The Chinese in America

by Iris Chang

  For many Chinese, the decisive moment when they first recognized that their future lay in America, not China, came when they married outside their race. It was not uncommon for Chinese immigrants to wed non-Asian women in the South. “With few or no Chinese women available, the first and succeeding generations blended through intermarriage with previously recognized ethnic groups,” notes historian Lucy Cohen, author of Chinese in the Post-Civil War South and herself a child of Chinese-Jewish intermarriage. She points out that marriage between whites and Chinese was more acceptable in the South than marriage between whites and blacks, largely because of the ambiguity of Chinese racial status: no scheme of racial classification had evolved for the Chinese, and as a result they became “a truly ‘mixed nation.’ ”

  Interracial marriage was also popular among Chinese intellectuals on the East Coast. Yung Wing married a Caucasian, Mary L. Kellogg, in 1875, and several students in his educational mission violated Chinese government regulations by marrying white women and settling permanently in the United States. (One reason the Chinese government terminated Yung Wing’s Chinese Educational Mission was that many Qing officials disapproved of these interracial unions.) During the late nineteenth century, the city of New York also showed a discernible pattern of interracial marriage between Irish women and Chinese men.

  Unlike other European immigrants, Irish women often migrated alone, without their families, and sometimes outnumbered Irish male arrivals two to one. It was natural, then, for these women to form relationships with those of an immigrant population that suffered a serious shortage of women. As early as 1857, Harper’s Weekly took note of the marriages between Chinese cigar vendors and Irish apple peddlers in New York. By the end of the decade, the New York Times noted that most owners of Chinese boarding houses were married to either Irish or German women.

  A great deal of racial antagonism is an expression of sexual anxiety. This goes back to humankind’s earliest days, when tribal conflict often ended with the men of the victorious tribe carrying off the women of the defeated tribe. So it is not surprising that some newspapers took to depicting Chinese men as lascivious creatures preying on innocent, impoverished white girls. Such was the tone of warning underlying a New York Times article on December 26, 1873, which described a “handsome but squalidly dressed young white girl” in an opium den. The Chinese owner allegedly told the reporter, “Oh, hard time in New York. Young girl hungry. Plenty come here. Chinaman always have something to eat, and he like young white girl. He! He!”

  More frequently, Chinese-white relationships were ridiculed rather than described portentously. In New York, the comedy of actor/theater manager Edward Harrigan featured stereotypical characters like Mrs. Dublin, the Irish washerwoman, and Hog-Eye, the Chinese laundryman. Store windows displayed mechanical toys of Chinese men dancing with Irish women. In March 1858, Yankee Notions ran a cartoon on its cover ascribing the following dialogue to a Chinese-Irish couple:

  MRS. CHANG-FEE-CHOW-CHY (the better half of the Celestial over the way): Now, then, Chang-Mike, run home and take Pat-Chow and Rooney-Sing wid ye, and bring the last of the puppy pie for yer daddy. And, do ye mind? Bring some praties of your mother, ye spalpeens. (To her husband) How be’s ye, Chang Honey?

  CHANG-HONEY: Sky we po kee bang too, mucho puck ti, rum foo, toodie shee sicke.

  Despite these caricatures, the Chinese-Irish marriages seemed to work well. When a New York World reporter told two Irish women they should be married to whites, not Chinese, one retorted that their Chinese husbands were as “white” as anyone, even “whiter” than most of their neighbors. Some Chinese husbands were studying English at night, to move up in American society. A writer for the New York Sun described his visit to a Chinese clubhouse and his exchange with a “young and pretty Irish girl, scarcely over eighteen”:

  “Today we had a nice dinner, chickens and such things, and the men and their wives are now smoking and drinking sour wine. The wives are all Irish girls. I’m married.” “What, married to a Chinaman?” “Certainly,” she answered proudly, “married two weeks today.” Then laughing outright she went on to say that the Chinamen were all good “fellows,” that they work hard, go to night school, and are devoted to their wives.10

  Originally, many Chinese immigrants did not plan to fall in love with non-Chinese women. Take the example of Charles Sun, who arrived in California in 1878 and later moved to a small Illinois town to work for his cousin, a laundryman called Fook Soo. While delivering freshly washed clothes, Fook Soo met the daughter of a rich white family and maintained a secret, two-year romance with her. When she became pregnant he skipped town and returned to China to marry a native woman. Feeling compassion for his cousin’s abandoned lover (her family immediately disowned her, then grudgingly took her back), Charles Sun offered her financial support, then marriage. Eventually they reared four children together. “It was hard for me to refuse her,” he later told an interviewer. “She was so pitiful! I was really in love with her at that period already, even though I had no intention that I should marry a white woman... [or spend] my whole life in that little town.”

  Some Chinese men already had wives back in the old country, because their families had taken the precaution of marrying them off before they left for Gold Mountain. And no doubt some loved the Chinese wives they had left behind, and were loyal enough to send them regular remittance checks, year after year. But in time, some Chinese emigres met other women in America, women who could easily compete for affection with the fading memories of those first wives back in China.

  Having a relationship with a non-Chinese woman was often the tipping point in the assimilation process, the point where the emigre first started saying “back in China,” rather than “back home.” Some men who took American girlfriends, and even some who took new wives, continued to send funds back to their China families, and some didn’t. The people in the home villages would carefully make note of this, for though they were thousands of miles apart, they kept tabs on their Gold Mountain men with newsletters and gazetteers. An unspoken agreement soon evolved. As long as the money kept arriving, the village would tolerate infidelity from the men, but not their wives. Even if they wed other women in the United States, the first wives were expected to remain “Gold Mountain widows” if the husband continued to support his children in China. However, if the money flow stopped, the reverse applied—the village was willing to look the other way if the wives chose to remarry.

  As the Chinese dispersed across the United States, many left behind mixed-race children. Unfortunately, no systematic studies have traced the lives of these children; indeed, few reliable statistics exist on any of the early Chinese, let alone their descendants. California was the only state in the union to list the Chinese as a separate group in the 1860 U.S. census. In most states, the census counted only whites, blacks, and mulattos, and the Chinese were often classified as either “white” or “black.”

  Occasional glimpses of these children can be found in scattered newspaper and magazine accounts. “It is very curious to hear the little half-breed children running about the rooms and alternatively talking Irish to their mothers and Chinese to their fathers,” one New York reporter noted. And as these children grew older, they made their own choices about their identity. Some—perhaps most—passed for white and adopted the values of the local community, like the southern-born children of the famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker. But others embraced the Chinese half of their heritage, such as the two sons of Yung Wing, both of whom graduated from Yale, moved to China, and married Chinese women.

  In the South, where Chinese men married white, black, Indian, or Creole women, the ethnicity of offspring was fluid. Their descendants chose to be “white” in certain settings, and “colored” in others; for them, race was not socially mandated, but was rather an individual choice. Lucy Cohen interviewed the grandson of a Chinese settler whose multiracial heritage permitted him access to stores with “Whites only” signs—but who al
so fit himself into the “Mexican/ Indian” category, so he could “pass for what he wants.” Cohen also met the mixed-race granddaughter of a Chinese immigrant who recounted that some of her family members passed for white, either denying or forgetting their heritage, while others retained the memory of their Chinese ancestry. The granddaughter recalled the day her son was called a “nigger” by a distant relative who was even darker-skinned than he was. “That made me angry, and I told him: ‘My daddy and your daddy are first cousins, you half-white b—. Our grandparents were Chinese and Creole.”

  What was the range or depth of emotions these descendants experienced as they came of age? Were some happy with their ability to defy racial pigeonholing—to be accepted by more than one ethnic group? Or were they tormented by a lifelong confusion over identity? Only hints of their feelings can be traced. One of the first to document the psychological turmoil of the mixed-race Asian in America was Edith Maud Eaton. Born in England in 1865, the daughter of a British father and a Chinese mother, Eaton grew up in Canada and later moved to the United States, where she wrote under the pseudonym Sui Sin Far. An early pioneer of Chinese American literature, Eaton wrote not only about the struggles of the Chinese in the United States against white hostility, but also of her own conflicted feelings about being half-Chinese. Her books are a poignant blend of racial pride, celebration, and despair. In the autobiographical Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian, published in 1909, she wrote:

  I have come from a race on my mother’s side which is said to be the most stolid and insensible to feelings of all races, yet I look back over the years and see myself so keenly alive to every shade of sorrow and suffering that it is almost a pain to live. Mother tells us tales of China. Though a child when she left her native land she remembers it well, and I am never tired of listening to the story of how she was stolen from her home. She tells us over and over again of her meeting with my father in Shanghai and the romance of their marriage. I glory in the idea of dying at the stake and a great genie arising from the flames and declaring to those who have scorned us: “Behold, how great and glorious and noble are the Chinese people!” Whenever I have the opportunity I steal away to the library and read every book I can find on China and Chinese. I learn that China is the oldest civilized nation on the face of the earth and a few other things. At eighteen years of age what troubles me is not that I am what I am, but that others are ignorant of my superiority.

  “Why is my mother’s race despised?” Eaton agonized, in a question that was to be shared by generations of other mixed-race children. “I look into the faces of my father and mother. Is she not every bit as dear and good as he? Why? Why?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Rumblings of Hatred

  Racial and ethnic tensions simmer just below the surface in virtually all multiethnic societies, but it usually takes an economic crisis to blow off the lid of civility and allow deep-seated hatred to degenerate into violence. When our livelihoods are at stake, when we are desperate, when families are uncertain where their next meal is coming from, when adults fear for the futures of their children, it is natural to ask why fortune has treated us so cruelly. And in these moments, we are all vulnerable to explanations that easily assign blame to some outside group. Perhaps it goes back to our primitive origins, when in threatening times our personal safety was best assured by sticking with our own tribe. But for whatever reasons, a general rule of history seems to be that the more people feel insecure about their own well-being, the more likely they will join with those of close affinity in striking out at some alien group.

  In the 1870s, when America slid into a nationwide depression, the Chinese became that scapegoat, especially in regions where they clustered in the greatest numbers. During an earlier era of prosperity, some Chinese might have been lulled into a false feeling of security when they moved into white neighborhoods or signed contracts with white businessmen. But when the prosperity vanished, the Chinese had to face just how resented, even loathed, they were by their white neighbors and competitors.

  Nowhere was that resentment greater than in the state of California, where all the ingredients for racial unrest came together. The gold disappeared and with it all those businesses that supported mining and prospecting. The railroad was complete and the men who had built it found themselves out of work. Thousands of ex-miners and discharged track laborers, white and Chinese, roamed the region in search of jobs. Even if the local economy been able to absorb these shocks, with the end of the Civil War came the end of the national manpower shortage. Now, former Union and Confederate soldiers were back home, eagerly looking for work, and some headed west, to the Golden State of California.

  Before the war, the expense and inconvenience of intercontinental travel would have deterred all but the most resolute from reaching the West Coast, but the new railroad made it easy for job-seekers to come, disgorging a steady stream not only of Civil War veterans from the East and South, but of newly arrived immigrants from Europe. Even though cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles were growing rapidly, they did not have enough work for them all.

  Worse, the transcontinental railroad did not bring the prosperity that many in California had hoped it would. While it did open eastern markets to western manufactured goods and some agricultural products, it also allowed shipment of inexpensive eastern products into California, which hurt local industries. The new factories in San Francisco were no match for the older, more established factories on the East Coast, and those who had traveled west to escape eastern sweatshops and mill towns, to seize new opportunities and build new lives, found instead mass unemployment and ruthless competition for jobs. Many of the competitors for these jobs were Chinese, and by the end of 1870 there were one Chinese and two whites for every job in San Francisco.

  As would be expected, many California businessmen, eager to cut costs in hard times, hired the Chinese because they were usually willing to work longer hours for less than half the pay. Further exacerbating racial tensions, some businessmen also used the Chinese as strikebreakers, just as had been done on the East Coast. In 1870, a traveler reported, “In the factories of San Francisco they had none but Irish, paying them three dollars a day in gold. They struck, and demanded four dollars. Immediately their places, numbering three hundred, were supplied by Chinamen at one dollar a day.”

  For struggling Irish workers engaged in a strike to secure decent wages for themselves, it must have been galling to witness the sheer number of Chinese willing to serve as scabs. Of course, most Chinese were likely unfamiliar with the concept “scab,” and in addition owed no allegiance or support to a union that would not have them as members. Nevertheless, the tensions between the two immigrant groups rose. In September 1870, the Overland Monthly published a humorous poem by the famous newspaperman, writer, and poet Bret Harte that depicted the growing animosity between the Irish and the Chinese. The verse was originally titled “Plain Language from Truthful James,” but eventually came to be known almost exclusively as “The Heathen Chinee.” It recounts a card game between two fictional characters: Ah Sin, a Chinese man, and William Nye, an Irishman. Even though Nye blatantly cheats with cards stuffed up his sleeves, he keeps losing to Ah Sin. Finally Nye, losing patience, shouts, “We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor!” and then assaults Ah Sin, knocking hidden cards out of the Chinese man’s sleeves.

  Which group did Harte intended to ridicule more, the Chinese or the Irish? If his poem depicted the former as crafty cheaters, it mocked the Irish as inept ones, forced to resort to violence after losing to the Chinese, even after excessive cheating. Whatever Harte’s intention, “The Heathen Chinee” struck a chord deep within the American psyche and became the country’s most popular poem in the 1870s. It was set to music and reprinted in virtually every newspaper in the county. Newsstands sold illustrated copies of the poem as pamphlets. The New York Globe published it twice, and in January 1871 the paper reported that hundreds of people had gathered to see a version of “The
Heathen Chinee” displayed in a shop window: “In all our knowledge of New York nothing like this has ever been seen on Broadway.” Bret Harte and Mark Twain even collaborated to bring “The Heathen Chinee” to the stage, under the title Ah Sin.

  But underneath the laughter provoked by the poem was tremendous fear of the Chinese, especially in California. Everything about the Chinese—their physiognomy, their language, their food, their queues—struck many whites as bizarre, making it easy to demonize them. Large numbers of whites, seeing their livelihoods threatened by Chinese competition, began to feel as if the Chinese were somehow part of a giant, secret conspiracy to undercut the American working man. They complained, with some basis in fact, that the Chinese worked for less money, rarely spent what they had, and tended to keep their capital within the community, shopping at Chinese groceries and importing their food from China. They also believed that the Chinese who sent part of their money home to China were draining the country of its currency, its very lifeblood, while they ignored the larger contributions made by these Chinese in America. Anti-Chinese clubs soon flourished throughout California, pressuring officials in San Francisco to pass a series of municipal ordinances against Chinese residents, designed to drive them out of the city.

  One was the 1870 Cubic Air law, which required lodging houses to provide at least five hundred cubic feet of open space for each adult occupant. On its face the law was not discriminatory, but it was flouted in poor white neighborhoods across the city while rigorously enforced in the Chinese section of San Francisco. City officials routinely arrested Chinese in the middle of the night, dragging them from bed and driving them “like brutes” into prison. Ironically, the local government violated its own cubic-air ordinance when it herded the Chinese into jail, where, as one newspaper noted, each Chinese enjoyed only twenty cubic feet of space. As an act of passive resistance, many refused to pay the fine, in essence staging jailhouse sit-ins. The San Francisco board of supervisors retaliated with the infamous “queue ordinance”: each male prisoner who did not pay his fine would have his hair shaved within an inch of his scalp. This ordinance devastated the morale of the Chinese, for a shorn head in their homeland was a mark of treason and occasioned a complete loss of caste.