by Iris Chang
So perhaps staying indoors was safer, though less than stimulating. One wife whiled away the hours playing cards with her servant, looking after her son, gossiping with neighbors, or hiring a hairdresser or a female storyteller to entertain her. In her essay “The Chinese Woman in America,” Edith Maud Eaton, a Eurasian writer who used the pen name Sui Sin Far, offered a glimpse of these women’s lives:
Now and then the women visit one another. They laugh at the most commonplace remark and scream at the smallest trifle, they examine one another’s dresses and hair, talk about their husbands, their babies, their food, squabble over little matters and make up again, they dine on bowls of rice, minced chicken, bamboo shoots and a dessert of candied fruits.
In contrast, other Chinese wives did not enjoy the luxury of idleness. Some belonged to the laboring class, toiling long hours like their husbands. In the late 1870s, a few could be found as domestics or in intensive labor industries as seamstresses, washerwomen, shirtmakers, gardeners, and fisherwomen. In family-run operations, like laundries or grocery stores, the line between business owner and laborer blurred, and wives were often compelled to work alongside their husbands to keep their businesses afloat.
Difficult as her life could be, the typical Chinese wife had more power in the United States than she could have achieved in her home village. First and most important, she had escaped the tyranny of her mother-in-law. In China, a daughter-in-law lived with her husband’s family and endured her husband’s mother’s hazing until she gave birth to a son; bearing a male child validated her existence and earned her the respect of the family. Her power grew with each additional male child and climaxed when she became a mother-in-law herself, attaining the authority to perpetuate the tradition by bullying her sons’ wives.
In the United States, Chinese families were nuclear, not multigenerational, and wives were usually freed from this hierarchical scheme of abuse. In addition, they lived in a country where women who worked were not stigmatized as they were in China. In their home villages, a working woman was often viewed with derision or pity, her employment a sign that her husband or family could not support her. But in the United States, some merchant wives passed their time doing needlework in the privacy of their own homes, earning thousands of dollars by mending clothes for Chinese bachelors. A few even opened their own tailor shops. The labor of these working women was valued by their families, because the money sent back home could spell the difference between life and death for relatives in China.
Perhaps most significantly, the Chinese emigrant wives also mothered a tiny population of American children. In 1876, the Chinese Six Companies estimated that a few hundred Chinese families lived in America, and perhaps one thousand Chinese children. In the long run, these infants, the first generation born in America, would enjoy more rights and privileges in the United States than their immigrant parents. Most were too young then to know that heated racial discussions were under way in Congress and across the country, negotiations about civil rights that would profoundly affect their future.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Spreading Across America
By the time of the 1870 census, 63,199 Chinese were living in the continental United States, 99.4 percent of them in the western states and territories, with a clear majority—78 percent—in California. It was only a matter of time before the Chinese emigrants crossed the Rocky Mountains, then the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Some found themselves clear across the country, on the Atlantic coast, while others, with the help of labor contractors, would end up in the American South. All of them would face a post-Civil War America grappling with the politics of race, and with the question of where certain ethnic groups would fit within a new social hierarchy.
One of the strangest episodes in the history of the Chinese in America concerned workers who signed labor contracts that in essence rendered them substitutes for former black slaves on postwar southern cotton plantations. Fortunately, it was a story with a reasonably happy ending for the Chinese. For while many southern plantation owners initially saw the arrangement as a match made in heaven—they had had heard wonderful reports about the industrious and cooperative nature of Chinese worker—they would quickly learn, however, that in addition to their diligence and accommodating nature, most Chinese workers understood a contract and expected its terms to be fully honored by both sides.
Relatively speaking, few Chinese laborers took field jobs in the South, for no one living in the country during the 1850s and 1860s could have been completely unaware of the consequences of slavery based on race. Southern plantation owners, accustomed to laborers who had no rights whatsoever, were unlikely to be beneficent, or even fair, employers, especially to people who had agreed to pick up the work of former slaves. These owners had lived most of their lives believing that the way to increase productivity was to have overseers whip grown men into total tractability. Why would they suddenly view a labor contract with a member of another race as an arrangement between parties sharing equal rights?
As it turned out, the Chinese in America would not acquiesce easily to white efforts to relegate them into a permanent underclass, in the South or elsewhere. In a culture that viewed blacks and Native Americans as having sprung from an inferior culture, the Chinese quickly recognized that anyone associated with these other two races was likely to be abused. In 1853, when a California judge barred a Chinese man from testifying against whites on the premise that the Chinese should be considered part of the same race as Indians and blacks, the Chinese community took greater offense at the comparison than at the exclusion. In an outraged letter widely circulated throughout the San Francisco business community, one Chinese merchant wrote that his people enjoyed thousands of years of civilization. How dare white Americans “come to the conclusion that we Chinese are the same as Indians and Negroes... these Indians know nothing about the relations of society; they know no mutual respect; they wear neither clothes nor shoes; they live in wild places and in caves.” Not surprisingly, such attitudes aroused bitter resentment from other minority groups, who believed that the Chinese should not be exempted from the unfair treatment they endured from the white population. When the Grass Valley Indians in central California were being shunted onto reservations, King Weimah, their chief, pointedly objected to the Chinese remaining free in the United States while his own people were being rounded up and isolated from American society.
Until the Civil War, racial injustice was legally codified in most states, and only after the war did the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee all citizenship rights, including the right to vote, to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” while the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race, color, or previous servitude. But during the post-Reconstruction era, southern states resorted to a variety of ruthless Jim Crow tactics, ranging from poll taxes to outright violence, to keep blacks away from the ballot box.
While southern racists were widely regarded in the North with righteous scorn, it should be noted that western politicians were equally unwilling to see the Chinese gain the right to vote. They feared, as California Republican senator Cornelius Cole warned, that “If the Chinese were allowed to vote,” it would “kill our party as dead as a stone.” Those who feared that the Chinese immigrants would start applying for naturalization, and once they had citizenship be guaranteed the right to vote, won a victory when in the 1870s Congress and a federal court decision withheld from the Chinese the right of naturalization, declaring them aliens ineligible for citizenship. But the Fourteenth Amendment, written to ensure that African Americans were given the full rights of citizenship, extended the right of birthright citizenship to all those born in the United States, and as a consequence to the American-born Chinese population as well. So while Congress denied Chinese immigrants the right to become naturalized citizens, the Reconstruction amendments precluded both the federal and state governments from denying American-born children their citizenship rights. It
would be a distinction the Chinese would not ignore.
Before the 1870s, only a handful of Chinese had lived in the old South, a few working as physicians, and many more as merchants, storekeepers, or cooks. Some had made their homes in southern port cities such as Charleston and New Orleans. But with the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of the black slaves, southern planters, hearing of the exemplary work habits of the Chinese and knowing they had no rights of citizenship, wanted to use them as field hands. Unlike the ruling class in the West, which feared the Chinese as competition, white southerners had no difficulty with the idea of importing hordes of foreigners, in this case to pressure their former black slaves to return to field labor under conditions that had prevailed under slavery. “Emancipation has spoiled the Negro, and carried him away from the fields of agriculture,” editorialized the Vicksburg Times. “Our prosperity depends entirely upon the recovery of lost ground, and we therefore say let the Coolies come, and we will take the chance of Christianizing them.” No doubt, one of the first Christian traits they would have the Chinese learn was to turn the other cheek when abused. But clearly the intent was not to save the souls of the Chinese, but to use them as leverage against the emancipated blacks. A planter’s wife wrote, “Give us five million of Chinese laborers in the valley of the Mississippi and we can furnish the world with cotton and teach the Negro his proper place.”
To this end, the southern elite organized a conference to discuss strategy. In 1869, hundreds of delegates arrived in Memphis, Tennessee, for the nation’s first Chinese labor convention. Tye Kim Orr, a Chinese Christian who had established a Chinese colony in British Guiana before moving to Louisiana, addressed the delegates in Memphis on the second day of the conference, assuring his audience that the Chinese were docile, obedient, and industrious—in short, a race amenable to easy exploitation. The conference whipped up considerable excitement in the press, especially with the appearance of Cornelius Koopmanschap, the country’s best-known importer of Chinese workers, who had helped supply the Central Pacific Railroad with Chinese labor. He captivated his audience at Memphis by promising that the Chinese would be willing to move to the South from San Francisco for about twenty dollars a month, or from China on five-year contracts for as little as ten dollars a month.
Anticipating the prospect of a new South rising on the backs of coolie labor, the delegates agreed to raise a million dollars to further Koopmanschap’s plans; they also appointed a committee to bring five hundred to one thousand Chinese immigrants to the South.
After the conference, the South went about actively recruiting Chinese labor. A few, brought from Cuba in 1866, were already working in sugarcane fields. To help lure more workers to the region, American clipper companies distributed handbills in south Chinese ports. “All Chinese make much money in New Orleans if they work,” one of these asserted. “Chinamen have become richer than mandarins there.” Some of the advertisements promised the Chinese that on their passage to the United States they would find “nice rooms and very fine food. They can play all sorts of games and have no work.” The handbills urged the Chinese to hurry. “It is a nice country. Better than this. No sickness there and no danger of death. Come! Go at once. You cannot afford to wait. Don’t heed the wife’s counsel or the threats of enemies. Be Chinamen, but go.”
These aggressive efforts netted the arrival of about two thousand Chinese in the South in 1869 and 1870. Some went to work on the plantations and shrimp farms of Louisiana. Others replaced black labor in the cotton fields of Mississippi and Arkansas. Still others toiled on railroads. In December 1869, some 250 Chinese men came as employees of the Houston & Texas Central Railroad. The following August, a thousand arrived in Alabama to build track toward Chattanooga.
By the middle of 1871, however, there appeared signs of serious conflict and, on both sides, disillusionment. On one plantation, the Chinese staged a strike to protest the whipping of a Chinese servant. On another, a Chinese labor gang attempted to lynch a Chinese agent who had given them false information about their life in the South. There were cases of plantation owners who shot and killed Chinese workers who rebelled against oppressive conditions.
The primary issue was that plantation owners, accustomed to absolute control over their workers, viewed their relationship with the Chinese as master and slave rather than employer and employee. In contrast, the Chinese considered their relationship to the planters as a capitalistic, not feudal, transaction and expected their employers to adhere to the terms of their contracts. Time had left the southern employers behind, and the Chinese laborers, unlike black slaves, now enjoyed decided advantages.
First, the Chinese worked under labor contracts and, to the dismay of the southern elite, proved to be shrewd and litigious negotiators. To spell out every detail of their contracts, they hired bilingual interpreters, men who served not only as translators but as surrogate agents and lawyers. Their job was to haggle over the terms of the contract, communicate worker grievances to employers, and secure new employment for their clients if they were dissatisfied with their jobs. When planters violated their contracts, the interpreters filed lawsuits on behalf of the Chinese.
Second, the Chinese in the South could sue or press charges against their employers. For example, in 1871, Chinese workers took their case to court after a skirmish with an overseer left one Chinese dead and two others wounded. The local judge not only permitted their testimony to be delivered in Chinese but later ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. In this respect, the Chinese enjoyed greater protection under the law in the South than in California, where state law specifically barred them from testifying against Caucasians.
Third, Chinese workers were protected by a postwar federal government deeply suspicious of southern efforts to exploit people on the basis of race. As early as August 1867, U.S. authorities halted Chinese labor recruitment in the South until they received testimonials and certificates from the Chinese stipulating that they had migrated to the South voluntarily and signed labor contracts of their own free will. This governmental vigilance made it difficult for southern plantation owners to hold Chinese workers in bondage.
For the southern oligarchy, the experiment with Chinese labor, begun with such high hopes, proved to be a disaster. Within a few years, most Chinese had walked away from their contracts and accepted other jobs at better wages. Many gravitated toward cities like New Orleans, where they opened their own stores. Some simply ran away, and most planters lacked the resources to pursue them. By 1915, scarcely a single plantation still employed Chinese labor.
If the southerners thought that they could import Chinese labor to discipline their former slaves, the North thought it could exploit Chinese labor to discipline its white workers. The northern attempt came during the “Gilded Age,” as Mark Twain called it, a showy, counterfeit epoch, its gilt veneer barely hiding underlying corruption. It was a time when ruthless capitalists, known as “robber barons,” ascended to positions of enormous power, not through exemplary hard work a la Horatio Alger, but through wholesale bribery, collusion, and intimidation. It was an age of contrasts, of conspicuous consumption by the wealthy juxtaposed against a backdrop of deep despair and disillusionment within the working class.
This yawning gap between rich and poor, which widened further during the second half of the nineteenth century, was already apparent during the Civil War, when men like J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and James Mellon eluded military service by paying less privileged men to act as their substitutes. Many of the rich grew richer selling shoddy equipment to the government for use by the Union armies. Class differences grew more distinct in the postwar era, especially during the presidency of U. S. Grant, a legendary Civil War general but a spectacularly incompetent public official. In an administration wracked by scandal, federal officials consistently protected the interests and ignored the excesses of those willing to pay them off. The robber barons engaged in an orgy of confiscatory expansion, first wounding and then
gobbling up competitors, all with the connivance of the courts and the help of the legislatures they purchased. Financiers and railroad moguls watered down stocks, used strong-arm tactics to bully employees into submission, and bought off federal, state, and city politicians to create their empires. Washington spent millions of taxpayer dollars to bail out Wall Street after a failed conspiracy by stock speculators to corner the gold market.
Against this background of greed, the frustration of the American worker mounted. Those who had loyally risked life and limb to fight in the Union armies were cast adrift after the war. Returning to crumbling, disease-ridden tenements in the cities, they had to compete with thousands of others for work, including even more desperate European immigrants—men and women willing to endure unhealthy and even dangerous conditions in factories for minimal wages. Others seeking work were farmers forced off the land when they found that they could afford neither the expensive equipment required to make agriculture profitable, nor the exorbitant shipping rates charged by powerful railroad monopolies. There were riots in the coal mines, strikes in mills and factories, accompanied by literal starvation in the streets. In an effort to defend themselves against their corporate employers, white employees started to organize unions to fight for decent working conditions and fair wages.
A new method of control had to be found quickly, a new source of labor that would demonstrate that union members were expendable, and eastern industrialists began to consider the Chinese as that source. In 1870 at North Adams, Massachusetts, the workers of a ladies’ boot and shoe factory went on strike, demanding an eight-hour day, a wage increase, and the right to review the company’s account ledgers. The owner, Calvin Sampson, fired them, but since the strikers belonged to the Secret Order of the Knights of Saint Crispin, the largest and possibly the most powerful union in the country, he was unable to hire replacement white workers. Still, Sampson rejected the demands of his workers, and after reading a newspaper article praising the efficiency of Chinese workers in a San Francisco shoe factory, he signed a three-year contract with the emigration firm of Kwong, Chong, Wing & Company under which seventy-five Chinese laborers would be sent east from the West Coast. Sampson was the first manufacturer in American history to transport Asians east of the Rockies to end a strike.
