The Chinese in America (6 page)

American industrial working conditions were also harsher than those experienced in many parts of the world. In New England factory towns, dark clouds billowed incessantly from tall chimneys, with layers of gray smoke hovering over the towns and surrounding countryside day and night. In metal- and wood-product manufacturing plants, workers choked on air filled with soot and sawdust. Northeastern businessmen built hundreds of textile mills, where low-paid, mostly female spinners, or “spinsters,” as they were called, transformed southern cotton into cloth for curtains, bed linens, and garments. Breathing lint and dust through ten- and twelve-hour shifts, many never married and died early from bronchitis and tuberculosis.

 

 

Eager for more land, and with it, they hoped, opportunity, Americans moved deeper into the interior of the great continent. The migration westward gathered its greatest steam in the early nineteenth century as settlers began to strike out through the Ohio and Missouri valleys, settling a region now called the Midwest but then considered the edge of civilization.

Gradually, these Americans adjusted to their new lives “out west.” Dotting a landscape of tree stumps were a few whitewashed cabins faced with rough-hewn shingles. Some dwellings were even more simple: a hastily constructed log cabin or a sod hut of prairie turf, its doors built from wood packing crates. What would later grow into the grand cities of the American Midwest were then nothing but muddy outposts, often with more livestock than people walking their streets. Nearly everything had to be done by hand and took great physical effort. As they converted prairie into planting field, farmers struggled with grass roots so old and stubborn that steel plows were needed to overturn the soil. Their wives spent hours in household drudgery, washing the family’s clothing, preparing meals, dipping candles, making soap out of lye, churning butter. Even though textile mills and sewing machines mass-produced clothes in the East, most women of the Midwest still made their garments by hand: combing wool, spinning yarn, weaving cloth, then stitching with thread and needle. Work defined even recreation, as families organized their social lives around communal labor, such as corn husking, flax making, and quilting.

Although the middle of the country remained relatively sparsely populated during the early- to mid-nineteenth century, many farmers began to feel more and more penned in with the arrival of each new family. What “crowded” meant to them might startle a city dweller today, and the urge to go westward never abated. One man decided to leave Illinois because “people were settling right under his nose”—twelve miles away.

The 1840s saw a significant rise in the number of families venturing westward from the Midwest to settle the Great Plains, that plateau between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains that stretches from Canada in the north to Texas in the south. They journeyed by covered wagon over unbroken stretches of prairie inhabited by enormous buffalo herds, following the wheel marks of other pioneers before them, across flat seas of grass all the way to a horizon that never seemed to change.

This expansionism was reinforced by a swelling sense of national chauvinism regarding the United States’ right to dominate the continent. During the 1840s, the federal government threatened war with Canada over the northern border of Oregon, declared war on Mexico, and then forced its southern neighbor to cede large western territories that would become the states of California and New Mexico. Journalist John L. O’Sullivan coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny” to describe the prevailing, though arrogant, belief among Americans that the entire expanse of the continent belonged to them, as if preordained by Providence. In the next three decades, a quarter of a million Americans crossed the nation from east to west.

The most adventurous pioneers pushed across the plains to California, all the more swiftly after news of the discovery of gold there in 1848 spread across the world. To reach the West Coast, pioneers had to cross first the Rocky Mountains and then the Sierra Nevada by wagon or stagecoach, relying on guides and scouts to lead them through traversable passes. In fact, so treacherous was this journey that some who were intent on reaching California opted instead for one of two indirect routes, each thousands of miles longer than the direct one. The first was to sail all the way around South America, a sea voyage of more than ten thousand miles. The second was a combination of land and sea routes: booking an ocean voyage to Central America, crossing by land to the Pacific Ocean, then proceeding by ship north up the West Coast.

 

 

For the Chinese headed for California from across the Pacific, the greatest threat would come not from the harshness of nature, but from the cruelty of fellow humans and the racism endemic to their beloved “Gold Mountain.” When the founding fathers of the United States “ordained and established” a Constitution intended, in the words of its preamble, to “establish justice ... and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” they excluded blacks from those blessings and saw no place in their society for the people living on the land before the arrival of Europeans. As the white population expanded and moved westward, both the federal and various state governments waged a campaign against those Native Americans whose usefulness as trading partners had ended. In the early nineteenth century, the U.S. government used its military superiority to force Native Americans to sign treaties ceding, tract by tract, the richest part of the land to whites, and then banished them to desolate reservations. The tacit process of extermination took even more direct and brutal forms. In California, the state legislature at one time offered bounty hunters a fee for each Indian scalp turned in. Eventually murder, hunger, heartbreak, and disease had their desired effect. In 1790 there were almost four million American Indians, but by 1844, fewer than thirty thousand remained east of the Mississippi, a much more manageable inconvenience for the white man.

Yet, by the mid-nineteenth century, some of the oppressed groups in America were starting to find their voices. Working women organized strikes, some violent, smashing through eastern factories with brickbats and stones. They demanded access to education. The era saw the first woman graduate of a medical school, and the first medical school for women established in Pennsylvania. A few daring women abandoned their confining corsets and petticoats for a new style called “bloomers,” baggy, gownlike pants that allowed them a new freedom of movement that did not expose them to the charge that they were flashing views of their legs as they went about active lives. In 1848, the first American convention to discuss women’s rights convened in Seneca Falls, New York, launching the female suffrage movement. The delegates issued a manifesto modeled after the Declaration of Independence, demanding that the legal right to own property, pursue education, and vote be extended to women. In the coming decades, the most oppressed population—the enslaved blacks—would see their cause taken up across the country. Inspired by the words of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, American abolitionists forced their fellow citizens, many far removed from those states where it was practiced, to face the evil of slavery. In 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe published
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
an anti-slavery book that focused the world’s attention on that horrendous institution.

 

 

Although the Chinese came from the most populous nation on earth, at the time of the gold rush perhaps fewer than fifty of them lived in the continental United States. This tiny population included merchants, former sailors, and a handful presented to the American public as sideshow curiosities. Their limited number made them highly marketable commodities in a country captivated by the mystery and exoticism of the East. Afong Moy, the first recorded Chinese woman in America, came to New York City in 1834 as part of a cultural exhibit. Museums in New York and Brooklyn displayed the sixteen-year-old Moy in a life-size diorama, seated on an oriental latticework chair, wearing a silk gown and slippers, as if she were a rare zoological specimen. Audiences watched with fascination as she ate with chopsticks, counted in Chinese and did computations on her abacus, and minced about on her “monstrously small” four-inch-long bound feet. A few years later, a second Chinese woman, starring as a museum showpiece under the aegis of American circus pioneer Phineas T. Barnum, attracted twenty thousand spectators in only six days. A “double-jointed Chinese dwarf Chin Gan” also appeared before huge crowds in America. But the most successful performers were Chang and Eng Bunker, the eponymous Siamese twins, who shared a liver and a five-inch ligament of flesh connecting their torsos. Even though the Bunker twins gained wide renown for their deformity, which reinforced the popular image of all Asians as freaks of nature, they should be remembered today for their formidable entrepreneurial skills and ingenuity in self-promotion—and, possibly even more significant, their ability to find acceptance in America.

The story of these twins contains elements of the American Horatio Alger legend. Born in 1811 in Siam (today Thailand), sons of a poor ethnic Chinese fisherman, their bizarre appearance was so disturbing to their fellow countrymen that the authorities considered condemning them to death. Later, a British trader discovered the twins and persuaded their family to send them on a world tour, starting in 1829, for a fixed monthly salary. When their contract expired on their twenty-first birthday, the twins went into business on their own. For the next seven years, they made a fortune touring the United States and Europe, rubbing elbows with European royalty and the cream of Western society. In 1839, the twins visited Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and, falling in love with the region, decided to retire from show business and live there permanently. Wholeheartedly adopting southern culture, they ran their own plantation, complete with thirty-three black slaves, and established themselves as two of the wealthiest men in the county. Though legally nonwhites could not become naturalized U.S. citizens under a 1790 statute, the twins managed, nonetheless, to establish themselves as U.S. citizens in their new community, adopting “Bunker” as their official surname to honor one of their friends. The Bunkers also married two local white women and fathered twenty-one children between them. (During the Civil War, two of their eldest sons enlisted in the Confederate army the moment they came of age.)

The Bunkers might have been tolerated, but were also protected by their world fame and especially by their great wealth. Their neighbors seemed to have viewed them as friends and contributors to the community; being only two, not an immigrant group, they posed no threat to established ways. Their ownership of black slaves reinforced the notion that, however odd they looked, they were of one mind with their fellow plantation owners. Had they been forced to endure the brutal realities of being industrial wage-earners or small farmers in nineteenth-century America, they might not have been so kindly disposed toward those who lived so splendidly off the labor of others.

Such was the America the first wave of Chinese immigrants entered. If the Chinese were not part of the focus of the debate on racial politics, it was probably because there were simply too few of them to arouse much fear and suspicion. Their time would come.

F
lush with hope, dazzled by tales of immediate riches, the Chinese who dreamed of what they would find in California were not warned that many grave dangers lay between Guangdong and Gold Mountain. For the unsuspecting, the first danger—and perhaps the worst—lay waiting just a few miles away, in Guangdong’s own busy port city, Canton.

In Chinese the term
k’u-li
literally means “hard strength.” Foreigners living in China often employed it to describe household help or menial Chinese laborers, but the term would take on a different coloration in the 1840s, when European capitalists experienced labor shortages on colonial plantations in regions like South America and the Caribbean. With the help of unscrupulous Chinese recruiters, or crimps, as they were called, a devil’s bargain was struck to replace African slave labor with Asian slave labor. Coastal cities, such as Amoy, Macao, Hong Kong, and Canton, served as major ports where men were bought and sold as human traffic. When the practice finally ended in the 1870s, following an investigation by the imperial Qing government, an estimated three-quarters of a million Chinese men had been either decoyed into or physically abducted and then sold into slavery, in what became known as the “coolie” trade.

The Chinese crimps used a variety of methods to fill their quotas. Men in debt, men imprisoned after clan fights, and men eager for work to avoid starvation all served as ideal candidates for entrapment, but for naive youths arriving in coastal cities fresh from the villages, the danger of entrapment was greater still. Some victims were lured into teahouses, regaled with stories of fortunes to be made overseas, and deceived into signing labor contracts for work in South America. When persuasion failed, the crimp resorted to outright abduction, and a British consul observed that even in broad daylight men could not leave their houses “without a danger of being hustled, under false pretenses of debt or delinquency, and carried off a prisoner in the hands of crimps, to be sold to the purveyors of coolies at so much a head, and carried off to sea, never to be heard of.”