Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community - Brossura

Chen, Yong

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0804745501 ISBN 13: 9780804745505

Casa editrice: Stanford Univ Pr, 2002

Riassunto

Founded during the Gold Rush years, the Chinese community of San Francisco became the largest and most vibrant Chinatown in America. For those Chinese traveling between the Old World and the New, San Francisco was a port of entry and departure. Many Chinese settled there, forming one of the oldest continuing ethnic communities in urban America.

This is a detailed social and cultural history of the Chinese in San Francisco, relating the development of various social and cultural institutions, ranging from brothels to the powerful "Six Companies." The book recaptures in vivid detail not only the community's collective mentalities but also the lives of ordinary people—laborers, theater-goers, gamblers, and prostitutes. In so doing, the author achieves what has been missing from virtually all the historiographic writing on the Chinese in America—he brings to life individual personalities with their varying human qualities.

The book shows the persistence of Chinese social patterns in San Francisco Chinatown, and demonstrates how the community helped shape white America's view of Asians in general and the development of race consciousness and strife. The author challenges several long-accepted views, such as the myth that the Chinese exodus to California in the mid-nineteenth century occurred mainly because of impoverishment in South China and the notion that the overwhelming majority of Chinese women in San Francisco were prostitutes. He also makes insightful comparisons of Chinese Americans with other ethnic groups.

The book makes imaginative use of a wide range of materials, private and public, fictional and statistical, in both Chinese and English, produced by both pro- and anti-Chinese sources. Among these are Chinese-language newspapers (including their advertisements), handbills, personal diaries, and other cultural productions. The author offers multidisciplinary analyses of such documents, showing the possibilities of extracting rich historical information from texts created for very different purposes.

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Informazioni sugli autori

Yong Chen is Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Yong Chen is Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Dalla quarta di copertina

Founded during the Gold Rush years, the Chinese community of San Francisco became the largest and most vibrant Chinatown in America. For those Chinese traveling between the Old World and the New, San Francisco was a port of entry and departure. Many Chinese settled there, forming one of the oldest continuing ethnic communities in urban America.
This is a detailed social and cultural history of the Chinese in San Francisco, relating the development of various social and cultural institutions, ranging from brothels to the powerful “Six Companies.” The book recaptures in vivid detail not only the community’s collective mentalities but also the lives of ordinary people—laborers, theater-goers, gamblers, and prostitutes. In so doing, the author achieves what has been missing from virtually all the historiographic writing on the Chinese in America—he brings to life individual personalities with their varying human qualities.
The book shows the persistence of Chinese social patterns in San Francisco Chinatown, and demonstrates how the community helped shape white America’s view of Asians in general and the development of race consciousness and strife. The author challenges several long-accepted views, such as the myth that the Chinese exodus to California in the mid-nineteenth century occurred mainly because of impoverishment in South China and the notion that the overwhelming majority of Chinese women in San Francisco were prostitutes. He also makes insightful comparisons of Chinese Americans with other ethnic groups.
The book makes imaginative use of a wide range of materials, private and public, fictional and statistical, in both Chinese and English, produced by both pro- and anti-Chinese sources. Among these are Chinese-language newspapers (including their advertisements), handbills, personal diaries, and other cultural productions. The author offers multidisciplinary analyses of such documents, showing the possibilities of extracting rich historical information from texts created for very different purposes.

Dal risvolto di copertina interno

Founded during the Gold Rush years, the Chinese community of San Francisco became the largest and most vibrant Chinatown in America. For those Chinese traveling between the Old World and the New, San Francisco was a port of entry and departure. Many Chinese settled there, forming one of the oldest continuing ethnic communities in urban America.
This is a detailed social and cultural history of the Chinese in San Francisco, relating the development of various social and cultural institutions, ranging from brothels to the powerful Six Companies. The book recaptures in vivid detail not only the community s collective mentalities but also the lives of ordinary people laborers, theater-goers, gamblers, and prostitutes. In so doing, the author achieves what has been missing from virtually all the historiographic writing on the Chinese in America he brings to life individual personalities with their varying human qualities.
The book shows the persistence of Chinese social patterns in San Francisco Chinatown, and demonstrates how the community helped shape white America s view of Asians in general and the development of race consciousness and strife. The author challenges several long-accepted views, such as the myth that the Chinese exodus to California in the mid-nineteenth century occurred mainly because of impoverishment in South China and the notion that the overwhelming majority of Chinese women in San Francisco were prostitutes. He also makes insightful comparisons of Chinese Americans with other ethnic groups.
The book makes imaginative use of a wide range of materials, private and public, fictional and statistical, in both Chinese and English, produced by both pro- and anti-Chinese sources. Among these are Chinese-language newspapers (including their advertisements), handbills, personal diaries, and other cultural productions. The author offers multidisciplinary analyses of such documents, showing the possibilities of extracting rich historical information from texts created for very different purposes.

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Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943

A TRANS-PACIFIC COMMUNITYBy Yong Chen

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2000 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-4550-5

Contents

Acknowledgments..........................................................................xiNote on Translation and Transliteration..................................................xvIntroduction.............................................................................11. Revisiting the Pre-Emigration Old World...............................................11Introduction.............................................................................452. The "First City": Locating Chinese San Francisco......................................493. The Social Landscape of Chinese San Francisco.........................................704. "China in America": The World of Ah Quin..............................................965. Collective Identity...................................................................124Introduction.............................................................................1456. A Time of Anger and a Time of Hope: The 1905 Boycott..................................1487. A Changing Mentality, 1906 to 1913....................................................1628. The American-ness of the Trans-Pacific Community Between the Wars.....................1869. Persistence of Trans-Pacific Ties.....................................................21710. The Road to 1943.....................................................................239Conclusion...............................................................................261Notes....................................................................................269Selected Bibliography....................................................................337Index....................................................................................379

Chapter One

Revisiting the Pre-Emigration Old World

On August 4, 1850, while white Californians (many of them newcomers who had arrived in California during the Gold Rush) were still waiting for the federal government to approve their petition to join the union, the Mary Ann Folliott sailed into the harbor of San Francisco after a 63-day voyage from Hong Kong. Aboard were nearly fifty "unidentified" Chinese. They were among the thousands of gold seekers who had begun to voyage across the Pacific Ocean from South China shortly after the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in January 1848.

The arrival of these 49'ers opened a new chapter in California history and in the nation's history of race relations. It marked the beginning of a large-scale Chinese presence in America, which would soon become a focal point in the national discourse of race. In California especially, where the pioneering 49'ers and their followers soon became a leading minority group and a major labor force, they helped transform the economic and social landscape.

The book begins, however, with an inquiry into the Pearl River Delta Region in South China during the pre-emigration years, a region that not only sent the Gold Rushers but also remained the main source of China's America-bound emigration for over a century. We know much about the world that they entered and its reaction to them. But we need to pay more attention to the world they had left. From their own perspective, after all, their venturesome journey to the New World was but an extension of their experiences in a different historical context. Revisiting the Old World can help to reveal the natural and social ecology that nurtured the body and mind of the immigrants and gave them the temples, theaters, social relations, and many other traditions that were later transplanted in the New World. Going back can also shed light on the collective backgrounds and mentality of these pioneers who, like the "unidentified" passengers on the Mary Ann Folliott, left few traces of themselves as individuals and have remained anonymous.

My intention in this chapter is not to offer a comprehensive history of the region but to provide some insights into a couple of fundamental but unanswered questions. The first and foremost question is a rather straightforward one: why did the mid-nineteenth-century Chinese exodus to California originate from the Pearl River Region? In attempting to answer this question, it is extremely important to consider the pioneers' journey, because it played a pivotal role in generating a continuous flow of migrants from the delta region in what immigration scholars call "chain migration," making the region the main source of China's U.S.-bound emigration until after World War II.

To understand the genesis of Chinese emigration we need to fully appreciate the socioeconomic realities of the region, especially its economic vitality. It was home to one of China's oldest and most developed market-oriented economies. This economy bred not only a relatively high degree of prosperity but also gave rise to individuals willing to venture away from home to pursue money-making opportunities. This helps explain why news about the discovery of gold quickly triggered the first wave of emigration to California.

Moreover, the region was also culturally vital as a result of its geographical location at the forefront of China's maritime frontier. For decades before the Opium War the provincial capital of Canton (now spelled Guangzhou) served not only as the regional economic center but also as the nation's sole official port for trade with the West. Therefore, the delta was China's oldest focal point of contact with America and other Western countries. Coming to China to pursue their varied interests in Chinese markets and Chinese souls, American merchants and missionaries congregated there and disseminated information about the New World. Of particular importance were the region's evolving California ties, through which the news of the discovery of gold reached local residents. In short, increasing Sino-American contact in South China before 1850 set the stage for the establishment of another condition necessary for mid-nineteenth-century Chinese emigration.

This argument marks a departure from the prevailing interpretation, which views Chinese emigration as a panic-stricken, hunger-driven flight from poverty and other socioeconomic difficulties. As I have stated elsewhere, whatever problems China may have been experiencing at the time, they do not fully explain the origins of mid-nineteenth-century emigration from the delta to California. Nor do they completely represent the socioeconomic realities there. I must admit that I am not the first to come to this "new" interpretation. Nineteenth-century contemporaries, including non-Chinese observers, held the same view. In 1855 the Rev. William Speer, then a missionary among Chinese immigrants in California who had served in the delta for several years, pointed out that residents in coastal Guangdong "are better acquainted with other countries than any other portion of the Chinese." He went on: "They are ... the richest people in the Empire. When the news of the discovery of gold ... reached them, it was natural that they, above all other Chinese, should rush to California." My research supports Speer's view. While we do not know how individual early emigrants made the decision to leave for California, it is clear that their departure constituted no rushed, massive exodus. In fact, fewer than seventy thousand people chose to go to California between 1849 and 1859. The 1860 federal census reports a Chinese American population (primarily on the West Coast, especially in California) of about thirty-five thousand, which is less than one-fourth the size of the Chinese community in Java during the same time.

The second question that this chapter deals with concerns mentality: early Chinese perceptions of America. I will concentrate on three of the earliest Chinese written works about the United States, taking a close look at each text itself. I will not attempt an exclusively textual reading that centers on the authors' aesthetics. Rather, my intention is to unearth key words and phrases that offer glimpses into larger societal trends. Although not written by emigrants, these texts came from and help to shed light on the historical environment that also generated Chinese emigration. They suggest that the knowledge about the United States available in the emigrant region was quite limited, reminding us that the New World remained an unfamiliar place for the emigrants, just as China was for most Americans at the time.

Socioeconomic Conditions Reconstructed

Guangdong, designated a province during the Qing Dynasty, is at the southeast end of mainland China. To the south is the vast South Sea, embracing the province along a coastline of several thousand kilometers. The mild, warm climate, along with plentiful precipitation, gives farmers in most areas multiple harvesting seasons (three for grains and seven for natural silk). The Pearl River Delta is the "pearl" of the province. "Every locality in Shunde is full of water and can be reached by boat. Rivers flow in different directions," reported the gazetteer for Shunde, one of the delta counties. There were, it went on, "profitable mulberry-tree fields and fish ponds. Natural silk is produced annually. Men and women live by their own exertion. The poor lease their land from the rich, who collect the rent.... Others specialize in different kinds of crafts and occupations that are found throughout the townships," ranging from weaving to making various utensils.

This portrait of prosperity and brisk commodity production stands in stark contrast with the image of impoverishment and a traditional agrarian economy that current scholarship has of the delta area. Only an in-depth examination of the rich local documents, especially county gazetteers, reveals the real conditions there. What follows is historical archeology or empirical social history.

The world the California-bound immigrants left was not a one-dimensional, stagnant and closed society. Instead, the Pearl River Delta was (and still is) one of the most dynamic areas in China. For local residents, migration was not a new concept. A long-standing Chinese frontier, Guangdong Province had been populated through continuous migration from the north beginning in the Qing Dynasty (221–206 B.C.). Such internal migration began to step up during the Tang Dynasty (618–907). In the Pearl River Delta the migrants from the north and their descendants helped to transform thousands of acres of marshland into agricultural fields. Generations of human labor accelerated the work of the Northern, Eastern, and Western Rivers that for centuries had been pushing the delta farther and farther into the sea by filling it with silt. The physical metamorphosis of the region was well remembered and recorded. The following is a passage from the gazetteer for one of the delta counties, Nanhai, about a mountain in the west of the county: "It used to stand in the middle of ocean waves. In several thousand years, the sand and mud brought down by two rivers accumulated around the mountain, gradually making it far away from the water." Starting largely from the Song Dynasty (960–1279) onward, people built dams to create and protect agricultural lands across the delta area.

Settlers from the north also profoundly transformed the region's social landscape by introducing the culture of China's ethnic majority, the Han people. This helps to explain why, despite its cultural uniqueness and its physical distance from the country's social and political center, the region had strong and inherent ties with "mainstream" Chinese culture. Local residents' distinctive dialects were based on and preserved significant elements of classic Chinese. In many of the temples that constituted a conspicuous mark in the regional landscape, people worshipped deities that had national, rather than only regional, followings. As we will see later, some of them were figures central to China's national history that had been deified. Equally conspicuous were the "citang" or clan buildings. The clan existed as a significant social and economic entity. Each clan often lived in its own structure. The rich clans owned land, fruit trees, and fish ponds and could afford to build massive, fortress-like compounds. The many genealogies that traced the clans' ancestral roots to central China were but one indication of Cantonese people's lasting historical memories of their geographical and cultural origins. Therefore, I must add, it is not culturally erroneous to use the word "Chinese" in reference to America's Cantonese immigrants.

Waves of southbound overland migration also created some of the most important social discord in the delta society, including the animosity between the Hakka and Bendi groups. The word bendi (meaning "natives" in Chinese) refers to those who established their presence earlier than the Hakka (meaning "guest people") in the province. The latter spoke a different dialect and lived in the mountainous areas and, in many cases, worked as tenant peasants. Occupying an even lower social status were those known as dan, who lived by the water on their boats and made a living mostly by fishing. The fifty thousand dan households on rivers south of Canton were descendants of a non-han ethnic group named yue. The "natives" did not allow intermarriages with these people, indicating not only a significant social gap between them but also the prejudice of the former.

The presence of non-Asians had further complicated the social structure and consciousness of the region. As an eighteenth-century writer named Fan Duanang reported, for example, during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) many rich families in Canton bought black slaves to serve as house guards, a phenomenon that had started in the Tang Dynasty. Later on the black slaves in Macao who served and lived among Europeans maintained some contact with Chinese residents—there were laws regarding crimes committed by Chinese and blacks together. More important, they remained a prominent presence in Chinese minds, if the numerous writings about them are any indication. Chinese writers from the Tang years earlier had called such blacks guinu (meaning ghost slaves) and considered them scarcely human. Fan believed that "they came from mountains beyond the oceans and lived on raw food. After being captured, they were fed cooked food ... if they survive they can learn to understand but not speak the human language." It is interesting to note how Fan used the categories of raw and cooked food to differentiate between the blacks and their civilized masters.

As markers of the delta's transformative process, many inland waterways existed to link different counties, and offered access to the sea. Several counties were located right along the long, curved coastline that was inlaid with fine harbors. Thanks to such favorable natural conditions, the region was a busy place for domestic and international trade. The Qing government blessed the region in another way by designating Canton as China's sole port for international trade between 1757 and the end of the Opium War. Even for decades after other ports had opened as a result of the Opium War, it maintained its significance in international trade.

Therefore a dynamic economy emerged in the delta long before the mid-nineteenth century, an economy that was characterized by the production of agricultural and nonagricultural commodities for domestic and international markets. Such a market-oriented economy constituted the foundation of the region's prosperity, a fact that became common knowledge after the Ming Dynasty. In a valuable book about Guangdong written in the seventeenth century, Qu Dajun, a native of Nanhai (another delta county) and a perceptive writer, noted that many people there were engaged in commerce-related activities, and some became wealthy. It also made possible a population growth that exceeded that which a subsistence economy could have sustained.

By the eighteenth century the province no longer had an agricultural system that could produce enough food for its population. In fact, it had a long history of reliance on neighboring Guangxi Province for the supply of rice, the staple of local residents' diet. Guangdong's dependence on Guangxi for rice supplies remained so important in the 1830s that foreigners in China noticed it. In 1833 the Chinese Repository reported that "large quantities of rice" were imported from Guangxi.

The province was unable to be self-sufficient in grain production in part because many people were involved, one way or another, in the more profitable market economy. Even among those who continued to work in the fields, many chose to grow various cash crops such as oranges, sugar cane, and tobacco, instead of food crops to consume themselves. Commenting disapprovingly on the Cantonese people's lack of interest in traditional agriculture, the governor of Guangxi stated early in the eighteenth century that they failed to grow enough rice because they "are very greedy and are always going after profit." The governor's attitude and language reflected the dominant way of thinking among the Chinese elite that regarded agriculture as the essential and proper way to make a living. China's rulers in Beijing were also aware of and worried about Cantonese people's active participation in commodity production and exchange. As early as the eighteenth century the Emperor Yongzheng more than once exhorted his subjects in Guangdong not to abandon traditional agriculture in favor of profit.

Guangdong used the profit from trade to import food supplies from elsewhere to feed its growing population. The Nanhai Xianzhi reported that "Guangdong is limited in its territory and dense in population. Few are engaged in agriculture. Six to seven out of every ten people are engaged in commerce. Trade is the most profitable of all." The authors of the county gazetteer did not mean to suggest that a majority of the people were merchants per se. The words "commerce" and "trade" used here were loosely defined and referred to varied market-driven economic activities, including the production of different agricultural and nonagricultural commodities. And engagement in such activities did not prevent many people from participating in grain cultivation on a part-time basis.

Economic conditions in different regions of Guangdong varied significantly. The market-oriented economy was most advanced in the Pearl River Delta in the eastern part of the province, thanks mainly to its geographic advantages. As early as 1730 the Emperor Yongzheng noted: "East Guangdong is surrounded by the ocean on three sides, where merchants arrive from various provinces and foreign barbarians come with money to purchase goods. Trade is very heavy."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943by Yong Chen Copyright © 2000 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Stanford Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0804745501
• ISBN 13: 9780804745505
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 428
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile