by Iris Chang
In many criminal acts, the complaining victims are the principal if not the only witnesses, so denying them the right to offer in court their account of what occurred makes prosecution impossible. Before People v. Hall, many whites had physically expelled Chinese miners from the most desirable locations. Once white miners understood that they could now terrorize Chinese camps without fear of legal consequences—that the law had in effect immunized them—they simply posted signs warning the Chinese to leave the premises immediately. In 1856, the people of Mariposa County gave the Chinese ten days’ notice to vacate the area: “Any failing to comply shall be subjected to thirty-nine lashes, and moved by force of arms.” In El Dorado County, white miners torched Chinese tents and mining equipment and turned back stagecoaches filled with Chinese passengers. As one scholar of the period has written, the ruling “opened the way for almost every sort of discrimination against the Chinese. Assault, robbery, and murder, to say nothing of lesser crimes ... so long as no white person was available to witness in their behalf.” This was the era that coined the term “a Chinaman’s chance”—meaning not much of a chance at all.
Legalized persecution turned the Chinese into gold rush scavengers. Rather than compete directly with whites, Chinese prospectors picked over abandoned claims. From now on, most of those who succeeded would do so through a combination of patient toil and a frugal lifestyle, though more than a few resorted to ingenuity. One smart and determined man named Ah Sam bought a log cabin from six miners for twenty-five dollars. Past experience had told him that he might make a killing by washing the gold dust from the dirt floor. He left with $3,000 worth of gold dust, a nice return on his investment.
Eventually, Chinese miners took millions of dollars’ worth of placer gold out of America. Within a few decades, some had returned to China, where they invested their wealth in farmland and became powerful landlords. Other stayed in the United States, living on money that lasted for another generation or two; family oral histories of Chinese Americans recount tales of dilettante ancestors sustained by their own fathers’ earnings during the gold rush. There were even a few who, despite the extensive racial discrimination against Chinese gold miners, legal and otherwise, managed to become mining capitalists—staking their claims, hiring their own workers, expanding their operations into vast enterprises. One of the wealthiest in this class was a man called Wong Kee, who employed as many as nine hundred men in his mining company.
Gold Mountain dreams came true for a few, but many more Chinese immigrants found only heartbreak, failure, and loneliness. One man worked as a prospector from his arrival in America till his death many years later, yet died with only enough gold to pay for his funeral. Newspapers contained reports of failed Chinese prospectors who, rather than return home in disgrace, ended their misery by committing suicide. Between the two extremes of wealth and wretchedness lay the vast majority of Chinese immigrants, who, recognizing the odds against them, pragmatically turned their sights on San Francisco, the site of their arrival. One by one, they made the decision to forgo their mining stakes, staking out instead a piece of the town to call their own.
According to the noted historian Hubert H. Bancroft, the first ship to sail from Canton to San Francisco was the American Eagle, which landed in February 1848—a month after the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, but well before the news had reached China. Two Chinese men and one Chinese woman disembarked. That April, the San Francisco Star reported that “two or three ‘Celestials’ ” (as the Chinese were called) had found employment in the city.2 The mere fact that this appeared in a newspaper suggests that these three may have been the very first Chinese to take up residence in San Francisco.
As more Chinese arrived (according to one estimate, 325 Chinese arrived in California in 1849, and then 450 in 1850, although more than 90 percent quickly moved to rural mining camps), those who remained in the city clustered in a region centered on Sacramento and Dupont Streets, which soon grew into ten blocks bounded by California, Jackson, Stockton, Kearney, and Pacific Streets. Known as “little China,” “little Canton,” or the “Chinese quarter,” this neighborhood eventually evolved into what we now call Chinatown. Like the rest of San Francisco, the area gradually filled in, from isolated shacks to congested city blocks. Some Chinese hammered shanties together using local materials, while others used prefabricated structures carved out of tree branches brought over from Hong Kong. Inside their shanties, the Chinese created a rough semblance of home. They built brick stoves and chimneys like those used in their homeland—a brick bench, or tin box packed with earth, constructed near a window or on a balcony to permit smoke to escape. They called San Francisco Dai Fou, literally, “Big City.”
Ethnic grocery stores were not far behind. By the early 1850s, as one white observer noted, they were filled with tea, ham, dried fish, and duck. Vendors hawked fruits and vegetables from reed baskets suspended from bamboo poles, and small shopkeepers spread game meat on sidewalk mats. The area reeked of fish as Chinese fishermen who worked along the bay sold their catches to miners. They dried their fish on the ground and later sorted them into sacks, boxes, and barrels. Some were salted and heaped on top of gravel rooftops to cure in the sun.
The San Francisco Chinese community continued to expand. By 1851, more than 2,716 new immigrants had arrived on the shores of San Francisco, and by 1852 the number had jumped to more than twenty thousand, though for many of them San Francisco would be only their port of entry, as they wandered out into the gold fields. In addition, around this time, an increasing number of Chinese miners were also returning to San Francisco. Plenty of money could be made from serving their dietary preferences, and not surprisingly, a thriving business catering to various Chinese needs soon developed.
In most cultures, eating is a social as well as a nutritional experience. But food occupies an even more important place in Chinese culture, which for millennia has revered its cuisine as not just a biological necessity but an exalted art form. So it should come as no surprise that Chinese restaurants soon followed the Chinese miners. As early as December 10, 1849, the San Francisco Daily Alta California newspaper reported a gathering of some three hundred Chinese at the “Canton” restaurant on Jackson Street. Here, lonely immigrants had an opportunity to forget, if only for an evening, that they were thousands of miles from their families back home.
But the Chinese were not the only San Franciscans enjoying a home-cooked Chinese meal. Soon people of all nationalities were flocking to Chinatown to eat. Beckoning to sightseers with triangular flags of yellow silk, some of the first Chinese “restaurants” were little more than cheap dining cellars, where customers ate as much as they wanted for a dollar, spitting bones and gristle onto the floor. But soon more ambitious, upscale establishments appeared, lit by lanterns hanging from green and red balconies. Sitting in rooms filled with regal decor—wood screens imported from China, gas lamp chandeliers, marble and carved mahogany furniture—customers could enjoy rare delicacies such as bird’s nest soup and shark’s fin.
Chinese restaurants became so beloved by San Franciscans of all races that in short order they became a featured selling point to encourage Americans to visit the city. During this era, travel guides urged people to eat a Chinese meal in San Francisco, some referring to the food as Chinese “chow chows.” In his 1851 memoir Golden Dreams and Waking Realities, miner William Shaw announced, “The ibest eating houses in San Francisco are kept by Celestials and conducted Chinese fashion. The dishes are mostly curries, hashes and fricasee served up in small dishes and as they are exceedingly palatable, I was not curious enough to enquire as to the ingredients.”
Not all the dishes served, however, were traditional Chinese fare. According to gold rush folklore, a group of drunken white miners invaded a San Francisco restaurant late one evening, demanding service. On the verge of closing for the night, the Chinese proprietor prudently decided to feed them and avoid trouble. His cook stir-fried the table scraps in his larder—a melange
of fried vegetables, meat, and gravy—and called it chop suey. The miners raved about this new Chinese delicacy, and soon people all over San Francisco were clamoring for it.
After their success in the food industry, the Chinese soon began to seek other ways to earn money. Many recognized that the path to riches lay, ironically, in domestic service. In those days before care-free fabrics, washing and ironing was difficult as well as tedious work, something most white men considered beneath their dignity. It was considered women’s work, but few women could be found to help them. Many Californians during the gold rush era, both Chinese and white, shipped their laundry to Hong Kong to be cleaned, but the prices were exorbitant—twelve dollars for a dozen shirts—and the process took four months. Still, sending dirty linen to be washed in Asia was cheaper and faster than mailing it back east. Laundrymen in Honolulu soon captured the business by washing shirts for only eight dollars a dozen. Finally, Chinese men in San Francisco saw a market need and moved to meet it. The first Chinese laundryman in the city was Wah Lee, who washed shirts for five dollars a dozen and advertised his services in 1851 by hanging the sign WASH‘NG AND IRON’NG.
The Chinese also opened curio stores, enticing white miners to trade gold dust for a variety of collectibles: porcelain vases, carved ivory and jade art, Oriental chess pieces, inkbrush scroll paintings, fans, shawls, and teapots. The modest shops advertised themselves with gaudy signboards and red ribbons, but in the grander establishments merchants installed glass windows in their storefronts and kept lavish shrines to bring them good luck: luxurious, gilded altars decorated with silk scrolls and ritual artifacts of worship.
By 1853, the Chinese had occupied most of Dupont Street, one of the best retail areas in San Francisco. Although the structures in that neighborhood were hardly exceptional (the San Francisco Daily Alta California noted they were “mere shells and tinder boxes, which could be fired by a single spark”), the location was excellent. As a group, the Chinese were mostly tenants, not homeowners, renting from white landlords who preferred the Chinese because of their willingness to pay more than Caucasians. For instance, one house that rented to a white man for $200 a month (an exorbitantly high figure at that time) went to a Chinese for $500 a month. On this street and others, a sophisticated Chinese business community soon appeared. By 1856, a Chinese directory called the Oriental listed thirty-three merchandise stores, fifteen apothecaries, five herbalists, five restaurants, five barbers, five butchers, three boarding homes, three wood yards, three tailors, two silversmiths, two bakers, one carver, one engraver, one interpreter, and one broker for U.S. merchants.
Not all of the Chinese settlers could read or write their own language, so this new community soon had need of professional writers. Some of the better-educated Cantonese picked up languages quickly, a few becoming fluent not only in English but also in Spanish. Most hired out as scribes, so illiterate Chinese could dictate letters to relatives back home. A few with journalistic skills published small ethnic newspapers in San Francisco and across the state. In 1854, the Gold Hills News became quite possibly the first Chinese newspaper published in the United States. Two years later, the Chinese News appeared in the northern California town of Sacramento, causing a local historian to later comment, “It is a little singular that the only paper ever printed in a foreign language in our city should have been a Chinese publication, particularly when we remember the considerable German and French elements in our population.” If this historian had been aware of the Chinese respect for education, he might have been less surprised.
The Chinese émigrés also hungered for art and entertainment. In 1852, the first Chinese theater was constructed in San Francisco from a prefabricated kit. The building, with a pagoda as its edifice, housed an auditorium for a thousand people and a stage of embroidered panels and gilt walls, gleaming with pictures of men, animals, and sea monsters. Visiting troupes from Guangdong province performed Cantonese operas there, performances that could last for weeks, attended by both Chinese and curious whites. The actors sometimes narrated in minute detail the epic sagas of an entire dynasty, providing audiences with nightly entertainment; according to one observer, “two or three months are generally consumed before all the acts of a play are finished.” At these performances, Chinese immigrants far from home could lose themselves in heroic stories of the past, forgetting for a short while their demeaning roles in everyday life and how far they had had to go to achieve their dreams.
White San Franciscans, watching the Chinese community expand and thrive, felt emotions ranging from awe and fascination to fear and hatred. Although details remain sketchy, the earliest Chinese in San Francisco seem to have received a warm welcome when they arrived—a mix of genuine excitement and curiosity. In 1850, when the Chinese colony numbered only a few hundred, the city fathers invited their participation in rites observing the death of President Zachary Taylor, assigning them a prominent place in the memorial procession. That year, Mayor John Geary and other city officials also honored the Chinese with a special ceremony, and when California became the thirty-first state in the union, the Chinese took part in the lavish celebrations. In May 1851, the San Francisco Daily Alta California went so far as to predict that the “China Boys will yet vote at the same polls, study at the same schools and bow at the same Altar as our own countrymen.”
But as the Chinese population grew, so did consternation among certain whites. In April 1852, Governor John Bigler called for an exclusionary law to bar future Chinese immigration. Although ignored by the federal government, his request may have been the first expression by a public official of an emerging anti-Chinese sentiment. Infuriated or alarmed, or both, by Bigler’s proposal, several Chinese in San Francisco published a long reply, defending their character and their ability to assimilate. “Many have already adopted your religion as their own, and will be good citizens,” they wrote. “There are very good Chinamen now in the country, and a better class will, if allowed, come hereafter—men of learning and of wealth, bringing their families with them.”
Such assimilation, however, was what some whites feared most. In 1853, the San Francisco Daily Alta California changed editors, and its tone swiveled from pro-Chinese to a virulently racist, pro-Bigler position. The Chinese, asserted a series of editorials, were “morally a far worse class to have among us than the negro. They are idolatrous in their religion—in their disposition cunning and deceited, and in their habits libidinous and offensive. They have certain redeeming features of craft, industry and economy, and like other men in the fallen estate, ‘they have wrought out many inventions.’ But they are not of that kin that Americans can ever associate or sympathize with. They are not of our people and never will be, though they remain here forever ... They do not mix with our people, and it is undesirable that they should, for nothing but degradation can result to us from the contact... It is of no advantage to us to have them here. They can never become like us.”
These sentiments echoed faintly in Washington. During this time, a few federal lawmakers began to express concern that the Chinese would not only remain in the United States, but would eventually demand their rights as Americans. Religious differences were cited as justification for exclusion. In 1855, for instance, William Russell Smith, a congressman from Alabama, raised the issue of excluding the Chinese from citizenship. “How long, sir, will it be before a million of Pagans, with their disgusting idolatries, will claim the privilege of voting for American Christians, or against American Christians?” he asked. “How long before a Pagan shall present his credentials in this Hall, with power to mingle in the councils of this Government?” Smith insisted that legislation eradicate such a possibility: “The American Party demands a law to prevent it.”
In the 1850s, however, with the country working its way toward civil war, these discussions in Congress had little immediate impact on Chinese American daily life in California. For many Chinese, the right to suffrage or election to public office were the last things on their minds:
their ambition lay not in becoming part of the governing class, but in earning a living. And the reality of the time was that the antagonism toward the Chinese on the West Coast was not broadly reflected in the corridors of federal power. Many in Washington saw the Chinese as a valuable source of manpower. Soon, when war came and coincided with grand plans to construct a transcontinental railroad, American capitalists eyed the industrious Chinese as labor for one of the most ambitious engineering feats in history.
CHAPTER FIVE
Building the Transcontinental Railroad
From sea to shining sea. In the decade of the 1840s, Americans were consumed by this vision, articulated in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which proclaimed it the right and duty of the United States to expand its democratic way of life across the entire continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Rio Grande in the south to the 54th parallel in the north. The country was feeling confident (during this decade, it acquired the territories of Texas, California, and Oregon), its population was increasing, and many wanted to push west, especially to California, made famous by gold and Richard Henry Dana’s recounting of his adventures there, in Two Years Before the Mast.
Making the vision real, however, was dangerous and frustrating. The territory between the coasts was unsettled and there was no reliable transport or route. Crossing the continent meant braving death by disease, brigands, Native Americans, starvation, thirst, heat, or freezing. This was true especially for those headed straight to the gold hills of California, but the gold rushers weren’t the only ones frustrated by the lack of a safe passage between the settled East and the new state of California in the sparsely populated West. Californians themselves were impatient at waiting months to receive mail and provisions. Washington, too, recognized the economic as well as political benefits of linking the country’s two coasts. In the West lay rich farmland waiting for settlement, gold and silver to be mined and taxed. What was needed was a transcontinental railroad to move more people west and natural resources safely and profitably to major markets back east.
