The Forgotten History of the Purging of Chinese from America
Michael Luo is the editor of newyorker.com.
More:Chinese AmericansAsian-AmericansRacismImmigrantsAmerican History
The Forgotten History of
the Purging of Chinese from America
The surge in violence against Asian-Americans is a reminder that
America’s present reality reflects its exclusionary past.
By Michael Luoril 22, 2021
Gum Shan. Gold Mountain. That was what the people in Guangdong Province
called the faraway land where the native population had red hair and blue eyes,
and it was rumored that gold nuggets could be plucked from the ground.
According to an account in the San Francisco Chronicle, a merchant
visiting from Canton, the provincial capital—likely soon after the discovery of
gold at Sutter Creek, in 1848—wrote to a friend back home about the riches that
he had found in the mountains of California. The friend told others and set off
across the Pacific Ocean himself. Whether from the merchant’s letter, or from
ships arriving in Hong Kong, news of California’s gold rush swept through
southern China. Men began scraping together funds, often using their family’s
land as collateral for loans, and crowding aboard vessels that took as long as
three months to reach America. They eventually arrived in the thousands. Some
came in search of gold; others were attracted by the lucrative wages that they
could earn working for the railroad companies laying down tracks to join the Eastern
and Western halves of the United States; still others worked in factories
making cigars, slippers, and woollens, or found other opportunities in the
American West. They were mostly peasants, often travelling in large groups from
the same village. They wore the traditional male hairstyle of the Qing
dynasty, shaved pate in the front and a braid down to the waist in the back.
They were escaping a homeland beset by violent rebellions and economic
privation. They came seeking the vast, open spaces of the American
frontier—where, they believed, freedom and opportunity awaited.
As the Chinese presence
grew, however, it began to stir the anxieties of white Americans. Violence,
often shocking in its brutality, followed. America, in the middle of the
nineteenth century, was engaged in an epic struggle over race. The Civil War,
by the latest estimates, left three-quarters of a million dead. In the
turbulent years of Reconstruction that followed, at least two thousand Black
people were lynched. Largely forgotten in this defining period of American
history, however, is the virulent racism that Chinese immigrants endured on the
other side of the country. According to “The Chinese Must Go”
(2018), a detailed examination by Beth Lew-Williams, a professor of history at
Princeton, in the mid-eighteen-eighties, during probably the peak of
vigilantism, at least a hundred and sixty-eight communities forced their
Chinese residents to leave. In one particularly horrific episode, in 1885,
white miners in Rock Springs, in the Wyoming Territory, massacred at least
twenty-eight Chinese miners and drove out several hundred others.
Today, there are more
than twenty-two million people of Asian descent in the United States, and
Asians are projected to be the largest immigrant group in the nation by 2055.
Asian-Americans have been stereotyped as the model minority, yet no other
ethnic or racial group experiences greater income inequality––or perhaps feels
more invisible. Then came the Presidency of Donald
Trump, his racist sneers about “kung flu” and the “China virus,” and
the wave of anti-Asian attacks that has swept the country.
The attacks have
produced a remarkable outpouring of emotion and energy from the Asian-American
community and beyond. But it is unclear what will become of the fervor once the
sense of emergency dissipates. Asian-Americans do not fit easily into the narrative
of race in America. Evaluating gradations of victimhood, and where a persistent
sense of otherness ends and structural barriers begin, is complicated. But the
surge in violence against Asian-Americans is a reminder that America’s present
reality reflects its exclusionary past. That reminder turns the work of making
legible a history that has long been overlooked into a search for a more
inclusive future.
The vast majority of
Chinese in America in the nineteenth century arrived in San Francisco, which had
been a settlement of several hundred people before the gold rush, but ballooned
into a chaotic metropolis of nearly three hundred and fifty thousand by the end
of the century. In “Ghosts of Gold Mountain”
(2019), Gordon H. Chang, a history professor at Stanford University, writes
that, at least initially, many were generally welcoming toward the Chinese.
“They are among the most industrious, quiet, patient people among us,”
the Daily Alta California, the state’s leading newspaper, said in
1852. “Perhaps the citizens of no nation except the Germans, are more quiet and
valuable.” Railroad officials were pleased by their work ethic. The Chinese
“prove nearly equal to white men, in the amount of labor they perform, and are
far more reliable,” one executive wrote.
White workers, however,
began to see the Chinese as competition––first for gold and, later, for scarce
jobs. Many perceived the Chinese to be a heathen race, unassimilable and alien
to the American way of life. In April 1852, with the numbers of arriving
Chinese growing, Governor John Bigler urged the California state legislature
“to check this tide of Asiatic immigration.” Bigler, a Democrat who had been
elected the state’s third governor the previous year, explicitly differentiated
“Asiatics” from white European immigrants. He argued that the Chinese, unlike
their Western counterparts, had not come seeking America as the “asylum for the
oppressed of all nations” but only to “acquire a certain amount of the precious
metals, and then return to their native country.” The legislature enacted a
series of measures to drive out the “Mongolian and Asiatic races,” including by
imposing a fifty-dollar fee on every arriving immigrant who was ineligible to
become a citizen. (At the time, naturalization procedures were governed by a
1790 law that restricted citizenship to “free white persons.”)
In 1853, the Daily
Alta published an editorial on the question of whether the Chinese
should be permitted to become citizens. It conceded that “many of them it is
true are nearly as white as Europeans.” But, it claimed, “they are not white
persons in the sense of the law.” The article characterized Chinese Americans
as “morally a far worse class to have among us than the negro” and described
their disposition as “cunning and deceitful.” Even though the Chinese had
certain redeeming qualities of “craft, industry, and economy,” it said, “they
are not of that kind that Americans can ever associate or sympathize with.” It
concluded, “They are not of our people and never will be.”
In remote mining communities, where vigilante justice often prevailed, white miners drove the Chinese off their claims. In 1859, miners gathered at a general store in northern California’s Shasta County and voted to expel the Chinese. In “Driven Out” (2007), a comprehensive account of anti-Chinese violence, Jean Pfaelzer, a professor of English and Asian studies at the University of Delaware, writes that an armed mob of two hundred white miners charged through an encampment of Chinese at the mouth of Rock Creek who had refused to leave. They captured about seventy-five Chinese miners and marched them through the town of Shasta, where people pelted them with stones. The county’s young sheriff, Clay Stockton, and his deputies, managed to disperse the mob and free the captives. But, in the following days, gangs of white miners rampaged through Chinese camps in the surrounding towns, as Stockton and his men struggled to bring the violence under control. The skirmishes came to be called the Shasta Wars. Eventually, the governor dispatched an emergency shipment of a hundred and thirteen rifles, by steamer, and a posse of men assembled by Stockton was able to restore order. The rioters were put on trial, but were quickly acquitted. “Quiet once more reigns in the Republic of Shasta,” an article in the local newspaper, the Placer Herald, said. “May the fierce alarums of war never more call her faithful sons to arms!”
On October 24, 1871,
racial tensions exploded in Los Angeles’s Chinatown on a narrow street lined
with shops and residences, called Calle de los Negros, or Negro Alley. Many
details are murky, but the journalist Iris Chang writes in “The Chinese in America”
(2003) that a white police officer, investigating the sound of gunfire, was shot;
a white man who rushed to help was killed. An angry mob of several hundred men
gathered. “American blood had been shed,” one later recalled. “There was, too,
that sense of shock that Chinese had dared fire on whites, and kill with
recklessness outside their own color set. We all moved in, shouting in anger
and as some noticed, in delight at all the excitement.” The street was
ransacked and looted, and there were shouts of “Hang them! Hang them!” By
night’s end, roughly twenty Chinese were dead, most of them hanged, their
bodies left dangling in the moonlight; one of them was a fourteen-year-old boy.
The incident remains one of the worst instances of a mass lynching in American
history.
A prolonged economic
slump in the mid-eighteen-seventies fanned white resentment. Factories on the
East Coast shuttered, and unemployed workers migrated West searching for work.
The completion of the transcontinental railroad also left many laborers in need
of jobs. An Irish immigrant named Denis Kearney, who ran a business in San
Francisco hauling dry goods, began to deliver fiery speeches in a vacant
sandlot near city hall. Kearney’s audience eventually grew to thousands of
embittered workers. Much of his ire was directed at “railroad robbers,”
“lecherous bondholders,” and “political thieves,” but he reserved his worst
vitriol for “the Chinaman.” He ended his speeches with the acclamation “The
Chinese must go!” In 1877, thousands of frustrated laborers in California
formed the Workingmen’s Party of California, and elected Kearney its president.
“California must be all American or all Chinese,” Kearney said. “We are
resolved that it shall be American, and are prepared to make it so.”
In central California,
white workers began burning down Chinese homes. In San Francisco, members of an
anti-Chinese club disrupted an evening labor meeting in front of city hall and
clamored for them to denounce the Chinese. A crowd marched to Chinatown and set
buildings ablaze and shot people in the streets; days of looting and assaults
followed. It took several thousand volunteers, armed with pick handles, and
backed by police and federal troops and gunboats offshore, to bring the riots
under control after three days, by which time four people were dead and
fourteen wounded.
By 1880, the Chinese population in the country exceeded a hundred and five thousand. On February 28, 1882, Senator John Franklin Miller, a Republican from California, introduced a bill to bar Chinese laborers from entering the United States. “We ask of you to secure to us American Anglo-Saxon civilization without contamination or adulteration with any other,” Miller said. “China for the Chinese! California for Americans and those who will become Americans!” Southern Democrats were united in their opposition to Chinese immigration, as were Republicans in Western states. It would fall to a band of New England Republicans, all with histories of fighting for equal rights, to defend the Chinese. A day after Miller’s speech, Senator George Frisbie Hoar, of Massachusetts, accused supporters of the bill of being motivated by “the old race prejudice which has so often played its hateful and bloody part in history.” Hoar, who had been active in the abolitionist movement, compared the plight of the Chinese to that of enslaved Black Americans: “What argument can be urged against the Chinese which was not heard against the negro within living memory?” Despite Hoar’s entreaties, the bill passed Congress easily. On May 6, 1882, President Chester Arthur signed into law what later became known as the Chinese Exclusion Act. It banned Chinese laborers from entering the United States for ten years, and prohibited Chinese immigrants already here from becoming citizens. The law was renewed in 1892 and made permanent in 1904. It marked the first time in U.S. history that a federal law restricted a group from entering the country on the basis of race. By 1924, the United States had taken steps to shut down nearly all immigration from Asia and to enact a quota system that severely restricted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe.
After the initial
passage of the Exclusion Act, efforts to drive out the Chinese intensified. On
November 3, 1885, at 9:30 a.m.,
whistles sounded across the city of Tacoma, Washington. White vigilantes had
set a deadline of November 1st for the city’s several hundred Chinese residents
to leave. A mob of men, bearing pistols and clubs, marched through the streets,
rounding up the large contingent who remained. “My wife refused to go and some
of the white persons dragged her out of the house,” a merchant later testified.
“From the excitement, the fright and the losses we sustained through the riot
she lost her reason, and has ever since been hopelessly insane.” In a driving
rain, vigilantes on horseback herded about two hundred Chinese on a muddy march
to the train station. According to Pfaelzer’s recounting in “Driven Out,” only
some in the group had enough money to pay the fare for a passenger train to the
neighboring town of Portland, about a hundred and forty miles away; others
clambered into boxcars aboard a passing freight train; and still others simply
started walking and could be seen for days along the tracks. Up and down the
West Coast, the “Tacoma Method” became a model for ridding
communities of the Chinese.
Still, the Chinese clung
to their place in America. Some turned to the court system for help. In 1898,
the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a man in his early twenties named Wong Kim
Ark, who was born in San Francisco and was denied reëntry to the country after
visiting family in China; the decision, in that case, secured the right of
birthright citizenship for nonwhites, under the Fourteenth Amendment. America’s
doors, however, would be largely closed to Chinese immigration until 1943, when
the exclusion acts were finally repealed. It was not a wartime stirring of the
American conscience led to the change but a shift in geopolitics: China
had joined the United States in its fight against Japan. Even then, only a tiny
number of Chinese immigrants were allowed in. The quota system enacted in 1924
that favored arrivals from Northern and Western Europe was not fully lifted
until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which prioritized
immigrants with specialized skills along with relatives of U.S. citizens and
permanent residents. Its advocates insisted that the changes would not have
much effect on the nation’s ethnic makeup. In fact, they unleashed a tide of
immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and set in motion a
demographic transformation of the country that is still unfolding today.
About a quarter of immigrants to the United States since 1965 have been Asian, and that number is only expected to rise. I owe my American story to the opening of America’s gates. Both of my parents emigrated from Taiwan for graduate school. My twin brother and I were born in Pittsburgh, where my father had begun working as an electrical engineer. Our story is one of upward mobility. What does it mean, then, that our existence in America still often feels conditional? Once we begin to understand what anti-Asian racism has looked like throughout American history, the contradictions start to become less perplexing.
Michael Luo is the editor of newyorker.com.
More: Chinese AmericansAsian-AmericansRacismImmigrantsAmerican History
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