The Chinese in America (60 page)

84 “Chiney ladies”:
Ibid., p. 57.

84 nailed shut inside a crate:
Ibid., p. 57

84 leased them out to local garment factories to sew by day:
Ibid., p. 59.

84 “beats and pounds them with sticks of fire-wood”:
Otis Gibson, p. 156.

84 acid thrown in her face:
Benson Tong, p. 142.

84 swallowing raw opium:
Judy Yung, p. 33.

85 average brothel employed nine women:
Huping Ling, p. 59.

85 annual profit
of $2,500: Lucie Cheng Hirata, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America,”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
Autumn 1979. As cited in Judy Yung, p. 30.

85 paid $40 in insurance:
Otis Gibson, p. 137.

85 “Yut Kum consents to prostitute her body”:
Benson Tong, p. 201. Original citation:
Congressional Record,
43rd Cong., 2d sess., March 1875, 3, pt. 3:41.

86 frightening them to tears:
Otis Gibson, p. 208.

86 writs of habeas corpus:
Victor G. and Brett de Bary Nee, p. 88.

86 “search the whole house”:
Ibid., p. 88.

86 sticks of dynamite:
Benson Tong, p. 185.

86 ascending to the rooftops:
Lynn Pan, p. 104. For additional sources on Donaldina Cameron, see Mildred Crowl Martin,
Chinatown’s Angry Angel: The Story of Donaldina Cameron
(Palo Alto: Pacific Books, 1977); Peggy Pascoe,
Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Carol Green Wilson,
Chinatown Quest: One Hundred Years of Donaldina Cameron House 1874-1974
(San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1974); Sarah Refo Mason, “Social Christianity, American Feminism, and Chinese Prostitutes: The History of the Presbyterian Mission Home, San Francisco, 1874-1935,” in Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers, eds.,
Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude and Escape
(Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1944); Laurence Wu McClain, “Donaldina Cameron: A Reappraisal,”
Pacific Historian,
Fall 1985.

86 sophisticated system of alarm bells:
“Statement of Chun Ho, Rescued Chinese Slave Girl, at the Presbyterian Rescue Home, Miss Cameron, Matron, in the Matter of Investigation into Chinese Highbinder Societies,” p. 9. File 55374/876, Box 360, Entry 9, Record Group 85, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

86 fifteen hundred Chinese
women were
rescued:
Judy Yung, p. 35.

86 “to better her condition”:
Huping Ling, p. 24.

87 “gaze upon the countenance of the charming Ah Toy”:
Curt Gentry,
Madams
of
San Francisco: An Irreverent History of the City by the Golden Gate
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), p. 52.

87 three months short of her hundredth birthday:
Judy Yung,
Unbound Feet,
p. 34.

87 Description of Suey Him’s life:
Ibid.

87 those keeping house grew from 753 in 1870 to 1,145 in 1880:
Huping Ling, p. 61.

88 Story of Polly Bemis:
Huping Ling, p. 79; Benson Tong, p. 22; Vardis Fisher and Opal Laurel Holmes,
Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West
(Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1990), pp. 273-74.

88 Descriptions of abductions of wives by highbinders:
Benson Tong, p. 172.

88 “She would either have to marry one of them men or go back to China”:
Major Document #154, Box 26, Survey of Race Relations, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University.

89 physicians in San Francisco lobbied to exclude Chinese prostitutes:
The
Chinese
Hospital
of San Francisco
(Oakland: Carruth and Carruth, 1899), p. 1;
San Francisco Chronicle,
July 1, 1871; California Department of Public Health,
First Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California for the Years 1870 and 1871
(San Francisco: D. W. Gelwicks, 1871), p. 46. All three cited in Benson Tong,
Unsubmissive Women,
p. 105.

89 “death-houses”:
Benson Tong, p. 106.

89 “stretched on the floor of this damp, foul-smelling den”:
Ibid., p. 107.

90 “My father traveled all over the world”:
Origins & Destinations: 41 Essays on Chinese America,
p. 83.

90 “When I came to America as a bride”:
Rose Hum Lee,
The Growth and Decline of Chinese Communities in the Rocky Mountain Region
(New York: Arno Press, 1978), p. 252.

91 “Now and then the women visit one another”:
Sui Seen [Sin] Far, “The Chinese Woman in America,”
Land of Sunshine,
January 1897, p. 62.

92 a few hundred Chinese families lived in America,
and perhaps one
thousand Chinese children:
Otis Gibson,
The Chinese in America,
p. 318.

93 63,199 Chinese:
1870 U.S. Census. For Chinese census statistics in the United States for the nineteenth century, see Thomas W. Chinn, H. Mark Lai, and Philip P. Choy, eds.,
A History of the Chinese in California:
A
Syllabus
(San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1969),
p.
19, table II.

93 99.4 percent:
1870 U.S. Census. Table II in Thomas W. Chinn, H. Mark Lai, and Philip P. Choy gives the statistic of 62,831 Chinese in the western states in 1870. Very few Chinese lived in the East Coast or Midwest during this era. Officially there was only one Chinese person in the entire state of Illinois in 1870, a number that grew to 209 by 1880. Some of the few Chinese in the Midwest had migrated from East Coast cities, not the West Coast. (Douglas Knox, “The Chinese American Midwest: Migration and the Negotiation of Ethnicity,” unpublished paper. Also Adam McKeown, “Chinese Migrants Among Ghosts: Chicago, Peru and Hawaii in the Early Twentieth Century,” Ph.D. dissertation in history, University of Chicago, 1997, p. 241.)

93 78 percent—in California:
1870 U.S. Census. According to table II in Thomas W. Chinn, H. Mark Lai, and Philip P. Choy, 49,277 Chinese lived in California in 1870.

94 “come to the conclusion that we Chinese are the same as Indians and Negroes”:
Lai Chun-chuen, Remarks of the Chinese Merchants of San Francisco on Governor Bigler’s Message, translated by W. Speer, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, as cited in Charles J. McClain, “California’s First Anti-Chinese Laws,”
Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1995
(Brisbane, Calif.: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1995), p. 102.

94 King Weimah:
Gunther Barth,
Bitter Strength,
p. 145.

95 “If the Chinese were allowed to vote”:
Eric Foner,
Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
(New York: Harper and Row, 1988), p. 447.

95 federal court decision:
Cheng-Tsu Wu, ed.,
“Chink!,”
p. 14.

96 “Emancipation has spoiled the Negro”:
“The Coming Laborer,”
Vicksburg Times,
June 30, 1869, as cited in James W. Loewen,
The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White
(Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1988; originally published by Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. viii, 22.

96 “Give us five million”:
Eric Foner, pp. 419-20.

96 Tye Kim Orr:
Andrew Gyory,
Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion
Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 31.

96 Information on Cornelius Koopmanschap:
Andrew Gyory, p. 31. Also, Gunther Barth, pp. 191-95.

97 “All Chinese make much money in New Orleans if they work”:
Lynn Pan,
Sons of the Yellow Emperor,
pp. 53-54.

97 “nice rooms and very fine food”:
Ibid.

97 the arrival of about two thousand Chinese in the South:
Sucheng Chan,
Asian Americans,
p. 82.

97 some 250 Chinese men came as employees of the Houston & Texas Central Railroad:
Ibid., p. 82.

97 a thousand Chinese arrived in Alabama:
Ibid., p. 82.

97 staged a strike to protest the whipping:
Lucy M. Cohen, “George W. Gift, Chinese Labor Agent in the Post-Civil War South,”
Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1995
(Brisbane, Calif.: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1995), p. 174.

97 attempted to lynch a Chinese agent:
Jackson Weekly Clarion,
November 20, 1873, as cited in James W. Loewen, p. 31.

97 shot and killed Chinese:
Ibid.

98 Information about bilingual interpreters:
Lucy M. Cohen,
Chinese in the Post-Civil War South: A People Without a History
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), p. 83.

98 press charges against their employers:
Lucy M. Cohen, “George W. Gift, Chinese Labor Agent in the Post-Civil War South,” p. 74.

98 U.S. authorities halted Chinese labor recruitment:
Ibid., p. 159.

99 By 1915, scarcely a single plantation:
Powell Clayton,
The Aftermath of the Civil War in Arkansas
(New York: Neale, 1915), p. 214, as cited in James W. Loewen, p. 31.

100 Information on strike in North Adams:
Andrew Gyory, pp. 39-41.

100 first manufacturer in American history:
Andrew Gyory, p. 60.

101 “A large and hostile crowd”:
The Nation,
June 23, 1870, p. 397.

101 “No scabs or rats admitted here”:
Andrew Gyory, p. 41.

101 “there can be nowhere a busier, more orderly group of workmen”:
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,
December 1870, p. 138, as cited in Ronald Takaki,
Strangers from a Different Shore,
p. 98.

101 “labored regularly and constantly”:
William Shanks, “Chinese Skilled Labor,”
Scrihner’s
Monthly, Vol. 2, September 1871, pp. 495-96, as cited in Ronald Takaki, p. 98.

101 Information on James B. Hervey:
Ronald Takaki, p. 99; Gunther Barth, pp. 203-6; Renqiu Yu,
To Save China, to Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 9-10. Arthur Bonner,
Alas! What Brought Thee Hither? The Chinese in New York 1800-1950
(Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1997), pp. 26-27, 30-32.

101 “shows a manifest attempt to revive the institution of slavery”:
Roger Daniels,
Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), p. 42.

102 10 percent wage reduction:
Ronald Takaki, p. 98.

102 “more and more like their white neighbors”:
Renqiu Yu, p. 9.

102 discharged all of them:
Arthur Bonner, p. 32.

102 peddling and candy making:
John Kuo Wei Tchen,
New York Before Chinatown,
pp. 77, 81, 227, 233-35.

102 748 Chinese lived in Manhattan:
Ibid., p. 225.

102 two thousand Chinese laundries:
Renqiu Yu, p. 8.

103 five Chinese youths:
Thomas E. LaFargue,
China’s First Hundred: Educated Mission Students in the United States 1872-1881
(Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1987), p. 166.

103 Ah Lum:
Carl T. Smith, “Commissioner Lin’s Translators,”
Chung Chi Bulletin,
no. 42, June 1967.

103 Information on Yung Wing:
Yung Wing,
My Life in China and America
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909); Jack Chen, The
Chinese of America,
pp. 177-78.

103 “foreign intercourse with China”:
Yung Wing, p. 2.

104 “I wanted the utmost freedom of action”:
Yung Wing, p. 35.

104 “Knowledge is power”:
Yung Wing, p. 50.

105 decapitation of seventy-five thousand people:
Jack Chen, p. 16.

105 “If I were allowed to practice my profession”:
Yung Wing, p. 60.

106 “the best time to serve their homeland”:
Timothy Kao, “Yung Wing (1828-1912): The First Chinese Graduate from an American University.” Paper presented during “Chinese Pioneer Scholars in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.: A Little-Known Aspect of the Chinese Diaspora” conference, Yale University, September 21, 1998, p. 2.

106 adapting to New England
life: Ibid., p. 4.

106 played American sports:
Ibid., p. 3.

107 Information on Tang Guoan, Tang Shaoyi, and Zhan Tianyou:
Ibid., p. 6.

109 Lue Gim Gong:
Ruthanne Lum McCunn,
Chinese American Portraits: Personal Histories 1828-1988
(San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1988), pp. 33-39; Ruthanne Lum McCunn, “Lue Gim Gong: A Life Reclaimed,”
Chinese America: History and Perspectives
1989, pp. 117-35.

110 “With few or no Chinese women available”:
Lucy M. Cohen,
Chinese in the Post-Civil War South,
p. 176.

110 outnumbered Irish male arrivals two to one:
Roger Daniels,
Coming to America,
p. 142.

110 Harper’s Weekly:
Harper’s
Weekly, October 3, 1857, as cited in Gunther Barth, p. 210.

110 most owners of Chinese boarding houses were married to either
Irish or German women:
New York Times,
June 20, 1859.

111 “handsome but squalidly dressed young white girl”:
New York
Times, December 26, 1873, as cited in Ronald Takaki, p. 101.

111 Edward Harrigan:
John Kuo Wei Tchen,
New York Before Chinatown
, pp. 127, 219-20. Original citation: Edward Harrigan papers, Manuscripts and Archives section, New York Public Library.