The Chinese in America (5 page)

The Chinese government tried desperately but unsuccessfully to stop the trade. In 1839, the Qing emperor appointed a special commissioner, an official named Lin Zexu, to end the drug traffic. In Canton, Lin confiscated 20,000 chests of opium—a British stockpile weighing more than three million pounds—and ordered the narcotic to be dissolved in fresh lime and water and flushed out to sea. In response, the British government launched a series of attacks against China to exert what they believed to be their right to foist a dangerous drug onto another country. Using this as a long-awaited excuse to break through China’s closed barriers, British forces invaded one port city after another—Canton, Amoy, Ningpo, Shanghai, Nanjing (Nanking)—until the Chinese finally capitulated. In 1842, the Qing government signed the Treaty of Nanking, which forced the country to open its ports to international trade, pay massive indemnities, and continue to allow the open importation of opium. The British established concessions at Amoy and Shanghai, and turned a rocky island into the colony of Hong Kong. They also joined France and other European nations in creating a system of extraterritorial privilege, whereby certain European powers were given their own jurisdictions within the port cities. Within these “concession” areas, Europeans were above Chinese law, and native Chinese were relegated to second-class citizenship in their own country.

Reports later emerged of white foreigners swaggering through Chinese port cities like petty dictators. A young American bank teller boasted that if a Chinese man failed to make room for him on the street, he would strike him down with his cane: “Should I break his nose or kill him, the worst that can happen would be that he or his people would make complaint to the Consul, who might impose the fine of a dollar for the misdemeanor, but I could always prove that I had just cause to beat him.”

Unfair treaties with the West also wreaked havoc in the countryside, when the Qing government shifted the burden of indemnities to the peasants, forcing them to pay increased taxes. The peasants were already slaves to the land, living a hand-to-mouth existence, owing heavy rents and the cost of supplies to their landlords. They already suffered horrid consequences for every disaster beyond their control (if they endured crop failure from unexpected weather or floods, they were always held personally accountable, while relief money sent by the central government lined the pockets of the local elite). Now, with the burdens of these new treaties put on the already sagging shoulders of the poor, large numbers of peasants found themselves thrown even deeper in debt. Many had no choice but to sell all their possessions—their plows, their oxen, even their own children—to pay down the debt. If they could not pay, rent collectors and local officials had the power to arrest them, beat them, or throw them into jail.

A Chinese prison was the last place anyone wanted to go. Conditions for the incarcerated in China exposed the depths of cruelty of the Qing dynasty. People were caged like animals, left in filth, dying from disease. Men were often left chained to decaying corpses, forgotten by the wardens. A mobile version of jail was the
cangue,
a cage in which the victim would be paraded before jeering crowds in the streets. A small opening cut into the bars at the top permitted the prisoner’s head to be drawn up for display to the crowds; each rough jostle would throw his neck against the jagged edges.

A desperate citizenry finally turned to violence. Nineteenth-century China roiled with rebellions, unprecedented in scale, and tens of millions of people died in the upheavals. The most serious one, known as the Taiping Rebellion, erupted in 1850 under the leadership of Hong Xiuquan, an ambitious young man from Guangdong province. A rural schoolteacher, Hong had tried repeatedly to pass the district-level imperial examination as his route to gentility. After failing the test several times, he suffered a mental breakdown and came to believe he was the son of God and the younger brother of Jesus Christ. An impassioned speaker, he started proselytizing, recruiting tens of thousands of followers, most from the bottom tier of Chinese society: homeless peasants, unemployed fishermen, charcoal burners off the streets. Some, however, were people with formidable military or technical skills, such as bandits, pirates, and former soldiers, as well as miners who knew how to handle explosives. Drifting north from Guangdong, the group moved from one city to another, seizing weapons and recruiting more people for their army.

Sadly, the biggest losers of this rebellion were the peasants. Marauding Taiping troops swept through the countryside, stripping fields of all food. And when the Manchu government eventually crushed the movement, they took vengeance on millions of innocent country people, many whom had had nothing more to do with the rebellion than the fact that they had watched it happen.

This and several subsequent rebellions over the next decade left the population devastated and the land ravaged. People who had farmed in one place for decades, or even centuries, found they could no longer support their families. They roamed the country in search of farmland and better jobs, to escape civil warfare and the tax collector. With starvation or soldiers at their heels, many Chinese were willing to defy authority, because they risked death even if they stayed put and did nothing. Some chose to leave the country entirely. During the nineteenth century, millions of Chinese moved abroad to southeast Asia, the West Indies, the Philippines, New Zealand, Australia, Africa, and the Americas. Even the Qing ban on migration to Manchuria could not prevent northern Chinese peasants, attracted by the region’s sparse population and open spaces, from slipping in illegally.

Nowhere was the urgency to leave greater than in the province of Guangdong. In 1847, the region experienced a credit crisis when British banks cut off funding to warehouses along the Pearl River. For more than a year, trade within the province halted almost completely, and a hundred thousand laborers found themselves unemployed. It was just about this time that some began to hear stories of the incredible wealth of a land across the sea—a land called
Gum Shan,
or “Gold Mountain.”

 

 

“Gold Mountain” was California. When gold was discovered there in 1848, a Chinese resident in California wrote a letter to share the news with one of his friends in the Canton region. Soon the region was buzzing with excitement, and people could talk of nothing else. If only they could get to Gold Mountain, perhaps all their problems would be solved.

Most people in Guangdong had only a dim concept of American life; almost no one had actually met anyone from America, or any Westerner. They heard rumors that white missionaries kidnapped and ate Chinese children, and reports of strange-looking foreigners, blue-eyed barbarians with red hair. There were hazards abroad—but stronger than the fear of the unknown was the opportunity to make money and salvage a living. Along with tales of barbarous deeds, the Chinese heard stories of a land glittering with wealth—all you had to do was walk around and pick the nuggets of gold up from the ground. Of course, these stories were no different from those that had enticed other adventure seekers to the mines in California, and later to Alaska, from all over the world. Greed is a powerful antidote to fear and an ancient inducement to adventure. Christopher Columbus, after all, found America while looking for El Dorado—a paradise of gold—in the Indies.

The promise of gold electrified the imaginations of the impoverished Chinese. It ignited hopes among poor people that they could go away for a brief period of time, then return wealthy enough to enjoy a new status among fellow townsmen. Perhaps a handful of gold was all they would need to break from the grind of daily life: to establish a small business, to purchase the land that would free them from the tyranny of rents, to build a house that would engender respect, to hire tutors for their children so they could pass the tests and become mandarins—in short, to achieve the wealth, power, and status that had been denied them solely by dint of their low birth.

Frenetically, men in the Canton region prepared to leave. They borrowed money from friends and relatives, sold off their water buffalo or jewelry, or signed up with a labor agency that would front them the money for passage in exchange for a share of their future earnings in America. All of this, of course, was illegal, but officials could easily be bribed to look the other way.

While the community willingly accepted the idea that the young men who left for Gold Mountain might be gone for many months, if not years, perhaps they knew it was important to cement each man’s ties to his home village. To remind him that the purpose of his trip was to earn money to bring back home, they usually married him off to a local woman and even encouraged him to father a child in the months or even weeks before he left. This step—the creation of a new family—carried a dual purpose: it would obligate him to send back remittances, and would also ensure the preservation of the ancestral bloodline.

 

A Cantonese nursery rhyme of the era, a simple ditty, expressed the collective longings of entire families:

That, at least, was the plan.

A
merica in the twenty-first century gleams for many hopeful immigrants; this was no less the case 150 years ago. Less than a century after its colonial rebellion, the young and vibrant country broadcast to the world a raw new culture not necessarily locked into old ways—certainly it contrasted sharply with the ancient mores enforced by petrified bureaucracies in China and Europe. To thousands worldwide who found themselves desperately trapped, without money, property, job, or future, this land of wide-open spaces, seemingly infinite resources, and unsettled territories (ignoring, of course, the long tenure of Native Americans) held out the promise that here was a place where a person could walk away from his or her past and begin again, reinvent himself or herself and give that new self a better life.

Few other countries offered such simple luxury of space—land enough for all, the stories said! Only 23 million people lived in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, compared to 430 million in China, a country similar in physical size: in short, one American for almost twenty Chinese. Only 15 percent of the U.S. population lived in towns of more than 2,500 people. The vast majority lived on small farms or in hamlets, mostly east of the Mississippi River. A person could walk for days in most areas along the East Coast, the most densely populated region in the country, and never lose sight of the woods. And west of the Mississippi stretched largely unpopulated land as far as the eye could see, a sight unmatched in any other temperate zone on the planet.

Compared to Europe’s great cosmopolitan centers, American cities were tiny in size and provincial in character. More than one million lived in Paris, more than two million in London. By contrast, a mere six cities in the United States had more than 100,000 people, and only one—New York—held more than half a million citizens. Even New York, America’s largest metropolis, was hardly what we think of today as urban: in what is now midtown Manhattan, families reared chickens in their yards, while in Brooklyn, hogs and cattle strolled down village streets.

Long before the first wave of Chinese reached California, America had fired the dreams of the poor of Europe, with most coming from the British Isles, others from France, Germany, Italy, and eastern Europe. As the nineteenth century approached its midpoint, more than one million Irish immigrants in flight from their country’s potato famine arrived on America’s shores. To escape the weight of British oppression, the unreasonable rents and taxes levied upon them, and the religious discrimination to which they were subjected in their own land, the Irish had been coming in a constant trickle for decades. But now there was an extra urgency in their migration; almost half the immigrants arriving in America in the 1840s were Irish, to whom America meant more than new opportunity. It meant survival, a chance to escape from the ever-present hunger that had left thousands of their countrymen dying in the streets.

There was in fact no one “America” to be reached in the mid-nineteenth century. The eastern, populated, half of the country was sharply divided into two separate social and economic spheres, soon to be at war with each other. The northeastern states had the largest cities and held most of the country’s industrial development. European immigrants could usually find work in northern factories, which offered jobs, albeit usually for paltry wages, especially for children. The South was dominated by a vast agricultural system that was sustained in large part by the work of slaves. Neither region held great opportunities for self-starting entrepreneurs; to start a business usually required capital, which few immigrants had in sufficient quantity, or land, which proved surprisingly difficult to acquire and farm.

The economic hazards of the immigrant’s “fresh start” were usually matched by prejudices that hemmed in new arrivals no matter where they landed. Racism ran deep, coupled with a class prejudice that, at least in the South, stigmatized a man who engaged in trade, or the farmer who worked his own land, without slaves. Often illiterate and malnourished, small planters were derided by the plantation elite and endured conditions which, while certainly better than those of black field hands, were worse than those of house slaves in the stately homes of the plantation owners. Ironically, in the 1830s less than one-third of the white population in the South owned a single slave.

Although immigrants might find greater opportunities in the New World than in their own lands, those who came expecting an easy life and quick riches would be sorely disappointed. Statistics paint an often grim picture of life in mid-nineteenth-century America for both citizens and new arrivals. The life expectancy there was not much higher than in China, and in certain populations it was significantly lower. A white person born in the United States in 1850 could expect to live, on average, to age thirty-nine-only about four years longer than the typical Chinese man in Beijing. For a black American, it was about a decade and a half less, twenty-three. Infant mortality rates were so high that, looking back, we wonder how families of that time could bear so painful a loss with such regularity: white families buried one infant for every five born; black families, one in three. Only half of all black babies survived their first year of life. Epidemics regularly swept through American cities, due to poor sanitation, drainage, and hygiene—sometimes as simple a matter as having no source of fresh water.