Visions of Citizenship in American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1997); William J. Novak, “The Legal Transformation of Citizenship
in Nineteenth- Century Amer ica,” in The Demo cratic Experiment: New
Directions in American Po liti cal History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak,
and Julian E. Zelizer (Prince ton, NJ: Prince ton University Press, 2003),
85–119; Barbara Young Welke, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long
Nineteenth Century United States (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2010); Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in
Twentieth- Century Amer i ca (Prince ton, NJ: Prince ton University Press,
2009). On the alien and noncitizen, see Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the
Alien: Dilemmas of Con temporary Membership (Prince ton, NJ: Prince ton
University Press, 2006); Sarah H. Cleveland, “Powers Inherent in
Sovereignty: Indians, Aliens, Territories and the Nineteenth Century
Origins of Plenary Power over Foreign Affairs,” Texas Law Review 81, no. 1
(2002): 1–284; Parker, Making Foreigners; Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects:
Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern Amer i ca (Prince ton, NJ: Prince ton
University Press, 2005), xix– xx.
16. For cultural studies scholarship on Chinese foreignness and alienage, see
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1996 ); Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian
Americans in Popu lar Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999);
Edlie L. Wong, Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion and
the Fictions of Citizenship (New York: New York University Press, 2015).
17. This represents a conservative estimate of the number displaced, based on
the number of out- migrants from San Francisco, the population drop in
King and Pierce Counties, and the estimated number of displaced Chinese
who arrived in San Francisco. Coo lidge, Chinese Immigration, 500;
USC / WT 1885, 1887; DAC, February 13, 1886. Estimated Chinese living in
counties based on the 1880 federal census. 1880 U.S. Census, Steven
Ruggles, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, and Matthew
Sobek, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 6.0 [machine-
readable database] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015).
264
NOTES TO PAGE 9
18. Today, we remember the 1882 law as the “Chinese Exclusion Act,” but this
is an anachronism. Contemporaries referred to the legislation as the
“Chinese Restriction Act,” reserving the stronger term “exclusion” for its
successors in 1888, 1892, 1902, and 1904. For the nineteenth- century use of
“restriction,” see C. S. Fairchild to Acting Collector of Customs,
January 30, 1889, file 3, box 14, Letters Received from the Department of
Trea sury Customs Ser vice, Puget Sound Collection District Letters, U.S.
Customs Ser vice, RG 36, NA; Cong. Rec., 50th Cong., 2d Sess. 56 (1888) at
412. For the current use of “exclusion,” see major Asian American
textbooks: Ronald T. Takaki, Strangers from a Dif er ent Shore: A History of
Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 111; Chan, Asian Americans,
54; Erika Lee, The Making of Asian Amer i ca: A History (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 2015), 94. The actual name of the legislation was “An Act to
execute certain treaty stipulations relating to the Chinese,” ch. 126, 22 Stat.
58 (May 6, 1882). Several historians have recognized that contemporaries
drew a rhetorical distinction between “restriction” and “exclusion.” Paul A.
Kramer, “Imperial Openings: Civilization, Exemption, and the Geopolitics
of Mobility in the History of Chinese Exclusion, 1868–1910,” Journal of the
Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14, no. 3 (July 2015): 322; Elmer Clarence
Sandmeyer, The Anti- Chinese Movement in California (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1939) , 96–108. In his study of the legal enforcement of
Chinese Exclusion, Charles McClain follows a similar periodization. He
divides federal Exclusion Act litigation into two phases: 1882–1885 and
1888–1894. Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Strug gle
against Discrimination in Nineteenth- Century Amer i ca (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1994), 147–172, 191–219. For further discussion, see
Beth Lew- Williams, “Before Restriction Became Exclusion: Amer ica’s
Experiment in Diplomatic Immigration Control,” Pacific Historical Review
83, no. 1 (February 2014): 24–56.
19. Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian Amer i ca through
Immigration Policy, 1850–1990 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1993), 17–42.
20. Pew Research Center: Social and Demographic Trends, Pew Research
Center, accessed December 2012, http:// www.pewsocialtrends .org / 2012 / 06
/ 19 / the - rise - of - asian - americans /.
21. For example, Erika Lee, At Amer i ca’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the
Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2003), 9–12; Adam M. McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and
NOTES TO PAGE 10
265
the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
Some of these arrivals represent multiple trips by the same individuals.
22. On the post– Civil War transformation of U.S. citizenship, see Eric Foner,
The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 107; Eric
Foner, Reconstruction: Amer i ca’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New
York: Harper and Row, 1988), 237, 582; Novak, “The Legal Transformation
of Citizenship,” 93, 106; Cathleen D. Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A
Social History of the United States Indian Ser vice, 1869–1933 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 18–20, 26–29; Downs and
Masur, The World the Civil War Made, 8. Mexican Americans had
already been granted citizenship based on the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo.
23. For local histories of expulsion, see Scott Zesch, The Chinatown War:
Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012); Craig Storti, Incident at Bitter Creek: The Story of the Rock
Springs Chinese Massacre (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1991); Jeffrey
Alan Dettmann, “Anti- Chinese Vio lence in the American Northwest:
From Community Politics to International Diplomacy” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Texas, 2002); Jules Alexander Karlin, “The Anti- Chinese
Outbreaks in Seattle, 1885–1886,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 39, no. 2
(1948): 103–130; Jules Alexander Karlin, “The Anti- Chinese Outbreak in
Tacoma, 1885,” Pacific Historical Review 23, no. 3 (1954): 271–283; Lynwood
Carranco, “Chinese Expulsion from Humboldt County,” Pacific Historical
Review 30, no. 4 (1961): 329–340; Larry D. Quinn, “ ‘Chink Chink
Chinaman’: The Beginning of Nativism in Montana,” Pacific Northwest
Quarterly 58, no. 2 (1967): 82–89. For national histories of exclusion, see
Lee, At Amer i ca’s Gates; Hing, Making and Remaking Asian Amer i ca;
Lucy E. Salyer, Laws as Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the
Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995). For international histories of imperialism, see
Michael H. Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States
and China to 1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); William
Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 2nd rev. and
enl. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972); Walter LaFeber, The New
Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898,
35th anniversary ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). Some
histories have broken this pattern; see Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections:
The Making of the U.S.- Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley: University of
266
NOTES TO PAGES 10–12
California Press, 2012); Kramer, “Imperial Openings”; Delber L. McKee,
Chinese Exclusion versus the Open Door Policy 1900–1906: Clashes over
China Policy in the Roo se velt Era (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1977).
24. This method has much in common with the larger field of global history;
see Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Prince ton, NJ: Prince ton
University Press, 2016).
25. On scale in historical scholarship, see Richard White, “The Naturalization
of Nature,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 973–986; Sebouth
David Aslanian, Joyce E. Chaplin, Ann McGrath, and Kristin Mann,
“AHR Conversation; How Size Matters: The Question of Scale in History,”
American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (December 2013), 1431–1472; Bernhard
Struck, Kate Ferris, and Jacques Revel, “Introduction: Space and Scale in
Transnational History,” International History Review 33, no. 4
(December 2011), 573–584; Patrick Manning, Navigating World History:
Historians Create a Global Past (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003),
265–273; David Christian, “Scales,” in Palgrave Advances in World
Histories, ed. M. Hughes- Warrington (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), 64–89. See also Hayden White, “The Question of
Narrative in Con temporary Historical Theory,” History and Theory 23, no. 1
(1984): 1–33.
26. Didier Fassin, “Scenes from Urban Life: A Modest Proposal for a Critical
Perspectivist Approach,” Social Anthropology 21, no. 3 (2013): 371–377;
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 15–16; Jacoby, Shadows
at Dawn, 4–7; Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa (1950; Criterion
Collection, 2012), DVD.
27. Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese among Others: Emigration in Modern Times
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 28–52.
28. LAT, November 8, 14, 1885. See also The Daily Gazette (Kalamazoo, MI)
September 6, 1885; Congressional Rec ord, 49 Cong. 1 Sess. February 26,
1886, 1814; SDC, November 23, 1885; Riverside Press and Horticulturist,
December 15, 1885.
29. Though there were more expulsions in California, documentation about
the expulsions from Washington Territory have been better preserved in
the historical archive. This is due to a federal investigation of the
vio lence in Tacoma conducted in 1886 and the so cio log i cal Survey of
Race Relations (SRR) conducted in 1924, both of which collected Chinese
NOTES TO PAGES 13–20
267
testimony on the vio lence in Washington Territory. Watson Squire to
Thomas Bayard (and enclosed documents), July 17, 1886, USDS / ML;
SRR.
30. “Chinese Reconciliation Proj ect Foundation, ” http:// www
.tacomachinesepark .org /.
31. Cecil Cavanaugh, “The Hatch Mill, Pacific Ave nue, as It Used to Be,”
[Photo graph and Caption] (1876), 1979.1.101, Washington State Historical
Society, Tacoma.
32. Carol Brash, “Classical Chinese Gardens in Twenty- first Century Amer ica:
Cultivating the Past,” ASIA Network Exchange: A Journal for Asian Studies
in the Liberal Arts 19, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 17–29.
.
1 THE CHINESE QUESTION
1. Frank A. Leach, Recollections of a Newspaperman; A Rec ord of Life and
Events in California (San Francisco: Samuel Levinson, 1917), 35, doi:
http:// hdl.loc .gov / loc .gdc / calbk .128; Sim Moak, The Last of the Mill Creeks, and Early Life in Northern California (Chico, CA, 1923), 29, doi: http:// hdl.
loc .gov / loc .gdc / calbk .173; Scott Zesch, The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
2.
SPI, December 18, 19, 25, 1877.
3. Ibid., December 18, 19, 1877.
4. Ibid., December 25, 1877.
5. Huie Kin, Reminiscences (Peiping, China: San Yu Press, 1932), 28; Andrew
Kan, interview by C. H. Burnett, August 22, 1924, box 27, no. 178, SRR;
Law Yow, interview by C. H. Burnett, August 12, 1924, box 27, no. 191,
SRR; Chin Chueng, interview by C. H. Burnett, August 21, 1924, box 27,
no. 187, SRR; J. S. Look, interview by C. H. Burnett, August 13, 1924, box
27, no. 182, SRR. See also Long Dong, interview by C. H. Burnett, July 28,
1924, box 27, no. 171, SRR; Woo Gen, interview by C. H. Burnett,
July 29, 1924, box 27, no. 183, SRR.
6. On “the Chinese Question,” see Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable
Enemy: Labor and the Anti- Chinese Movement in California, 2nd ed.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Andrew Gyory, Closing the
Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1998); Stamford M. Lyman, “The ‘Chinese
Question’ and American Labor History,” New Politics 7, no. 4 (winter
2000): 113–148; Mary Roberts Coo lidge, Chinese Immigration (New York:
268
NOTES TO PAGES 20–22
Henry Holt, 1909), 127–144; Robert Ernest Cowan and Boutwell
Dunlap, Bibliography of the Chinese Question in the United States (San
Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1909).
7. American imperialism was one of a multiplicity of colonial formations
in China, advanced by vari ous Western powers and Japan in the nineteenth
century. Bryna Goodman and David S. G. Goodman, eds. Twentieth-
Century Colonialism and China: Localities, the Everyday, and the World
(London: Routledge, 2012); Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making
of the U.S.- Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2012), 6–11; Michael H. Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The
United States and China to 1914 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1983); Pär Kristoffer Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and
Imperial Power in Nineteenth- Century China and Japan (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012); Teemu Ruskola, Legal Orientalism: China,
the United States, and Modern Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2013), 127–128, 136, 144.
8. Coo lidge, Chinese Immigration, 498.
9. Kin, Reminiscences, 3–22. See also Judy Yung, Gordon H. Chang, and Him
Mark Lai, Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Pres ent
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 57–67.
10. For further discussion of the term “sojourner,” see Franklin Ng, ed., The
History
and Immigration of Asian Americans (New York: Garland, 1998),
87–126. For Eu ro pean sojourners, see John Bodnar, The Transplanted:
A History of Immigrants in Urban Amer i ca (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1987). For comparative patterns of Chinese migration to Southeast
Asia, Australia, and the Amer icas, see Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese Among
Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2008), 7–54.
11. Mae M. Ngai, “Chinese Gold Miners and the ‘Chinese Question’ in
Nineteenth- Century California and Victoria,” Journal of American History
101, no. 4 (March 2015): 1082–1105; Yong Chen, Chinese in San Francisco,
1850–1943: A Transpacific Community (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2000), 2–44; Kil Young Zo, Chinese Emigration into the United
States, 1850–1880 (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 198–200; Shih- Shah Henry
Tsai, The Chinese Experience in Amer i ca (Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1986), 34–35; Gunther Paul Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the
Chinese in the United States, 1850–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1964), 66–69.
NOTES TO PAGES 22–26
269
12. Kin, Reminiscences, 21–23; Mae M. Ngai, The Lucky Ones: One Family and
the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese Amer i ca, adv. ed. (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 5–6.
13. Kin, Reminiscences, 24.
14. Ibid., 24. For a population estimate, see Coo lidge, Chinese Immigration,
498.
15. Kin, Reminiscences, 25.
16. June Mei, “Socioeconomic Origins of Emigration: Guangdong to
California, 1850–1882,” Modern China 5, no. 4 (October 1979): 487–489;
Henry Yu, “Mountains of Gold: Canada, North Amer ica, and the
Cantonese Pacific,” in Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Diaspora, ed.
Chee- Beng Tan (London: Routledge, 2012).
17. On the Pacific world, see Matt K. Matsuda, “AHR Forum: Oceans of
History: The Pacific,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006):
758–780; Arif Dirlik, “The Asia- Pacific Idea: Real ity and Repre sen ta tion in
the Invention of a Regional Structure” in Arif Dirlik, ed., What Is in a
Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 15–36; Chang, Pacific Connections, 1–16,
The Chinese Must Go Page 38
