The Chinese in America (24 page)

The Densmore investigation resulted in numerous arrests, as well as the discharge of some forty people from the Immigration Service. Transcripts of telephone conversations, secretly taped in 1917 by investigators, exposed the inner workings of collusion between Chinese smugglers and white officials. Here is a verbatim excerpt from one such transcript, of a phone call from a Chinese man to an official named McCall:

Under such a system, Chinese nationals who refused to pay off corrupt officials often faced trouble getting into the United States. According to an immigrant named Chen Ke, his troubles began when he refused to bribe the interpreter of the Boston customs office. In retaliation, the interpreter told the authorities that Chen Ke possessed fake documents and had him deported to China. Chen Ke later smuggled himself back into America, incurring a debt of $6,500, which took him twenty years to repay.

Such experiences left the Chinese American community with a profound sense of shame, terror, and insecurity. “Whenever my mother would mention it, she’d say ‘Angel Island, shhh,’ ” recalled Paul Chow, a retired engineer who later led an effort to restore the immigration facility as a historical landmark. “I thought it was all one word ‘Angelislandshhh.’ ” He later understood the reason for his family’s embarrassment regarding the detention center: back in 1922, his father had bribed an immigration official to get into the country.

T
hrough the decades immediately following the passage of the Exclusion Act, the Chinese in America continued to live suspended in a state of cultural limbo, not fully accepted by white American society, yet not able—or not willing—to return to China and sacrifice their American earnings. The strength of the U.S. dollar allowed some to support their families back in China in relative luxury. To the lowest-paid émigrés, the money sent home often assured the survival of family members. Now, with the exclusion laws in place, these men had to face the harsh reality of their strangely split lives. Even visiting their families would put them at the mercy of immigration officers, who could bar their reentry into the United States and cut them off from their treasured source of revenue forever.

There was another factor to consider. As hostile as the laws were in the United States, the political situation in China was far more chaotic and dangerous. By the end of the nineteenth century, Japan had bullied China into near submission. In 1895, the defeat of China in the First Sino-Japanese War forced the imperial government to sign the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which ceded to Japan part of Manchuria, four ports, Taiwan, and the Pescadores. But despite mounting pressure from Japan and other aggressors, the Qing government seemed oblivious to the need to build a strong military. The power behind the throne was the Empress Dowager Cixi, who appointed her nephew Guangxu as puppet emperor after her son died under mysterious circumstances. Legendary for her corruption, she used money desperately needed by the Chinese navy to build modern warships to finance instead a massive marble boat to decorate the lake at her summer palace.

As popular hatred against the Manchus swelled, a revolution appeared inevitable. In time, the Chinese émigrés would discover that even their marginal status in United States gave them a measure of political power and freedom unthinkable in China. They could organize against the hated Qing regime with less fear of retribution and provide much-needed financial support for political activists. These activists fell into two main groups: the reformers, who wanted to change the Qing from within, and the revolutionaries, who wanted to overthrow the regime entirely.

At the vanguard of the reform movement were two scholars, Kang Youwei and his protégé Liang Qichao. Their initial goal was to save the Qing dynasty through changes in policy. In 1898, Kang convinced the young emperor Guangxu to initiate a series of efforts to modernize Chinese education and national defense, a program known as the Hundred Days’ Reform Movement. Kang also favored the idea of establishing a constitutional monarchy modeled after the government of Meiji Japan.

However, the Empress Dowager Cixi recognized that these reforms, crucial as they were to China’s survival as a country, also gravely threatened her own position. A proven master at court intrigue, she staged a coup d’état that placed her nephew the emperor under house arrest and forced Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao to flee China in fear for their lives. In exile from their homeland, they organized in Canada the Protect the Emperor Society, also known as the Chinese Empire Reform Association or
Baohuanghui,
and gained a wide following among the Chinese in the United States. Chapters of their organization swiftly spread across the continent and to Hawaii. Their supporters began to train cadets in preparation for a military campaign in China. Homer Lea, an eccentric Caucasian strategist with grandiose fantasies about his role in China, founded a short-lived Western Military Academy in California for this purpose.

Before long, however, many Chinese immigrants grew so disgusted by the corruption within the Manchu regime that they lost interest in restoring the emperor to power. Instead, soon after the turn of the century, they threw their support behind a new movement, one intent on deposing the government entirely and establishing a new democratic republic in China. The leader and hero of this revolutionary movement was Sun Yat-sen, who, like Kang Youwei, had been born in Guangdong province, an anti-Manchu stronghold. But unlike Kang, an accomplished scholar from the gentry, Sun came from a peasant family with no vested interest in supporting the status quo. His early background, marked by ambition and a desire for upward mobility, resembled that of many other nineteenth-century Chinese who ultimately emigrated to America. Sun grew up in a rural coastal village near Canton, from which many of his relatives had gone to America to seek better opportunity; two of them died in California during the gold rush. Other family members had settled in Hawaii, and in the early 1880s Sun moved there as well, where he studied at a mission school, became a Christian, and learned the concepts and workings of Western democracy.

For years, Sun Yat-sen drifted in search of his place in society. He studied at a medical college in Hong Kong, but the British considered him unqualified to be a doctor and barred him from practicing medicine. At the same time, the Manchu government ignored Sun’s eager offer to help them build up their national defense. In 1894, an angry and frustrated Sun created a secret organization in Hawaii called the Revive China Society, whose purpose was to oust the Manchu regime. The society worked closely with tong organizations, which, despite their illegal activities in China and the United States, were increasingly committed to the political goal of destroying the imperial government. Conspiring with other secret societies near Canton, Sun planned a poorly funded, ill-conceived military operation that was quickly discovered and crushed by local Qing officials. Many of the rebels were executed, but Sun managed to escape to Japan. Sun was now what Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao would soon become: an activist without a country, a fugitive from the law.

Then came an attempt on Sun’s life that changed the course of China’s history. In 1896 in London, he was abducted by Qing authorities, who intended to ship him back to China. Eloquent even in dire circumstances, Sun convinced a watchman to transmit a message to a friend, who helped free him. The botched kidnapping turned Sun into an instant hero. The Western media reported the sensational story of his capture and miraculous release, which gained world sympathy for his cause. Sun’s new celebrity enabled him to relaunch his movement on a different level. In the United States, his public appearances drew thousands of eager supporters, and the Chinese American community raised enormous sums of money to help him overthrow the imperial government.

Sun’s revolutionary alliance was eventually successful, and on October 10, 1911, a mutiny of army officers ended more than two and a half centuries of Manchu rule. The rebels declared the birth of a new government, the Republic of China, and elected Sun Yat-sen as provisional president. Adopting American democracy as their model, the revolutionaries called themselves the Kuomintang (National People’s Party), also known as the KMT or the Nationalists. In the United States, the KMT began to establish local chapters in cities with great concentrations of ethnic Chinese, and the influence of American culture on Sun’s new republic was plain from the beginning. His Three People’s Principles—nationalism, democracy, and people’s livelihood—was originally written in English, and was inspired by Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and its dedication to a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Sun’s Republic of China, however, was doomed to an early demise. In 1912, to avoid civil war, Sun resigned in favor of Yuan Shikai, a powerful military leader from north China. However, although the Kuomintang was the dominant party in parliament, Yuan quickly undermined the fledgling republic by arrogating dictatorial power, purging the Kuomintang, silencing the press, and liquidating thousands of his enemies. His dream of democracy for China in tatters, Sun was forced to flee the country. With Yuan’s death in 1916, the central government splintered into many fiefdoms, leaving China in the control of feuding warlords.

 

 

While bloodshed and chaos reigned in China, thousands of Chinese immigrants fought their own quiet battles in the United States—namely, the daily struggle to make a living. During the early twentieth century, it was still unclear which career paths would lead to opportunity, and which to dead ends.

Many soon learned that it would be a hard road to travel if they remained in agriculture. In California, any Chinese who aspired to be landowning farmers found their dreams thwarted by a state law called the 1913 Alien Land Act, which barred aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning land, even if they could afford to buy it.
¹⁷
Without the right to purchase and own land, some Chinese were forced to become migrant farm laborers. In an oral history interview, émigré Suen Sum provides us a glimpse of this nomadic lifestyle. Arriving in the United States as a paper son, he had settled in Locke, California, a rural community in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta with an all-Chinese population. Drifting from farm to farm, he washed toilets, chopped wood, picked fruit, tended gardens. “The whites treated us Chinese like slaves,” he recalled. Though he possessed some education—the ability to read and write in his native language, and a high school degree from China—he made barely enough money to live on: ten to twenty cents an hour, ten hours a day. At these wages, Suen Sum could not afford to marry, or do much of anything except work. There were days when he lacked money to buy food. “Every year it was the same. You work year after year, from youth to old age, and I still haven’t saved any money.”

Where landownership was allowed, a few notable Chinese prospered in agriculture, but they were generally the exception rather than the rule. On the Hawaiian islands, Lum Yip Kee, a Cantonese émigré, dominated the poi market with his plantations and processing factory, earning the title of “Taro King.” Another Chinese immigrant to Hawaii, Chun Afong, became a millionaire thanks to his sugarcane holdings, his life inspiring the Jack London short story “Chun Ah Chun.” In California, some Chinese profited by leasing land or by processing the harvests faster than their competitors. A few even managed to purchase land, in spite of the 1913 Alien Land Act. Thomas Foon Chew became known as the “Asparagus King” of San Francisco. In Alviso, California, he owned the Bayside Canning Company; the first cannery to preserve green asparagus. It grew into the third largest cannery in the world (after Del Monte and Libby’s). Chin Lung, a near invalid in his Cantonese childhood, began his career by working in the reclamation of the tule lands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta, a job that left his hands and feet bloody and caused him to cry himself to sleep every night. He saved enough money to lease land across the delta, eventually emerging as the “Chinese Potato King” in the region.

For most Chinese immigrants, however, better opportunities could be found in small towns and cities, not in rural America. Over time, Chinese workers left the ranches altogether, their places taken by migrant Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican laborers. Many gravitated toward industries that had become virtual Chinese monopolies.

As always, restaurants remained a popular place to work. By 1920, roughly a quarter of all Chinese workers in the United States worked in restaurants. Most of these were tiny mom-and-pop enterprises, in which the owner worked as cook and dishwasher and his wife—if he had one—as the waitress and cashier. A few Chinese with sufficient capital rented their own buildings, installed expensive Asian decor, and hired battalions of chefs, waiters, and hostesses.

Regardless of the size of the operation, many Chinese sensed that profits could be made not by offering authentic cuisine from their homeland, but instead dishes that looked Chinese but appealed to the American palate. Chow mein (“fried noodles”), for example, was invented when a Chinese cook accidentally dropped a handful of Chinese pasta into a pot of simmering oil. When the crisp, golden-brown result delighted his customers, he added the item to his menu. It was an instant hit with his American patrons, and other Chinese restaurants quickly added the new concoction to their own offerings. David Jung, who opened a noodle company in Los Angeles in 1916, is credited with creating the fortune cookie. (Contrary to popular myth, the fortune cookie is not an ancient Chinese dessert, nor is it customary to insert messages in Chinese pastries. While it is true that during the Yuan Dynasty, rebels baked secret messages into Moon Festival cakes, outlining plans for an attack—the uprising overthrew the Mongolians and established the Ming Dynasty—the concept of slipping words of wisdom into fried cookies is completely American.) Chop suey, a fried hodgepodge of vegetables and meat, enjoyed an enormous following among Caucasians and became an icon of mainstream culture by the early twentieth century, when Sinclair Lewis mentioned it in his novel
Main Street
(1920). It varied greatly by region, as chefs tailored their food to suit local tastes. On the East Coast, some Chinese restaurants even offered chop suey sandwiches.