The Chinese in America (57 page)

29 “Americans are very rich people”:
Diane Mei Lin Mark and Ginger Chih,
A Place Called Chinese America
(Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1982; Organization of Chinese Americans, 1993), p. 5.

30 three-quarters of a million Chinese men:
Robert J. Schwendinger, “Investigating Chinese Immigrant Ships and Sailors,” in Genny Lim, ed.,
The Chinese American Experience: Papers from the Second National Conference on Chinese American Studies (1980), p. 16.
An estimated 250,000 Chinese were shipped to Cuba and 87,000 to Peru between 1847 and 1874, according to Laura L. Wong, “Chinese Immigration and Its Relationship to European Development of Colonies and Frontiers,” in Genny Lim, ed.,
The Chinese American Experience, p. 37.

30 “without a danger of being hustled”:
H. F. MacNair,
Modern Chinese History: Selected Readings
(Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1927), pp. 409-10; Jack Chen,
The Chinese of America
(New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 21.

30-31
Description of coolie trade—the kidnappings and South American conditions:
Lynn Pan,
Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora
(New York: Kodansha America, 1994), pp. 67-69; Madeline Y. Hsu,
Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home, p. 34;
John Kuo Wei Tchen,
New York Before Chinatown,
pp. 49-50. Tchen describes how American shipbuilders created the slave ships used for the coolie trade, and that the guano harvested by the Chinese fertilized the topsoil of Maryland tobacco plantations.

32 forty dollars in gold:
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), pp. 14-15; William Speer,
An Humble Plea
(San Francisco, 1856), p. 7. According to historian Haiming Liu, the trip cost $40-$60 and it took 35 to 45 days to travel from Guangdong to California. (Haiming Liu, ”Between China and America: The Trans-Pacific History of the Chang Family,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1996.)

32 Travel conditions over Pacific:
Jack Chen,
The Chinese of America,
p. 23; Sylvia Sun Minnick,
Samfow: The San Joaquin Chinese Legacy
(Fresno, Calif.: Panorama West Publishing, 1988), p. 8; Liping Zhu, A
Chinaman’s Chance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier
(Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1997), p. 24.

32 “The food was different”:
Lee Chew, “Life Story of a Chinaman,” p. 289, as cited in Ronald Takaki,
Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans
(New York: Little, Brown, 1989; reprinted by Penguin Books, 1990), p. 68.

33
Libertad:
Jack Chen, p. 23.

34 Description of San Francisco before the gold rush:
J. Hittel,
A History of the City of San Francisco and Incidentally of California
(San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft and Company, 1878), pp. 398-400; Edward Kemble, “Reminiscences of Early San Francisco,” in Joshua Paddison, ed.,
A World Transformed: Firsthand Accounts of California Before the Gold Rush
(Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 1999), pp. 309, 315.

34 Description of San Francisco in 1848:
Christopher Lee Yip, “San Francisco’s Chinatown: An Architectural and Urban History,” Ph.D. dissertation in architecture, University of California, Berkeley, 1985, p. 11; Joshua Paddison, ed., A
World Transformed: Firsthand Accounts of California Before the Gold Rush,
p. 311; David E. Eames,
San Francisco Street Secrets
(Baldwin Park, Calif.: Gem Guides Book Company, 1995), p. 51.

34 boom town of thirty thousand:
David E. Eames, p. 44.

34 46 gambling halls, 144 taverns, and 537 places that sold liquor:
Ibid., p. 48.

35 “worthy of an Empress”:
Lucius Morris Beebe,
San Francisco’s Golden Era
(Berkeley, Calif.: Howell-North, 1960), p. 12.

35 Women were scarce:
David E. Eames, p. 44.

35 92 percent of California was male:
Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss,
The Oxford History of the American West,
p. 815.

35 “Every man thought every woman in that day a beauty”:
Curt Gentry,
The Madams of San Francisco: An Irreverent History of the City by the Golden Gate
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), p. 33.

35 Information on brothels:
Mary Ellen Jones,
Daily Life on the Nineteenth-Century American Frontier
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 152.

36 five murders every six days:
David E. Eames, p. 66.

36 “Committee of Vigilance” history:
Ibid., pp. 68-78.

36 Description of San Francisco culture:
Ibid
.
, p. 66.

37 more than half of the San Francisco population was foreign-born:
Julie Joy Jeffrey, p. 143.

38 Information on Chinese costumes:
Edward Eberstadt, ed.,
Way Sketches; Containing Incidents of Travel Across the Plains, From St. Joseph to California in 1850, With Letters Describing Life and Conditions in the Gold Region by Lorenzo Sawyer, Later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of California
(New York, 1926), p. 124, as cited in Gunther Barth,
Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States
1850-1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 114.

39 “allow a couple of Americans to breathe in it”:
Gunther Barth, p. 114;
San Francisco Herald,
November 28, 1857.

39 wonderfully clean”:
J. D. Borthwick,
Three Years in California,
1851-1854 (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1857 [also Oakland, Calif.: Biobooks, 1949]), p. 44; Benson Tong,
Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth Century San Francisco
(Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), p. 13.

39 “They are quiet”:
Vardis Fisher and Opal Laurel Holmes,
Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West
(Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1990), p. 272.

39 “It was a mystery”:
Ibid., p. 262.

39 forty-pound nugget:
Pauline Minke, “Chinese in the Mother Lode (1850-1870),” thesis, California History and Government Adult Education, 1960, Asian American Studies Library, University of California at Berkeley, p. 27. (Later published as book—San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1974.)

40 240-pound nugget:
Ibid., p. 27.

40 friendly Shoshone and Bannock Indians:
Liping Zhu,
A Chinaman’s Chance,
p. 28.

40 water wheel:
Sucheng Chan,
Asian Americans: An Interpretative History
(New York: Twayne Publishers [imprint of Simon & Schuster], 1991), p. 29.

40 Tin mining:
David Valentine, “Chinese Placer Mining in the United States: An Example from American Canyon, Nevada,” in Susie Lan Cassel, ed.,
The Chinese in America: A History from Gold Mountain to the New Millennium
(Walnut Creek, Calif.: Alta Mira Press, 2002), p. 40.

40 Yuba River:
Isaac Joslin Cox,
Annals of Trinity County
(Eugene, Ore.: John Henry Nash of the University of Oregon, 1940), p. 210, as cited in Pauline Minke, p. 26.

40 irrigation ditch from the Carson River to Gold Canyon:
Origins & Destinations: 41 Essays on Chinese America / A Joint Project of Chinese Historical Society of Southern California and UCLA Asian American Studies Center
(Los Angeles: Chinese Historical Society of Southern California and UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1994), p. 113; Jack Chen, p. 256.

40 “wailings of a thousand lovelorn cats”:
Charles Dobie,
San Francisco’s Chinatown
(New York and London: D. Appteton-Century Company, 1936), p. 42, as cited in James L. Boyer, “Anti-Chinese Agitation in California, 1851-1904: A Case Study on Traditional Western Behavior,” master of arts thesis, San Francisco State College, p. 112.

41 “About every third Chinaman runs a lottery”:
John Hoyt Williams,
A Great and Shining Road: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroad
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 99.

41 “We don’t know and don’t care”:
Vardis Fisher and Opal Laurel Holmes,
Gold Rushes and Mining Camps of the Early American West,
p. 262.

41 “He assaulted me without provocation”:
Diane Mei Lin Mark and Ginger Chih,
A Place Called Chinese America,
p. 6.

41 Information on Joaquin Murieta:
Pauline Minke,
Chinese in the Mother Lode,
pp. 34-35.

42 “their presence here is a great moral and social evil”:
Diane Mei Lin Mark and Ginger Chih, p. 32.

42 “tide of Asiatic immigration”:
Roger Daniels,
Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), p. 35. Original citation: John Bigler, Governor’s Special Message, April 23, 1852, p. 4.

42 Commutation tax:
Charles J. McClain, “California’s First Anti-Chinese Laws,”
Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1995
(Brisbane, Calif.: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1995), p. 91.

42
Taxes: Otis Gibson makes reference to a 1876 statement by the Chinese Six Companies which complained that the Chinese paid taxes on personal property, the foreign miner’s tax, $200,000 in annual poll taxes, and more than $2 million in duties to the Custom House of San Francisco. Otis Gibson,
The Chinese in America
(reprint edition, New York: Arno Press, 1979; original published in 1877 by Hitchcock & Walden in Cincinnati), p. 321.

42 barred from the city hospital:
Robert J. Schwendinger, “Investigating Chinese Immigrant Ships and Sailors,”
The Chinese American Experience: Papers from the Second National Conference, Chinese American Studies (1980),
p. 21.

43 Information on foreign miner’s tax:
Cheng-Tsu Wu, ed.,
“Chink!” A Documentary History of Anti-Chinese Prejudice in America
(New York: World Publishing Company, 1972), pp. 4, 11; Charles J. McClain, “California’s First Anti-Chinese Laws,” p. 91; Chen-Yung Fan, “The Chinese Language School of San Francisco in Relation to Family Integration and Cultural Identity,” Ph.D. dissertation in education, Duke University, 1976, p. 44.

43 “I had no money to keep Christmas with”:
Charles Dobie, p. 50, as cited in James Boyer, p. 119.

43 tied the Chinese to trees:
Pauline Minke, p. 46.

43 “I was sorry to have to stab the poor fellow”:
Vardis Fisher and Opal Laurel Holmes, p. 261; Charles Dobie, p. 50.

43 runners to sprint from one village to the next:
Pauline Minke, p. 47.

43 Maidu Indians:
Gunther Barth, p. 145.

44 “no black or mulatto person”:
Charles J. McClain, “California’s First Anti-Chinese Laws,” p. 100.

44 “same type of human species”:
Ibid., pp. 101, 140. The full text of Murray’s opinion can be found in Cheng-Tsu Wu, ed.,
“Chink!,”
pp. 3-43.

44 “soon see them at the polls”:
Charles J. McClain, “California’s First Anti-Chinese Laws,” p. 101. Also, People v. Hall case file, October 1, 1854, California State Archives, Sacramento.

44 “Any failing to comply”:
Diane Mei Lin Mark and Ginger Chih, A
Place Called Chinese America,
p. 32.

45 In El Dorado County, white miners torched Chinese tents:
Victor G. and Brett de Bary Nee,
Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown
(New York: Pantheon, 1972, 1973), p. 37.

45 “opened the way for almost every sort of discrimination against the Chinese”:
Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer,
The Anti-Chinese Movement in California
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991; original edition published in 1939), p. 45.

45 picked over abandoned claims:
The historical record suggests that the Chinese miners were extremely thorough. As one contemporary observed, “When a Chinaman gets through going over the diggings with a comb, there ain’t enough gold left to fill a bedbug’s mouth.” Nelson Chia-Chi Ho, “Portland’s Chinatown: The History of an Urban Ethnic District,” in Paul D. Buell, Douglas W. Lee, and Edward Kaplan, eds.,
The Annals of the Chinese Historical Society of the Pacific Northwest
(The National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1984), p. 31.

45 Ah Sam:
Autobiography of Charles Peters, pp. 143-45, as cited in Gunther Barth,
Bitter Strength,
p. 116.

45 dilettante ancestors:
For example, interview with Rodney Chow, #149, Southern California Chinese American Oral History Project.

45 Wong Kee:
Sue Fawn Chung, “Destination: Nevada, the Silver Mountain,”
Origins & Destinations: 41 Essays on Chinese America,
p. 119.

46 First ship to sail from Canton:
H. Brett Melendy,
Chinese and Japanese Americans
(New York: Hippocrene Books, 1984), p. 15; Hubert Howe Bancroft,
History of California,
Vol. 7 (San Francisco: The History Company, 1890), p. 336.

46 “two or three ‘Celestials’ ”:
San Francisco Star,
April 1, 1848.

46 325 Chinese arrived:
Ronald Takaki,
Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans
(New York: Little, Brown, 1989; reprinted by Penguin Books, 1990), p. 79.

46 450 in 1850:
Ibid., p. 79.

46 90 percent quickly moved to rural mining camps:
Laverne Mau Dicker,
The Chinese in San Francisco: A Pictorial History
(New York: Dover Publications, 1979), pp. 355-370, as cited in Qingsong Zhang, “Dragon in the Land of the Eagle: The Exclusion of Chinese from U.S. Citizenship, 1848-1943,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1994, p. 196.