The Chinese in America (7 page)

Once a person had fallen into the hands of coolie traders, it was almost impossible to escape. The victims were locked in filthy, disease-ridden receiving stations, or barracoons, which the Chinese called
zhuzi guan
(literally, “pig pens”). Because of its squalor, this trafficking in human bodies was also referred to as “the buying and selling of piglets.” In one
zhuzi guan
at Macao, slave traders beat gongs and set off fireworks to hide the frantic cries for help. In Amoy, they stripped the men naked and stamped their chests with letters indicating their destination—for instance, “P” for Peru, or “S” for the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii)—then herded the prisoners onto ships and locked them in bamboo cages or chained them to posts. As with the African slave system, the more people a trader could cram into a vessel, the greater his profit for the voyage. During the African slave trade, approximately 15 to 30 percent died during capture or confinement along the African coast, and an additional 10 to 15 percent perished during the journey across the Atlantic Ocean. In the mid-1800s, the death rate of coolies in transit also hovered between 15 and 45 percent.

In 1873 and 1874, the Chinese government sent official delegations to South America to learn the fate of these coolies,
¹
and the picture that emerged was shocking. Chinese slaves on the Cuban sugar plantations were made to labor twenty-one out of the twenty-four hours, and, fed only about three unripe bananas per meal, many quickly died from hunger and exhaustion. Those who survived a few years often bore scars from repeated whippings. Others (probably those who had tried to escape) had had their limbs maimed or lacerated. Suicides were not uncommon. Some slit their own throats, others ingested opium, still others jumped into wells and drowned.

An equally horrific situation existed in Peru, where the Chinese were put to work on the Chincha Islands. The islands provided a rich source of guano (bird droppings), which Peru exported as fertilizer to Europe and North America. The unfortunate Chinese sent to labor on the guano beds endured both blazing heat and the unbearable stench of fowl excrement. Those too weak to stand worked on their knees, picking out gravel from guano, and guards stood sentinel on the shores to prevent coolies from accessing the only means of freeing themselves from their misery—hurling themselves into the sea.

Fortunately, the vast majority of emigrants were able to protect themselves by working through responsible emigration brokers, called
k’o-t’ou
or towkay. While these brokers could hardly be characterized as Good Samaritans—viewed in their entirety, their actions were clearly exploitative—they did provide some protection to men eager to emigrate but ignorant about how to protect themselves against the dangers into which they might fall. Broker-sponsored émigrés to the United States were housed at a special inn
(hak-chan)
while awaiting embarkation, usually from the port cities of Hong Kong and Canton. In addition, during his client’s sojourn in America, the emigration broker would make sure that mail, remittances, and news would travel from the émigré to his family back home.

For those eager lacking the funds, a credit-ticket system evolved. Chinese middlemen would typically advance forty dollars in gold, and in exchange the émigré assumed debt and a monthly interest rate of about 4 to 8 percent, which he could take up to five years to repay. Or the emigrant might agree to work for a set period of time as an indentured laborer, in exchange for the debt’s repayment by his employer.

The Pacific Ocean crossing was grueling and hazardous. The amount of time it took to reach California varied, depending on weather conditions and whether the journey was made by junk, boat, or steamer. During the gold rush it took between four and eight weeks to travel by steamer from Canton to San Francisco, and the cost of the trip ranged from about forty to sixty dollars. Steerage conditions, already appalling before 1848, grew worse as shipmasters and Chinese entrepreneurs competed for business by driving down ticket prices and making up for it through increased volume. Passengers brought their own bedding, which they spread on wooden bunks below deck, each bunk often only seventeen inches above the one underneath. Those with the cheapest tickets would take turns sleeping. The food was at best unfamiliar to the passengers and at worst inedible, and was rendered more unpalatable by the accompanying stink of body odor and freight. “The food was different from that which I had been used to, and I did not like it at all,” one passenger complained. “When I got to San Francisco I was half starved because I was afraid to eat the provisions of the barbarians.” Disease was prevalent. In 1854, the
Libertad
arrived in San Francisco after eighty days at sea with 180 Chinese—one-fifth of all those who had set out—dead from fever or scurvy. Ship captains routinely threw the dead overboard, and it was not unusual for Chinese passengers to take up collections to prevent this practice and to ensure that the bones of the dead would be returned to their ancestral land.

 

 

Did the émigrés spend the lonely nights on board these ships regretting their decision, wondering if they would survive the journey? Or did they set aside their very real fears, and focus instead on the future? And if the latter, what did they imagine the future would hold in store for them? Would San Francisco be another Canton? Or perhaps Hong Kong? And the Americans? What would they be like? Would they welcome the Chinese to their country, as all the emigration posters had suggested they would? Or would the Americans resent them and perhaps try to fleece them, or worse, kill them?

What were the shipboard dreams dreamt in 1849 by young men on their way to America, at a time when America represented a new start for so many? How many of these young men would have those dreams fulfilled? The records tell us less than we would like to know about these first shiploads of Chinese to America. But they do tell us something: for the Chinese, as for every other immigrant group, America may have seemed a stop on a journey back to wealth and position in the homeland. But for a surprisingly large number, it would be a one-way trip. While America surely transformed some of these impoverished émigrés into wealthy returnees, it turned many more into something else—hyphenated Americans, Americans who would always remember their homelands as a treasured past but find in America their future.

When the ship carrying the first group of Chinese headed for Gold Mountain docked in San Francisco, after months at sea, the first impression must have been unforgettable. By the shore near the docks, the émigrés would see hundreds of square-rigged vessels drifting vacant, abandoned by their owners, would-be gold hunters from Central America, for the authorities to deal with.

Before the gold rush, San Francisco had been a desolate area of sand dunes and hills. Discovered by the Spanish in 1769, the area had served as a presidio, a military post, with little more than a chapel and some brush and tule huts, and for almost a century, it lay relatively untouched by civilized men. Then, in 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill near the Sacramento River.

Thousands of gold hunters descended on San Francisco, a great natural port, on their way to Sutter’s Mill. When the first prospectors arrived, they threw down planks as makeshift bridges between the wharves; these planks soon became city streets. Beyond the wharves sprawled hundreds of canvas tents and wooden shacks, connected by dirt roads that melted into mud swamps with each rainfall. Residents tottered over temporary sidewalks created from garbage dumped into the mire; one precarious path was made from sacks of flour, stoves, tobacco boxes, and even a grand piano. To build shanties and stores, they ripped apart the seagoing vessels they found rotting at the docks.

Between 1848 and 1850, this sleepy village of five hundred people exploded into a boom town of thirty thousand, roughly the size of Chicago. By 1851, when the Chinese began arriving by the thousands, it was one of the largest cities in the United States. But it exhibited none of the respectability of the older, staid communities of the East Coast. San Francisco was a roaring frontier town—boastful and ambitious, shameless in its filth and greed. It made no effort to hide its excesses or sins. Rowdy young men roamed the streets, determined to spend their gold as fast as they found it. The first two-story buildings in San Francisco were not churches, city halls, or courthouses, but hotels and casinos, and by 1853 the city enjoyed 46 gambling halls, 144 taverns, and 537 places that sold liquor. So dizzying was the pace of growth that within only a few years the newly rich had moved from their shacks to luxurious, palatial establishments, gorging on twenty-course dinners served to them on gold-plate dishes.

As in many gold rush towns, those who profited most handsomely were not just the miners, but those who supplied them with essential goods and services. Fortunes were made in small businesses, most started by former prospectors themselves, who reaped unheard-of profits selling food, equipment, and clothing. Eggs fetched a dollar apiece, and an 1848 price list showed a pound of butter selling for six dollars, a pair of boots for a hundred. Anticipating the needs of miners for rugged wear, Levi Strauss made pants out of denim tent canvas and created an empire. Those who provided domestic help, such as laundering clothes, also prospered. The granddaughter of one forty-niner recalls a local washerwoman wearing a shawl with a diamond brooch “worthy of an Empress.”

Women were scarce in San Francisco. Most prospectors were single, or chose not to bring their wives and children to this raw frontier. In a town with only one woman for every dozen men, the mere rumor of a female newcomer was enough to empty saloons and hotels, causing a stampede to the docks. In this respect, San Francisco hardly differed from the entire state: census reports show that 92 percent of California was male, and 91 percent were fifteen to forty-four years of age. Wrote one California pioneer woman, “Every man thought every woman in that day a beauty. Even I have had men come forty miles over the mountains, just to look at me, and I never was called a handsome woman, in my best days, even by my more ardent admirers.”

With these demographics, brothels inevitably flourished. Some enterprising women in San Francisco charged more than a hundred dollars a night—the equivalent of the price of a house, or about a year’s wages in other parts of the country. Entrepreneurs in the world’s oldest profession rode furiously on horseback from camp to camp, trying to fit as many clients as possible into their schedules.

In a city of young men on the make, violence was the rule in the settling of disputes. Rogues of all kinds—cutthroats, charlatans, professional gamblers—naturally gravitated toward a city where no one questioned your past, where no authority checked your records. No court or police system existed until 1850, no California land office until 1853. Inevitably, then, disputes over property and land titles were most often settled by force, the decision often going to the disputants less averse to or more adept at using fists, pistols, or knives. Since the city was populated mainly by aggressive, ambitious men who had braved disease, robbers, frozen mountain passes, and the desert to make the journey, it is not surprising that during the early 1850s, San Francisco witnessed an average of five murders every six days.

Without a government in which the people had confidence, mob rule prevailed, often in the form of public hangings, in particular scapegoating foreigners without sufficient evidence. For a while, San Franciscans—who created the “Committee of Vigilance” in 1851—tended to blame all crimes on arrivals from Australia, viewing them as rabble from a penal colony. The vigilantes thought nothing of stringing up suspicious characters, defying and even intimidating whatever little public authority existed—on one occasion abducting and holding hostage a California state supreme court justice.

Strangely enough, however, a progressive element also thrived in San Francisco. The city drew not only criminals and capitalists, but also intellectuals, attracted like the others not only by the opportunity for quick wealth but also the romance of adventure. By 1853, the community supported a dozen newspapers and a strong subculture of writers. It soon boasted more college graduates than any other city in the country. Despite its rough-hewn beginnings, San Francisco swiftly became the most cultured city on the West Coast, where even callused, weather-beaten gold prospectors could be seen attending theater performances. The presence of intellectuals fostered a certain tolerance in the city, a fascination for anything different, even as just under the surface ran a current of barely restrained hair-trigger tempers and murderous rage.

It was against this backdrop—a weird juxtaposition of greed and violence on one hand and an avid curiosity about new ideas and experiences on the other—that the first wave of Chinese made their appearance in the American West. If San Francisco did not initially resist their arrival, perhaps it was because almost everyone in San Francisco had come from somewhere else. By 1853, more than half of the San Francisco population was foreign-born, and in a city united by the single, driving obsession to make money, only one color seemed to matter: gold.

This would change.

T
he gold rush was born out of the sense among people living bleak lives of interminable desperation, Chinese or otherwise, that here at last was a chance to change the unchangeable—to wrench themselves out of the endless and demeaning routine of their daily existence and maybe catapult themselves into another class entirely. People more conservative in outlook might regard with contempt those who would invest all they had in such pie-in-the-sky hopes, and China had always been a land where the conservative outlook—respect for one’s elders, one’s betters, one’s rulers—was highly revered. But wherever the future was the dimmest, there, too, would be found people most eager to grab at this last chance at a better life, a chance that according to rumor had already led some few to great riches.