The Chinese in America (75 page)

The Chinese delegation to Cuba led to the signing of a 1879 treaty between China and Spain to end the coolie trade, and the delegation to Peru resulted in treaties that protected the rights of Chinese immigrants in that country, and permitted only immigration on a voluntary basis.

The nickname grew out of Chinese claims of being part of a celestial kingdom.

Eventually, U.S. engineers would build the Panama Canal in the early twentieth century.

Gambling was as addictive for Chinese railroad workers as whiskey among their white counterparts. Chinese gamblers left their mark on Nevada, where casinos credit the nineteenth-century Chinese railroad workers with introducing the game of keno, based on the Chinese lottery game of
pak kop piu.

Years later, some of the Chinese railroad workers would journey back to the Sierra Nevada to search for the remains of their colleagues. On these expeditions, known as
jup seen you
(“retrieving deceased friends”), they would hunt for old grave sites, usually a heap of stones near the tracks marked by a wooden stake. Digging underneath the stones, they would find a skeleton next to a wax-sealed bottle, holding a strip of cloth inscribed with the worker’s name, birth date, and district of origin.

This license fee was repealed in 1864.

Even women who had not been prostitutes were treated by the tongs as property, without rights of their own. In Seattle, a Chinese widow who turned down several proposals of marriage from tong members received an ultimatum: “She would either have to marry one of them men or go back to China,” a neighbor recalled. “This woman came over to me and cried. She said she did not want to go back to China. Her children had been born here and she wanted to stay in the country.” The tongs forced her to return anyway.

One Chinese student, Chung Mun-yew, became coxswain for the Yale varsity crew team, helping Yale defeat Harvard in 1880 and 1881 in races along the Thames River. Another student, Liang Tun-yen, led a Chinese baseball team to several victories.

These graduates had the good fortune of witnessing the height of America’s industrial and technological revolution during the nineteenth century: during the 1870s, the decade of the mission’s existence, Alexander Graham Bell would invent the telephone, and Thomas Edison the phonograph and electric light bulb.

By 1882, the
Sun
would report that the Chinese “from the fashionable clubs of Mott and Park Street rode... in Chatham Square coaches, carrying a liberal supply of liquor and cigars... accompanied by their Irish wives, many of them young, buxom and attractive.”

The exclusionists expanded their reach beyond the continental United States into newly annexed territory. In 1898, the U.S. government applied the exclusion laws to the Chinese community on the Hawaiian islands. While the Hawaiians received U.S. citizenship upon annexation, the ethnic Chinese were required to apply for certificates of residence, even though many came from families who had lived on the islands for generations. These measures applied to the Chinese in the Philippines when it, too, became a U.S. territory in 1898.

The Wong Kim Ark case was only one of several important legal battles waged by the Chinese that would pioneer the field of civil rights law in the United States. Another landmark case,
Yick Wo
v.
Hopkins,
would set the standard for equal protection before the law. Between 1873 and 1884, the San Francisco board of supervisors passed fourteen anti-Chinese laundry ordinances, one of which was a fire safety ordinance that mandated that all laundry owners in wooden buildings be licensed or risk heavy fines and six months of imprisonment. Since all of the Chinese laundries in the city were housed in wooden buildings, the Chinese viewed the ordinance as discriminatory, designed to cripple their livelihoods. When the board of supervisors rejected virtually every Chinese application for a license, the laundrymen protested by refusing to comply with the law and keeping their wash houses open. In 1885, the board refused to grant Yick Wo, a Chinese laundryman, a license to operate his business, even after he had secured city permits to prove that his building had passed the fire and health inspections. In response, the Chinese laundry guild filed a class action lawsuit that eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that while the ordinance appeared to be “fair on its face and impartial in appearance,” its enforcement was not. The high court concluded that any law applied in a discriminatory manner, whether to U.S. citizens or foreign aliens, was unconstitutional because it violated the Fourteenth Amendment.

Shanghai was divided at the time into Chinese districts and international settlements, where Western foreigners enjoyed extraterritorial rights.

Between 1855 and 1934, a child born abroad legally gained U.S. citizenship if his father was a U.S. citizen at the time of the birth, and had lived in the United States before the birth.

There was the infamous “chopsticks slaying case” involving Wong Shee, the wife of a New York merchant. In October 1941, she arrived at Angel Island, where immigration officials separated her from her nine-year-old son. After hearing rumors that she would be deported to China, Wong Shee killed herself by ramming a chopstick through her ear. A few years later, in 1948, thirty-two-year-old Leong Bick Ha hanged herself from a bathroom shower pipe after failing her examination. That same year, Wong Loy tried to leap from the fourteenth floor of an immigration building when told that she would be sent back to China.

For years, the poetry remained unprotected from the elements. Some, written in pencil, could be easily smudged away, or disappear from flaking paint and water erosion. But a few scholars took the time to preserve the literature of Angel Island—to prevent this delicate legacy from crumbling away. In 1926, Yu-shan Han encountered the poems when he arrived in the United States to study at Boston University. Even though his trip was sponsored by a U.S. senator, immigration officials mistreated Han, calling him a “chink” and locking him away on Angel Island. While incarcerated, he read the poetry on the walls and, deeply moved, began to copy and translate them. Other efforts were made to record these verses. Detained in 1931, Smiley Jann copied ninety-two poems; the following year, Tet Yee, another inmate, recorded ninety-six poems. Some of these, and others, were later compiled by historians Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung in their book
Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940.

The original purpose of the Alien Land Act act had been to discourage Japanese immigration into California. Like the Chinese, Japanese arrivals had endured anti-Asian racism and could not become naturalized citizens, but unlike the Chinese, they were not systematically excluded from the United States. To avoid the humiliation of having their people turned away from American shores, the Japanese government in 1907 signed the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” in which Japan would voluntarily restrict and police contract-labor immigration to the United States. However, some of the Japanese émigrés began to buy and lease farmland in California, which so alarmed the state’s politicians that they lobbied the federal government for legislation to stop Japanese immigration. When these efforts came to nothing, they decided to focus on state legislation. Believing that the Japanese would be reluctant to migrate to California if they could not acquire land, the California legislature passed the Alien Land Act, which, until its repeal in 1948, barred all Asians from owning real estate in California.

As early as 1858, a San Francisco herbalist, Hu Yunxiao, used English-language business signs to bring in white customers, and, beginning in the 1870s, Chinese herbalists ran advertisements in English-language newspapers in California, some as large as half a page, with pictures of Chinese men taking the pulse of white patients.

By obscuring the truth, they promoted the myth of easy American success, and inspired others to emigrate. The myth persisted for decades. When researching To
Save China, to Save Ourselves,
his book on Chinese hand laundries in New York, author Renqiu Yu learned from his field interviews that as late as 1979 many descendants of laundrymen still had no inkling what these “clothing stores” had really meant.

The School Law of 1870 specified that the education of black and Indian children would be provided in separate schools.

During the early twentieth century, many ABCs used the terms “white” and “American” interchangeably, even though they were, like whites, American citizens. Such language only served to reinforce their sense of themselves as foreigners in the United States.

As more immigrant families possessed the financial means to let their children participate in leisure activities, softball, tennis, and golf became popular among the Chinese middle class.

This racism cooled Pardee Lowe’s teenage ambition to be elected president of the United States, a fever he later called “Presidentitis,” contracted when his teacher, Miss McIntyre, told the class: “every single one of you can be president of the United States someday!” As Lowe later recalled, “I broke down and wept. For the first time I admitted to myself the cruel truth. I didn’t have a ‘Chinaman’s chance’ of becoming president of the United States. In this crash of the lofty hopes which Miss McIntyre had raised, it did not occur to me to reflect that the chances of Francisco Trujillo, Yuri Matsuyama, or Penelope Lincoln [Pardee’s classmates] were actually no better than mine.”

Another date cited for the crash is October 29, the day on which the market took its worst beating.

Many whites believed the manufactured myths. “Last summer, on a day early in the afternoon, a big, husky, middle-aged American gentleman opened the [YMCA] door and asked in broken English for the location of the underground tunnels and opium dens,” one observer in San Francisco noted. “On being told that no such places existed, he was quite disappointed and ‘Chinatown’ lost its glamour [for] him.” White teenage girls, fed images of Chinese men as white slavers, seemed titillated by Chinatown’s reputation. According to the
Chicago Tribune,
they searched for Chinese men in alleys on their way to mission schools and toured Chinatown in groups in New York.

Both winning essayists ended up doing precisely the opposite of their written intentions. After graduating with a degree in international law from Harvard, Robert Dunn worked in Nationalist China as secretary to a delegate to the United Nations. Kaye Hong stayed in America, where he became a successful businessman.

Chinese American women took to the skies as well. One of the first female aviators of Chinese descent was Ouyang Ying, who resolved in the 1910s to help China build its military defense. Tragically, she died in a plane accident in 1920, at the age of twenty-five, before she could move to China. Another pioneer was Katherine Cheung; in 1931 she became the first Chinese woman in America to earn a pilot’s license. Cheung became something of a celebrity, awing spectators with her aerial performances and earning headlines in San Francisco newspapers. A woman ahead of her time, she criticized the Chinese Nationalists for barring female students from their aviation schools. Cheung intended to start her own pilot training program in China but changed her mind after she survived a plane crash and her ailing father begged her never to fly again.

Despite the discrimination against their families by the United States government, Japanese Americans from Hawaii gave their lives in patriotic service to the United States. The Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team from Hawaii became the most decorated U.S. military unit during World War II.

By fighting exclusion, the Citizens Committee unleashed some of the deepest fears of white Americans. One xenophobic letter called the Chinese the “enemies of the American people”: “If you want a polyglot, mongrel race, then repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act, and amalgamate with the negroes and the Chinese.”

Clarence Lee was the Eurasian son of Yan Phou Lee, a member of the Chinese Educational Mission, a summa cum laude graduate of Yale in 1887, and author of the book
When I Was a Boy in China,
one of the first English-language autobiographies written by a Chinese American.

During the early 1940s, the Chinese Communists had to contend not only with a Nationalist economic blockade but also the lack of foreign military aid. The Russians signed a Soviet-Japan neutrality pact in 1941 and later devoted their resources to fight against a German invasion.