The Chinese in America (12 page)

Even more debilitating than the gradual loss of skills and drive was the acquisition of expensive tastes. For a growing number of Gold Mountain families, the pursuit of pleasure became an obsession. Women acquired rare artwork and jewelry, while men gambled away fortunes, smoked opium, and bought new concubines. A Chinese historian complained that the Toishan region, once “simple, reverential, and thrifty” because of its poor soil, changed drastically after so many of its young men went overseas to earn money: “In a flash, clothing and food tend toward Chinese American, the business of marriage becomes especially contentious, wasteful, and excessively extravagant.”

While some families had the foresight to save, others spent recklessly. Because the flow of money from overseas seemed endless, there was no incentive to question these new lifestyles. Fortunately, not all this money was squandered on private indulgences. Many Gold Mountain families donated generous sums to create new schools, colleges, libraries, and other public works. By the late nineteenth century, a Toishan gazetteer commented that “various charities are everywhere,” observing that vast sums of overseas money had funded local hospitals, lecture halls, orphanages, and land for the poor. But it also noted, “The customs of the people are gradually becoming wasteful. Capping ceremonies [a coming-of-age ritual in which a father honored his son on his twentieth birthday] and wedding banquets required the expenditure of several hundred gold pieces. Fields lie barren and infertile and cannot be restored to their original state.”

And there was another problem, one of even greater concern. Just when the traditional Toishan personal and familial values, derived from Confucianism, were degenerating, social unrest increased. The mid-nineteenth century was a time of spontaneous uprisings congealing into outright rebellions in this part of China. One of those, the Red Turban rebellion, an outgrowth of the Triads’ secret criminal network, plotted the overthrow of the Manchu government. For years, Triad bandits had been terrorizing rural villages, pressuring peasants to join their movement, extorting protection money from towns. Then in 1853, the local Triads, calling themselves the Red Turbans, ran amok in Guangdong, forcing villagers to arm and defend themselves. The Turbans were suppressed by the government two years later, with a bloody reprisal that beheaded some seventy-five thousand suspected participants.

Another bitter conflict was the Punti-Hakka feud, the roots of which predated even the founding of the Qing dynasty in 1644. In the thirteenth century, the Cantonese-speaking Punti had settled into richer, more fertile farms in the lowlands of Guangdong, while the Hakka—known as the “guest people” because they arrived later—were forced to move to poorer regions in the hills. Thus began a furious ethnic rivalry, in which the Puntis and the Hakkas fought not only over land, but also for government positions through the imperial examination system. The Hakkas performed so well on the tests that the Qing imposed strict quotas against them, which only increased their resentment. In the 1850s, in the aftermath of the Red Turban uprising, the hatred between the Puntis and Hakkas erupted into new violence. Villages that had armed themselves against the Red Turbans now had the weaponry to fight each other; between 1854 and 1867, clashes killed two hundred thousand people.

The money sent home from America apparently exacerbated the situation. Through most of the twenty years of mass Chinese emigration to America, the province of Guangdong roiled with banditry, as the unemployed came to believe China was so corrupt that no one could succeed by playing it straight. Looting, kidnappings, and armed robberies increased dramatically. The Gold Mountain families, now firmly entrenched as the local gentry, became a highly visible and tempting target, leading to an even greater demand for overseas money—to hire bodyguards, to purchase arms, to build fortresses and walls against invaders. Ironically, the peace and security that the Chinese émigrés sought to purchase for their families with hard labor in America became more elusive than ever.

This may explain why one group of Chinese emigrants to the United States returned to China with a very different purpose in mind. Some arrived home to encourage their sons, nephews, or brothers to join them in America, to assist in the running of successful businesses they had established there. For them, America, with all its racism and discrimination, remained a land of opportunity, if only in relative terms. Rather than looking back longingly at what they had left behind, they looked forward to a time when they might be able to bring all their family members to a new life in America. Yes, the United States had its faults, and it was certainly not the welcoming haven the Chinese once thought it would be. But these men had crossed a line: with each visit to China, they became a little less wedded to their Chinese past and a little more to their American present. Their families recognized it even before they did. Anecdotes relate how baffled villagers watched the returning relatives drink coffee, wear American hats, or accidentally intermingle English with Chinese in casual conversation.

Only years later, looking back on old memories, did the workers themselves recognize how much they had changed. Huie Kin, who established a Protestant mission in New York, remembered that as a boy in Guangdong province he had heard that Caucasians were “red-haired, green-eyed foreign devils with ... hairy faces,” people who were “wild and fierce and wicked.” Later, as an American of Chinese descent, he was amused at how wholeheartedly he had once believed these myths.

Even those Chinese who had not started out with such wild notions remembered their surprise at the little things. “[A]s we walked along the streets the Americans and their dress looked very funny to us, and we all laughed,” one nineteenth-century Chinese émigré recalled of his first day in San Francisco. Some found it astonishing that white men wore close-fitting suits, since everyone knew that Chinese gentlemen preferred loose robes. “It was a long time before I got used to those red-headed and tight-jacketed foreigners,” Yan Phou Lee noted in his autobiography,
When I Was a Boy in
China. “‘How can they walk or run?’ ” Meanwhile, others thought it hilarious that white women wore long, wide, flowing gowns that mopped up dirt from the streets. Zhang Deiyi, an interpreter for the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, noted with amusement the “barbarian women” with unbound feet, who enjoyed “trailing long skirts on the ground like the tails of foxes.”

Other bizarre American customs provoked even greater amusement. What could be more absurd than people who ate with metal utensils instead of chopsticks, which made a “cacophony of dingdang noises” as they dined? And then there was the decidedly American tradition of shaking hands, which left Zhang Deiyi’s wrist sore, and of exchanging cards and autographs, which was “a great bother.” But perhaps nothing could compare with the kiss—the “ritual of touching lips together,” as Zhang put it. A Chinese popular magazine was almost at a loss for words when trying to describe it to its readers. The way to kiss, the editors had heard, “requires making a chirping sound. Those who do not know how to translate say the sound is like a fish drinking water, but this is wrong.”

Over time, however, the Chinese emigrants made the transition from Old World to New, such that there would come a point in each man’s life when during a visit back to China, his own relatives would suggest that his behavior no longer seemed Chinese.

 

 

The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 threw thousands of Chinese men out of work, work they needed not only to support themselves but also to provide the funds they had to send home. New work had to be found. Although they had proved themselves energetic and innovative workers, most traditional jobs remained closed to them solely because of their race. Nonetheless, the Chinese immigrants applied ingenuity and willing diligence to the problem and made their way by accepting opportunities that others found squalid or dangerous.

As the transcontinental railroad made it profitable to ship fresh produce to other regions in the United States, many of the swamps and valleys of California were turned into farmland, which in turn created a demand for farm labor. To exploit the situation, some of the more entrepreneurial Chinese arrivals established themselves as labor contractors. Their ability to speak Cantonese enabled them to recruit and manage large crews of migrant laborers, while their familiarity with American ways allowed them to cut a good deal for themselves with the white farmers.

These Chinese middlemen collected at both ends, charging the Chinese workers fees for finding them jobs and charging the farmers for placing workers. The middlemen also charged the Chinese for the provisions they needed. While we do not know if they actively recruited new workers from China, or simply used the pool of laid-off railroad employees, we do know that they served a real, necessary function by acting as the gateway between capital and labor. Many white landowners were eager to use Chinese labor because it was both inexpensive and self-sufficient. Under contracts worked out with the farm owners, for instance, the Chinese farmhands did their own cooking or paid for the services of a professional cook. They also slept in their own tents or under the open sky. Before long, they dominated the ranks of field labor: in 1870, only one in ten California farm laborers was Chinese; by 1884, it was one in two; by 1886, almost nine in ten.

These Chinese formed the backbone of western farm production. They sowed crops, plowed the soil, and ended up producing about two-thirds of the vegetables in California. Thanks to Chinese sweat, fruit shipments soared—from nearly two million pounds in the early 1870s to twelve million a decade and a half later. As the Chinese poured into farm work, grain swiftly surpassed mining as the largest source of revenue for the state. By the 1870s, California had become the wheat capital of the United States.

All these contributions paled, however, compared to the Chinese reclamation of the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta. Every spring, the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, the two major rivers in California, flooded their common delta for hundreds of square miles. The rotting tules, or bulrushes, decayed into a rich, fertile layer called peat, but to exploit this nutrient-rich soil, farmers had to drain, clear, and plow the delta as well as construct numerous levees and dikes to protect crops from future floods. Because horse hooves sank straight into the slushy bottom, humans were needed to complete these tasks, but few white men wanted to wade knee- or sometimes waist-deep in these mosquito-infested swamps. Only the Chinese were willing to do what was needed—to work in the muck, slashing their knives through miles of rotten tules, and build by hand a series of gates, ditches, and levees to create a giant labyrinthine network of irrigation channels.

The exact number of Chinese who died from disease, infection, or overwork as they restored five million acres of boggy delta swamp-land was not recorded. Some landowners valued Chinese life less than that of their animals; in the flood of 1878, as Chinese workers, covered with mud and weighted down with sandbags, struggled to shore up levees, some farm owners dispatched boats upriver to rescue their stock but left the Chinese behind to scream at passing ships for help. But we do know what the Chinese did for the landowners: they not only reclaimed the land, an achievement that would have been impossible without their stubborn dedication to the task assigned them, but they also invented the “tule shoe” during the project, so that horses could be used in this environment. And after their work was done, a surveyor estimated that the land, which the owners had purchased from the federal government for as little as two or three dollars an acre, the land on which the Chinese had worked for about ten cents per cubic yard of soil moved, was now worth seventy-five dollars an acre. The combined value of Chinese labor on the railroads and tule swamps, two projects essential to California’s growth, ran in the hundreds of millions.

The sea also provided work opportunities for the Chinese, though its dangers rivaled or even surpassed the brutality of the delta reclamation. Some Chinese labor contractors cut a new kind of deal with the salmon-canning factories of the Pacific Northwest, in which the canneries paid contractors for the volume of work produced, while the contractor paid the laborers a fixed wage. The incentives of such an arrangement ensured a negative outcome. The Chinese labor contractors became harsh taskmasters, and conditions in the canning industry grew notoriously bad. The horror of the job began even before arrival at the work site. On board vessels sailing to Alaska, the Chinese received no water for washing, so their living quarters swarmed with lice and fleas; when inspecting the “Chinatown” section of his vessel one shipmaster wore rubber boots as protection against parasites. By the early 1880s, canneries in the region employed more than three thousand Chinese, who labored under such shocking conditions that Rudyard Kipling, visiting one such cannery, wrote, “Only Chinese men were employed in the work, and they looked like blood-besmeared yellow devils, as they crossed the rifts of sunlight that lay upon the floor.” One observer remarked that the scene in a cannery was “not so much like men struggling with innumerable fish as like human maggots wiggling and squirming among the swarms of salmon.”

There were two ways the middleman could increase his profit—pay the workers a minimal sum, and force them to work faster. A Bureau of Fisheries investigator reported that the contractors drove workers “as with the whip,” noting that “the work of canning exceeds in rapidity anything I have ever seen, outside the brush-making establishment in the East.”

Their speed was indeed stunning. One Chinese Columbia River butcher could behead and debone up to two thousand fish, or eighteen tons, a day. History does not record how many Chinese men, reduced to the level of human machinery, died from accidents or disease in canneries of the Northwest. Decades later, the invention of a fish-butchering machine reduced the need for workers from dozens to only two operators. In a twisted acknowledgment of the enormous work capacity of these immigrants, the manufacturer named it “the Iron Chink.”