by Iris Chang
Although the Chinese community was relieved by this Supreme Court decision, victory in the courts did not always translate into a new respect for the Chinese community or for the Chinese in America as a people. To the contrary, by the turn of the century, a shameful series of local and federal acts reminded the Chinese that any court ruling, to have meaning, must have the support of local officials prepared to carry out its provisions.
In 1899, U.S. officials in Hawaii learned that a few people had died of plague in Hong Kong. Fearful that the disease had spread to Honolulu, they forbade the local Chinese from boarding ships headed for the continental United States. In addition, the board of health burned down a section of the city’s Chinatown. Health officials in San Francisco followed their example, shutting down all Chinese-owned businesses and ordering all Chinese who wished to leave the city to submit to inoculation first. The illegality of these measures prompted a Mr. Wong Wai to sue the department of public health, a lawsuit he won in both the local district court and the court of appeals. In May 1900, the court ordered the San Francisco public health department to cease and desist, but officials persisted in their campaign by enlisting the support of the board of supervisors. Soon, in contravention of the legal order, Chinatown was cordoned off by the police, barricaded, and completely quarantined, while city officials talked about burning and razing it to the ground. It took the combined efforts of the Chinese Six Companies, their attorneys, the Chinese ethnic media, the local Chinese consul, and China’s minister (ambassador) to the United States to break the quarantine and save the San Francisco Chinatown from total destruction.
It didn’t help the Chinese cause that, just at this time, the Boxer Rebellion was developing in China. Calling themselves “The Boxers United in Righteousness,” gangs of impoverished Chinese peasants, blaming foreigners for China’s economic ills, besieged and slaughtered white Christians and Chinese converts in northern China as well as white missionaries and diplomats in Beijing. While China’s ills were by no means solely attributable to the influence of foreign powers, the Opium Wars early in the nineteenth century had certainly disrupted the country’s economy and led to the granting of special economic rights to Great Britain and broad concessions to various other foreign powers in China. It took a combined military force of several Western nations to crush the rebellion, and afterward the Qing government agreed to pay massive indemnities in gold. Even though the Chinese émigrés in the United States had nothing to do with the rebellion, the strain on Chinese-American relations was bound to hurt them. Before the Boxers, the Chinese ambassador could be counted on to argue the case of the Chinese community with Washington. Now, with a weakened China—in effect, a nation that had become almost a subject nation—there was no one with any clout to plead for them.
Nonetheless, the Chinese continued to protest the American policies that targeted them. “We helped build your railroads, open your mines, cultivated the waste places, and assisted in making California the great State she is now,” one group of petitioners would write to the president of the United States. “In return for all this what do we receive? Abuse, humiliation and imprisonment. We ask that these things be changed, and that we be treated as human beings instead of outlaws.”
But nothing changed, either in the West or in Washington, D.C. When the Geary Act expired in 1902, Congress passed yet another exclusion law, this time extending the period of exclusion indefinitely and continuing to deny naturalization to the Chinese already in the United States. In 1904, Ng Poon Chew, founder of Chung Sai Yat Po, San Francisco’s first Chinese-language daily newspaper, described what it felt like to be Chinese in America: “all Chinese,” he wrote, “whether they are merchants or officials, teachers, students or tourists, are reduced to the status of dogs in America. The dogs must have with them necklaces”—here Chew is referring to the residence certificates—“which attest to their legal status before they are allowed to go out. Otherwise they would be arrested as unregistered, unowned dogs and would be herded into a detention camp.”
In 1905, just when it seemed things could not get any worse, the Supreme Court announced its decision in United States v. Ju Toy.
The Exclusion Acts, both the first and those that followed, it must be remembered, had never fully excluded the Chinese. Even the first act made exceptions for merchants, teachers, students, and their household staffs. So all through this period a limited number of Chinese were entering the country, some as permanent immigrants, others as American citizens who had left the country and were now returning. But in the Toy decision, the Supreme Court determined that Chinese immigrants denied entry to the United States, even if they alleged American citizenship, could no longer gain access to the courts to appeal the decision. Instead, it gave the secretary of commerce and labor, who oversaw immigration issues, jurisdiction on this matter. The decision of the secretary, the Court ruled, would be “final and conclusive even when the petitioner alleged U.S. citizenship.”
The Supreme Court appeared untroubled by the contradiction between its previous ruling in Wong Kim Ark that U.S. citizenship could not be stripped from Americans of Chinese descent, and its new ruling denying due process to citizens by allowing immigration authorities to decide in effect who was and who wasn’t a citizen without review by any court. According to a New York judge, immigration officials had so much power that if they wished “to order an alien drawn, quartered and chucked overboard, they could do so without interference.”
Not surprisingly, after the Court endowed immigration officials with this power, Chinese admission rates started to plummet. From 1897 to 1899, 725 of 7,762 Chinese who had applied to enter the United States were rejected—about one in ten; then, between 1903 and 1905, the rejection rate rose to one in four.
Oddly enough, the most dramatic protest against America’s discriminatory measures was undertaken in China, by a group of activists seeking a ban on American goods and businesses until the exclusion policy was repealed. On July 20, 1905, after the Ju Toy decision, the Chinese in Shanghai initiated a full-scale boycott. They quit working for American companies, moved their homes and businesses out of American-owned buildings, and pulled their children out of American schools. Some 90 percent of the businesses in the Chinese district of the city13 displayed placards supporting the boycott. Chinese businessmen canceled contracts with American firms and refused to buy or sell American products; demonstrators prevented American ships from unloading their cargos; newspapers refused to run American advertisements.
The boycott spread first to other coastal cities in central and south China—with the Canton region, the homeland for most Chinese in North America, providing plenty of financial support—and then to the interior of the country and abroad. The movement fascinated Chinese from all walks of life; one American traveler, visiting a mountaintop monastery in China, reported that “even the old monks” wanted to talk about it. It also gained the support of overseas Chinese communities throughout Asia and attracted donations from the Chinese in the United States and Hawaii, where mass meetings and fund-raisers were held to sustain the boycott. This was one of the rare occasions when diverse groups of Chinese in the United States—the mercantile elite, the laborers, the journalists, Christians, even the tongs—put aside their differences and worked together toward a single goal.
So effective was the boycott that it devastated many American businesses in China and deprived the United States of some $30 million to $40 million worth of trade. It hurt textile mills in the American North and cotton plantations in the South. In Canton, Standard Oil’s sales plummeted from about 90,000 cases of fuel monthly to 19,000. So low had American firms fallen in esteem that the British American Tobacco Company found it difficult to even give away free cigarettes to its agents in China.
A year after the boycott began, the U.S. government stepped in, pressuring the Manchu government to put it down. The royal family, still reeling from its humiliation in the Boxer Rebellion, acceded to U.S. pressure, no doubt fearing
retaliation if it did not act and act quickly. It is likely that the government was inclined to move against the boycotters for another reason as well. At the time, the boycott was directed solely against foreigners, but the possibility was real that it could quickly turn into a domestic revolution that might topple the throne. The Manchus issued an imperial edict to crush the boycott.
Nonetheless, the embargo had made its point, not just in China but in the United States as well, which did not end the policy of exclusion, but did ameliorate its worst abuses. President Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order to immigration officials to stop abusive treatment of Chinese merchants and other legitimate visitors, along with a warning that any official caught mistreating Chinese who had the proper paperwork would be dismissed. The U.S. government shortened delays in processing arrivals, discarded a proposal for a new round of Chinese registrations, and scrapped the humiliating Bertillon system of identification, instituted in 1903, which required detailed measurements of the nude body. The results were immediately apparent. In 1905, immigration authorities had rejected 29 percent of the certificates approved by American consuls in China; in 1906, after the boycott, they rejected only 6 percent.
But even more important, Roosevelt used his bully pulpit to set a new tone for the treatment of the Chinese in America. Speaking before Congress, the president noted, “Much trouble has come during the past summer from the organized boycott against American goods,” and warned, “We must treat the Chinese student, trader and businessman in a spirit of broadest justice and courtesy if we expect similar treatment to be accorded to our own people of similar rank who go to China.”
The cumulative effect of the restrictive immigration laws sharply decreased the number of new immigrants. In 1883, one year after the passage of the Exclusion Act, 8,031 Chinese managed to enter the United States. We do not know how many of these were immigrants returning from visits to China and how many were first-time arrivals. In 1884, the number dropped to 279; in 1885, 22. In 1887, a total of ten Chinese arrived in the United States. The new immigrants were virtually all from privileged classes—scholars, merchants, professionals, and diplomats. At the same time, the Chinese in America began an exodus out of the country to avoid persecution and massacre. Between 1890 and 1900, the number of male Chinese in the United States (at that time 95 percent of the Chinese population) dropped from 103,620 to 85,341.
An unknown number of Chinese tried to circumvent the exclusion laws, risking their savings, even their lives, in order to enter the United States. For no matter how bad things were in the United States, the opportunity to earn more money outweighed the risks. Some migrated first to Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean, and then tried to smuggle their way into the United States by train or boat. Many of them did not make it. The files of border patrols from that era include stories of capsized boats and Chinese nearly drowning, of Chinese hiding in rice bins on steamers bound for America. “They would stab through the rice and you might be killed in the process,” one immigrant recalled. “Sometimes you had to hide in a coffin, and you could suffocate to death.” A few made it in, but not enough to reverse the decline of the Chinese American population.
Ironically, the event that opened a new immigration window for the Chinese in America was a historic natural catastrophe that changed the lives of Chinese and non-Chinese alike. At 5:13 A.M. on April 18, 1906, an earthquake struck San Francisco. “My cousin and I were asleep in the basement of the store on Washington Street,” recalled Hugh Leung, a high school student at the time. “He woke me and I felt the trembling and saw pieces of plaster falling down like water. I thought I was on the ocean. I quickly dressed and ran into the street. The building across from our place collapsed.” In panic, thousands of Chinese rushed into Portsmouth Square, a large open space in San Francisco Chinatown. A fire operator on the scene remembers, “It seemed not more than several minutes after the shock before the square was literally packed with hundreds of Chinese, of all ages, sexes and condition of apparel, jabbering and gesticulating in excited terror.”
The Chung Sai Yat Po newspaper described the ordeal of the residents : “They carried their bundles, walking away but at the same time looking back as they did so, brooding or weeping softly.” While the wealthier Chinese, terrified of white violence, fled the city, the poor stayed behind, for want of funds. Haunted by memories of persecution by whites, some were too frightened to seek food and shelter from city relief stations. Others were robbed by the soldiers brought in to maintain order in the city, and still others were ordered by these soldiers to perform physical labor. Uncertain about where to resettle the Chinese, city officials shuffled them from one camp to another, each move drawing howls of protest from whites who feared that the Chinese would stay in their neighborhoods permanently.
Finally the authorities ordered the Chinese to the far corner of the Presidio, and white looters had a field day. Thousands of men, women, and children descended on the charred remains of what was left of Chinatown, hauling away sacks of melted bronze, pitchers and teapots, artworks, and other valuable items. Looting was prevalent everywhere in the city, but because the Chinese were not permitted to return to protect their belongings, thieves rifled the vaults and safes of Chinese-owned banks, homes, and businesses. Army officials stood by with “shoot to kill” orders to prevent the wholesale pillage of the city, but they refused to enforce discipline in Chinatown, arguing they could not tell the difference between genuine thieves and innocent curiosity seekers, a patently ridiculous claim. Contemporaneous accounts suggest that the looters included some of the most prominent citizens in the Bay Area, and the San Francisco Chronicle reported that they included “high railroad officials,” “society people in Oakland and San Francisco, and reputable businessmen.” The plunderers also included members of the military. On April 21, the Chinese consul general in San Francisco protested to the governor that “the National Guard [is] stripping everything of value in Chinatown.”
The fire destroyed much of the city, but most important for the Chinese, it destroyed city birth and citizenship records. The loss of these municipal files allowed many immigrants to claim that they were born in San Francisco, not China, thereby enabling them to establish U.S. citizenship. Because all foreign-born children of American citizens are entitled to U.S. citizenship, a Chinese immigrant who managed to convince the American government that he was a citizen could then return to his homeland and claim citizenship for children born in China.14 Or he could tell American authorities that his wife in China had given birth to a son, when in reality no child had been born, and then sell the legal paperwork of this fictitious son to a young man eager to migrate to the United States. These so-called immigration slots were sold either through an individual’s network of relatives and acquaintances or through emigration firms. Traditionally, these firms—known as Gold Mountain firms—were import/export companiesthat also served as travel agencies, hotels, postal carriers, and banks for remittances. As crucial middlemen for Chinese émigrés, they were well placed to act as brokers in the illegal “paper sons” program.
The paper sons phenomenon naturally aroused the suspicions of the U.S. government. Authorities could not help but notice that the ratio of Chinese sons to daughters reported to be born during visits to the motherland was something like four hundred to one. They also commented on the high number of Chinese who alleged American citizenship. One federal judge noted that “if the stories told in the courts [are] true, every Chinese woman who was in the United States twenty-five years ago must have had at least five hundred children.” To detect paper sons, the government detained the Chinese at immigration stations and subjected them to lengthy interrogations.
At first, San Francisco officials detained Chinese arrivals in “the Shed,” a windowless two-story frame building at the edge of the Pacific Mail Steamship company’s pier. The Shed was filthy; one observer reported that it was “overrun with vermin” and that “the odors of sewage and bilge are most offensive.” After
a period of detention at the Shed, one Chinese merchant declared the Americans “a race of pigs.” Even Chinese immigrants in the classes exempt from the exclusion laws—merchants, professionals, intellectuals—faced humiliation upon arrival and then weeks of bureaucratic frustration.
In 1910, the government fenced off ten acres of Angel Island, in San Francisco Bay, as an immigration facility. This island had previously served as a military depot for recruits as well as a detention center for prisoners of the Spanish-American and Indian wars. Officials found its location advantageous for two reasons: as with nearby Alcatraz, the surrounding bay formed a natural barrier to escape; moreover, the physical isolation provided effective quarantine for the communicable diseases that American officials claimed were “prevalent among aliens from oriental countries.”
Over the next thirty years, some 175,000 Chinese immigrants, along with arrivals from other countries, would pass through Angel Island. Approximately 75 to 80 percent of the Chinese were detained until they could prove who they were, which usually required detailed investigations. Though modeled on Ellis Island near Manhattan, for decades the primary immigration gateway for the United States, Angel Island served a much different purpose. Ellis Island was a way station, with most immigrants processed and released within hours, whereas Angel Island was a long-term detention center, where many Chinese were imprisoned for months, even years. Looking back at how each was run, one might say that Ellis Island was operated to facilitate immigration and Angel Island to discourage it.
