to the purveyors of coolies at so much a head, and carried off to sea, never to be heard of.”
Once a person had fallen into the hands of coolie traders, it was almost impossible to escape. The victims were locked in filthy, disease-ridden receiving stations, or barracoons, which the Chinese called zhuzi guan (literally, “pig pens”). Because of its squalor, this trafficking in human bodies was also referred to as “the buying and selling of piglets.” In one zhuzi guan at Macao, slave traders beat gongs and set off fireworks to hide the frantic cries for help. In Amoy, they stripped the men naked and stamped their chests with letters indicating their destination—for instance, “P” for Peru, or “S” for the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii)—then herded the prisoners onto ships and locked them in bamboo cages or chained them to posts. As with the African slave system, the more people a trader could cram into a vessel, the greater his profit for the voyage. During the African slave trade, approximately 15 to 30 percent died during capture or confinement along the African coast, and an additional 10 to 15 percent perished during the journey across the Atlantic Ocean. In the mid-1800s, the death rate of coolies in transit also hovered between 15 and 45 percent.
In 1873 and 1874, the Chinese government sent official delegations to South America to learn the fate of these coolies,1 and the picture that emerged was shocking. Chinese slaves on the Cuban sugar plantations were made to labor twenty-one out of the twenty-four hours, and, fed only about three unripe bananas per meal, many quickly died from hunger and exhaustion. Those who survived a few years often bore scars from repeated whippings. Others (probably those who had tried to escape) had had their limbs maimed or lacerated. Suicides were not uncommon. Some slit their own throats, others ingested opium, still others jumped into wells and drowned.
An equally horrific situation existed in Peru, where the Chinese were put to work on the Chincha Islands. The islands provided a rich source of guano (bird droppings), which Peru exported as fertilizer to Europe and North America. The unfortunate Chinese sent to labor on the guano beds endured both blazing heat and the unbearable stench of fowl excrement. Those too weak to stand worked on their knees, picking out gravel from guano, and guards stood sentinel on the shores to prevent coolies from accessing the only means of freeing themselves from their misery—hurling themselves into the sea.
Fortunately, the vast majority of emigrants were able to protect themselves by working through responsible emigration brokers, called k’o-t’ou or towkay. While these brokers could hardly be characterized as Good Samaritans—viewed in their entirety, their actions were clearly exploitative—they did provide some protection to men eager to emigrate but ignorant about how to protect themselves against the dangers into which they might fall. Broker-sponsored émigrés to the United States were housed at a special inn (hak-chan) while awaiting embarkation, usually from the port cities of Hong Kong and Canton. In addition, during his client’s sojourn in America, the emigration broker would make sure that mail, remittances, and news would travel from the émigré to his family back home.
For those eager lacking the funds, a credit-ticket system evolved. Chinese middlemen would typically advance forty dollars in gold, and in exchange the émigré assumed debt and a monthly interest rate of about 4 to 8 percent, which he could take up to five years to repay. Or the emigrant might agree to work for a set period of time as an indentured laborer, in exchange for the debt’s repayment by his employer.
The Pacific Ocean crossing was grueling and hazardous. The amount of time it took to reach California varied, depending on weather conditions and whether the journey was made by junk, boat, or steamer. During the gold rush it took between four and eight weeks to travel by steamer from Canton to San Francisco, and the cost of the trip ranged from about forty to sixty dollars. Steerage conditions, already appalling before 1848, grew worse as shipmasters and Chinese entrepreneurs competed for business by driving down ticket prices and making up for it through increased volume. Passengers brought their own bedding, which they spread on wooden bunks below deck, each bunk often only seventeen inches above the one underneath. Those with the cheapest tickets would take turns sleeping. The food was at best unfamiliar to the passengers and at worst inedible, and was rendered more unpalatable by the accompanying stink of body odor and freight. “The food was different from that which I had been used to, and I did not like it at all,” one passenger complained. “When I got to San Francisco I was half starved because I was afraid to eat the provisions of the barbarians.” Disease was prevalent. In 1854, the Libertad arrived in San Francisco after eighty days at sea with 180 Chinese—one-fifth of all those who had set out—dead from fever or scurvy. Ship captains routinely threw the dead overboard, and it was not unusual for Chinese passengers to take up collections to prevent this practice and to ensure that the bones of the dead would be returned to their ancestral land.
Did the émigrés spend the lonely nights on board these ships regretting their decision, wondering if they would survive the journey? Or did they set aside their very real fears, and focus instead on the future? And if the latter, what did they imagine the future would hold in store for them? Would San Francisco be another Canton? Or perhaps Hong Kong? And the Americans? What would they be like? Would they welcome the Chinese to their country, as all the emigration posters had suggested they would? Or would the Americans resent them and perhaps try to fleece them, or worse, kill them?
What were the shipboard dreams dreamt in 1849 by young men on their way to America, at a time when America represented a new start for so many? How many of these young men would have those dreams fulfilled? The records tell us less than we would like to know about these first shiploads of Chinese to America. But they do tell us something: for the Chinese, as for every other immigrant group, America may have seemed a stop on a journey back to wealth and position in the homeland. But for a surprisingly large number, it would be a one-way trip. While America surely transformed some of these impoverished émigrés into wealthy returnees, it turned many more into something else—hyphenated Americans, Americans who would always remember their homelands as a treasured past but find in America their future.
Before the gold rush, San Francisco had been a desolate area of sand dunes and hills. Discovered by the Spanish in 1769, the area had served as a presidio, a military post, with little more than a chapel and some brush and tule huts, and for almost a century, it lay relatively untouched by civilized men. Then, in 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill near the Sacramento River.
Thousands of gold hunters descended on San Francisco, a great natural port, on their way to Sutter’s Mill. When the first prospectors arrived, they threw down planks as makeshift bridges between the wharves; these planks soon became city streets. Beyond the wharves sprawled hundreds of canvas tents and wooden shacks, connected by dirt roads that melted into mud swamps with each rainfall. Residents tottered over temporary sidewalks created from garbage dumped into the mire; one precarious path was made from sacks of flour, stoves, tobacco boxes, and even a grand piano. To build shanties and stores, they ripped apart the seagoing vessels they found rotting at the docks.
