by Iris Chang
The exact number of Chinese who died from disease, infection, or overwork as they restored five million acres of boggy delta swamp-land was not recorded. Some landowners valued Chinese life less than that of their animals; in the flood of 1878, as Chinese workers, covered with mud and weighted down with sandbags, struggled to shore up levees, some farm owners dispatched boats upriver to rescue their stock but left the Chinese behind to scream at passing ships for help. But we do know what the Chinese did for the landowners: they not only reclaimed the land, an achievement that would have been impossible without their stubborn dedication to the task assigned them, but they also invented the “tule shoe” during the project, so that horses could be used in this environment. And after their work was done, a surveyor estimated that the land, which the owners had purchased from the federal government for as little as two or three dollars an acre, the land on which the Chinese had worked for about ten cents per cubic yard of soil moved, was now worth seventy-five dollars an acre. The combined value of Chinese labor on the railroads and tule swamps, two projects essential to California’s growth, ran in the hundreds of millions.
The sea also provided work opportunities for the Chinese, though its dangers rivaled or even surpassed the brutality of the delta reclamation. Some Chinese labor contractors cut a new kind of deal with the salmon-canning factories of the Pacific Northwest, in which the canneries paid contractors for the volume of work produced, while the contractor paid the laborers a fixed wage. The incentives of such an arrangement ensured a negative outcome. The Chinese labor contractors became harsh taskmasters, and conditions in the canning industry grew notoriously bad. The horror of the job began even before arrival at the work site. On board vessels sailing to Alaska, the Chinese received no water for washing, so their living quarters swarmed with lice and fleas; when inspecting the “Chinatown” section of his vessel one shipmaster wore rubber boots as protection against parasites. By the early 1880s, canneries in the region employed more than three thousand Chinese, who labored under such shocking conditions that Rudyard Kipling, visiting one such cannery, wrote, “Only Chinese men were employed in the work, and they looked like blood-besmeared yellow devils, as they crossed the rifts of sunlight that lay upon the floor.” One observer remarked that the scene in a cannery was “not so much like men struggling with innumerable fish as like human maggots wiggling and squirming among the swarms of salmon.”
There were two ways the middleman could increase his profit—pay the workers a minimal sum, and force them to work faster. A Bureau of Fisheries investigator reported that the contractors drove workers “as with the whip,” noting that “the work of canning exceeds in rapidity anything I have ever seen, outside the brush-making establishment in the East.”
Their speed was indeed stunning. One Chinese Columbia River butcher could behead and debone up to two thousand fish, or eighteen tons, a day. History does not record how many Chinese men, reduced to the level of human machinery, died from accidents or disease in canneries of the Northwest. Decades later, the invention of a fish-butchering machine reduced the need for workers from dozens to only two operators. In a twisted acknowledgment of the enormous work capacity of these immigrants, the manufacturer named it “the Iron Chink.”
Not all Chinese entrepreneurs succeeded by exploiting their compatriots. Many had grown up within or near villages along the Guangdong coastline, or along the Pearl River, and they saw opportunities in the rich California coastal waters. The nets of Chinese fishermen were cast all along the West Coast, from the state of Oregon to Baja California. Hundreds of Chinese moved to Monterey, California, building cabins on the beach, laying abalone meat on rooftops and railings to dry.
They failed, however, to anticipate the strength of the white fishing lobby. Just as white miners had convinced the state of California to impose special taxes on their Chinese competitors, so did white fishermen succeed, in 1860, in getting the government to impose a special four-dollar-a-month fishing license on the Chinese.6 In addition, throughout the 1870s other immigrant groups-Greeks, Italians, and Balkan Slavs—organized to force through legislation limiting the size of Chinese nets, and thereby their catch. At one point, in 1880, California decided to withhold fishing licenses from aliens ineligible for naturalization, which meant, of course, all Chinese and only Chinese. Although the courts later declared this regulation unconstitutional, while the cases were pending, the impact devastated the Chinese fisheries.
At this same time, another very different entrepreneurial trend was developing among the Chinese in America. They were becoming increasingly an urban population. To earn their living, some decided to service the needs of local farm workers and miners by creating tiny Chinatowns in rural California communities, such as Sacramento (called Yee Fou, or “Second City”), Stockton (Sam Fou, or “Third City), Marysville, and Fresno. Others gravitated toward Los Angeles, formerly a way station for prospectors, a ranch town supplying wagons, equipment, and beef. Los Angeles, a lawless city, teemed with gamblers and prostitutes, and the Chinese moved there to open their own casinos and stores. Still others moved to fast-growing cities in the Pacific Northwest, like Tacoma, Portland, and Seattle, where they ran restaurants and laundries as well as businesses to assist the fishing industry. None of these Chinese communities, however, could compare in size or importance to the San Francisco Chinatown, which by 1870 was home to almost a quarter of all of the Chinese in California.
A Chinese man returning two decades after entering through the port of San Francisco in 1849 would not have recognized the city.
During the gold rush, San Francisco had been a filthy jumble of rough frame buildings, shacks, and tents, its beaches strewn with suitcases, trunks, and shovels. But the new San Francisco, the San Francisco of the 1870s, was tall, handsome, dignified. Muddy wagon trails had given way to paved streets that wended their way from the harbor up into the hills; along them rose stately buildings of stone and brick, designed in Gothic, Italian, and other classical architectural styles. Where unshaven, unkempt miners in plaid shirts and denim trousers had once roamed, there now walked refined, serious men in broad-cloth suits and top hats, emerging from banks, hotels, and offices. One immigrant who had remembered San Francisco as “narrow, revoltingly dirty, its squares filled with filth and the remains of animals,” was astounded to find it “no longer recognizable ... a great and beautiful city.”
But this transition, miraculous and sudden to the eyes of an outsider, had not been easy at all. The gold rush boom had been followed by bust times, poverty, and a series of devastating fires. Fortunately for San Francisco, local entrepreneurs always found methods to turn disaster into profit. The smoldering piles of scrap iron left by the periodic infernos led to the beginning of the city’s foundry industry, which supplied much-needed metal supplies for ship repairs and quartz mining equipment. Then, once the transcontinental railroad was finished, factories sprang into being, churning out goods of all kinds for export across America. Some processed food for the rest of the country—they milled wheat into flour, or salted and packaged meat. Others shipped out nonperishable products like tobacco and textiles. By the 1870s, San Francisco had grown into one of the major manufacturing centers in the United States.
The Chinese in San Francisco adapted to this change. Though Chinese vegetable peddlers continued to walk the streets with baskets suspended from each end of a shoulder pole, and Chinese washermen, numbering in the thousands, still controlled the city’s laundries, many others entered the new world of mass production. Most of those who made the transition did so as workers. By 1870, the Chinese constituted nearly half the labor force in the city’s four major industries: shoes and boots, woolens, cigars and tobacco, and sewing. Moreover, they represented about 80 percent of the workers in woolen mills, and 90 percent of the cigar makers in San Francisco.
But now, for once in America, their employers were likely to be Chinese. And something else was also new for the Chinese immigrants. In China, those who engaged
in trade had been traditionally reviled, relegated to the bottom of a Confucian-defined social hierarchy that valued the scholar, the official, and the farmer, but not the merchant. But in the United States, financial success in business was worshipped. This new attitude would have far-reaching consequences, both within the Chinese community and outside it.
By the 1870s, San Francisco had five thousand Chinese businessmen, many of whom were highly successful and posed to local whites a formidable economic threat. In 1866, these Chinese had owned half the city’s cigar factories, and by 1870, eleven out of twelve slipper factories, most of which employed Chinese labor almost exclusively, were in Chinese hands. This elite of five thousand included vendors and middlemen in agriculture, the retail sector, and hydraulic quartz mining, as well as the labor contractors. Unafraid to flaunt their wealth and success, many lived in opulent apartments in San Francisco gleaming with crystal, porcelain, and ivory, staffed with servants. Their lives were a far cry from those of their employees, fellow Chinese who lived and worked in tenement factories, rolling cigars, sewing shirts, making boots and slippers. For these piecemeal laborers, the line between work and home often disappeared. “It is no uncommon thing to find in an apartment fifteen feet square three or four branches of business carried on, employing in all at least a dozen men,” one observer wrote of the world of the San Francisco Chinese worker. “In apartments where the ceiling is high, a sort of entresol story is fitted up, and here a dozen are to be seen engaged in various avocations, eating and sleeping upon and beneath their work benches or tables.”
Just as thousands of European immigrants endured atrocious conditions in the ghettos of New York, so did many Chinese cope with expensive, substandard housing in San Francisco. To save rent, they packed into crowded rooms where virtually every inch of space was used. J. S. Look, a Chinese émigré who arrived in the city during its manufacturing era, recalled that “there were so many of us that we had to sleep on the floors as there were not enough beds in Chinatown for the people that lived there.”
Because many Chinese could not afford furniture, they used crates found on the street as tables and cabinets. Because beds were scarce, they slept in shifts, or nailed bunks to the wall, one above another, like shelves, until their apartments resembled army barracks. The most unfortunate lived in squalid underground cellars where, one observer noted, “scarcely a single ray of light or breath of pure, fresh air ever penetrates. These rooms are filled with bunks like the rooms for passengers on ships and steamers, and by the dim, flickering light of a little oil lamp the poor wretches who den there crawl into their miserable couches.” When contemplating how they were able to tolerate such conditions, two factors must be kept in mind. The first is that their sacrifices were providing better lives for their families back home. The second is that many no doubt believed their discomfort to be temporary and refused to see the conditions in which they found themselves as the long-term reality of their lives.
The new economics of Chinatown—the elaborate terracing of wealth and position—soon found expression in an informal but all-encompassing power structure. At the foundation was a tier called the clans, who addressed the basic daily needs of Chinese laborers, such as housing. One level up, the clans of each district were organized into civic associations. Finally, at the pinnacle, ruled six powerful district associations, at the time known as the Chinese Six Companies, and later as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of America. The Six Companies anointed themselves the supreme power in Chinatown, with the ostensible purpose of resolving disputes, protecting members, and guarding the welfare of the entire community. So powerful were they that before the first Chinese consulate appeared in the city during the 1870s, the Six Companies served as unofficial ambassadors of China, acting as the voice of the Qing imperial government in the United States.
The Six Companies had evolved out of the need of the emerging Chinese business elite for order. The white man’s government had demonstrated that its mission was to suppress, not protect, Chinese interests. Chinese businessmen may have organized their own guild in San Francisco as early as 1849, and certainly by 1850 a number of immigrants from Guangdong had formed the Kong Chow Association, literally, “Pearl River Delta,” one of the first Chinese American organizations in America. When tensions arose between Cantonese people of different dialects and districts, the association split into two groups, which became the first two of the Six Companies. Later, four additional organizations appeared in the 1850s, with offices in prominent neighborhoods in San Francisco.
The Companies’ influence on a new Chinese worker began the moment he arrived at the docks. Representatives would be there to load the new arrival’s luggage onto a wagon and bring him into Chinatown, ostensibly to find him food, lodging, and work, but also to make sure he joined one of the associations, explaining that his dues would be more than offset by the social services the Six Companies provided. The Six Companies did in fact provide services. In San Francisco they created a safety net for the Chinese workers, lending them money when necessary and helping out when they were sick. They settled disputes between members, opened a Chinese-language school, maintained a Chinese census, and channeled remittances for their members back to their home villages through the district associations.
Their services extended into the spiritual realm as well, supporting joss temples, which were places of peace and meditation. During that era, a Chinese émigré could identify a house of worship by the tinsel on its balcony or the dragon figures on its balustrades. Stepping inside, he could ponder his fate in darkness, inhaling the aroma of burning incense, listening to prayers chanted to the music of gongs and drums. The decor within the temple-the idols sculpted from wood or plaster, the red and gold calligraphy, the glass lanterns filled with oil, the carved art from Chinese myths—transported the worshipper into a world that seemed to transcend both America and China.
The Six Companies also lavished attention on funerals, which could be huge, almost theatrical productions. Beginning typically at the home or store of the deceased, a Buddhist priest in a satin robe would chant prayers, and bang his bell and cymbals. Then a procession would head for Lone Mountain Cemetery, where each of the Six Companies had fenced off its own area. Along the route, white-clad mourners would weep and toss strips of brown paper, symbolizing copper coins needed for the passage to heaven. The entrance to the graveyard lot was usually marked by a canopy, beyond which lay a brick furnace, table, and headboard with Chinese characters. There, friends would burn paper near the body—Chinese messages, paper servants, paper money—gifts for the deceased in the afterworld that disappeared with his spirit in flame and smoke. Instead of the corpse being buried, the flesh would later be scraped off and the bones laid out to dry in the sun before being bundled into white muslin and shipped back to China. The return of these bones represented a final act of patronage, a commitment by the Six Companies to protect their members and send them back safely to their home villages, even after death.
While the Six Companies had their dark side—their social system may have unintentionally reinforced the image of the Chinese as foreigners, not melting-pot Americans—the real threat to Chinese émigrés came from a very different group: those who belonged to the secret societies known as the tongs.
Tong members tended to be outcasts who either lacked clan ties or had been expelled by their associations. They modeled themselves after the Triad societies in China, an underground fraternity in Guangdong province dedicated to the overthrow of the Manchu government. Representing the interests of the poor and the oppressed, the Triads drew into their ranks legions of impoverished peasants, embittered tenant farmers, people who had failed the civil service examinations—in general, those angry enough at the system to organize against the landlords and the imperial Qing elite. They invented elaborate initiation ceremonies, passwords, and coded hand signals, and swore blood oaths to pledge eternal brotherhood: “Tonight we pledge ourselves before Heaven that the breth
ren in the whole universe shall be as if from one womb, as if begotten by one father, as if nourished by one mother, and as if they were of one stock and origin.”
But unlike the Triads, the tongs had no clear political motives driving their actions, and very quickly they became involved in the extremely lucrative business of importing thousands of Chinese women and girls to America to service the Chinese bachelor population. Most of these women did not come by choice but were forced into degradation.
Prostitution and enslavement had a long history in China. In times of famine, a Chinese family on the brink of starvation might sell the youngest daughter to keep the other members of the family alive. The Qing dynasty officially sanctioned the practice, noting that the survival of one in ten families depended on a daughter’s being prostituted. Of course, many parents did not sell their daughters outright but nevertheless sealed their destiny by selling them as mui tsai, a Cantonese term for “little sister.” As children, mui tsai worked as indentured servants for another family, ostensibly to be freed by marriage at age eighteen. While a fortunate few might be treated kindly, many others were abused, raped, and sold into brothels. Some mui tsai ended up in America to service the army of Chinese male laborers who had no prospects for female companionship in a white world.
Because they tended to be illiterate and born into the poorest levels of Chinese society, most of these women left no memoirs. Several poignant stories survive as oral histories, however, recorded by missionaries and journalists. Ho-tai remembered that her mother had been determined not to sell her, even though the family faced starvation and “death was all around them.” But one night, when her mother was away from home, her father sold her for several pieces of silver. As she sailed away, she caught one last glimpse of her frenzied mother, “her dress open far below her throat, her hair loose and flying, her eyes swollen and dry from over-weeping, moaning pitifully, stumbling in the darkness, searching for the boat but it was gone.”
