China’s Daughters:

China’s Daughters: Angel Island and the Pacific Migration

A Global Perspective • Lives of women in China, in migration, and in America • Connecting women’s experience on both sides of the Pacific reclaims the history of women • Using experience of Chinese women reveals how dynamics of race, class and gender shaped immigrant experience

19th Century Migration The millions of Chinese who migrated overseas were part of a greater international migration in which workers, capital and technology crossed borders.

Motives for migration • Poverty • Increased taxes • Loss of land • Competition from imported manufactured goods • Unemployment “When I was very young, my father was a wealthy farmer. A flood destroyed all his land and he lost all his money. It was then that our family changed…At the time, the Japanese were bombing my village. That was another reason why I fled my country…Here there was a future. In China we were just too poor and there was nothing we could do.” --Lee PueyYou

Opium Wars forced China to open doors to outside trade and political domination. Imperial summer palace destroyed by western troops. Scene depicting 2nd Opium War in the late 1850s, a conflict which resulted in the legalizing of opium trade in China. Opium dens become familiar sight in Chinese cities.

While some Chinese laborers were coerced into migration… 250,000 Chinese “coolie” laborers migrated to North America, South America, and Australia from1847 to 1874. Taking opium dulled the aches and pains from long hours of physical labor.

Many peasants in the Pearl River delta hit hard by imperialist infiltration… • Overpopulation • Repeated natural calamities • Devastation caused by Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) + Red Turban uprisings (1854-64) and interethnic feuds

…willingly answered the call of capitalism. • Drawn by news of gold • Recruited by labor contractors • Railroads, fisheries, vineyards, agriculture

But the predominantly male migration left Chinese women a minority within a minority. • 1850: 7 Chinese women vs. 4,018 men in San Francisco • 1855: Women less than 2% of Chinese population in US • 1900: ~ 4,500 women compared to ~ 90,000 Chinese men on the mainland

Financial considerations meant the women were left behind. • Most intended to strike it rich and come home • Did not bring wives (though more than half were married) • Cost of passage • Harsh living conditions in CA • Lack of job opportunities for women in US "America was believed to be the haven for Europe's oppressed; immigrants were expected to stay once they arrived. To leave again implied that the migrant came only for money; was too crass to appreciate America as a noble experiment in democracy…”

Chinese women contributed to the family economy, • Apart from the very wealthy, most women worked. • Hauling water, cutting and gatheringgrain, feeding the pigs and chickens, raising vegetables, cooking, and taking care of the feeding, clothing, and laundry for the family defined a woman’s everyday life in all peasant societies. • In South China many women worked in the fields planting and harvesting rice and sweet-potatoes. Yet others worked raising silkworms and spinning silk.

Though loneliness often marked the lives of those women left behind. O, just marry all the daughters to men from Gold Mountain: All those trunks from Gold Mountain – You can demand as many as you want! O, don’t ever marry your daughter to a man from Gold Mountain: Lonely and sad – A cooking pot is her only companion! If you have a daughter, don’t marry her to a Gold Mountain man. Out of ten years, he will not be in bed for one. The spider will spin webs on top of the bedposts, While dust fully covers one side of the bed. Cantonese folk rhymes tell of the conflicting emotions of being a gamsaanpo(wife of a Gold Mountain man) or, more appropriately, a sausaanggwai (grass widow).

Patriarchal cultural values bound the lives of many Chinese women. “The absence of talent in a woman is a virtue.” -- Chinese proverb “A woman’s duty is to care for the household, and she should have no desire to go abroad.” -- Confucian teaching “Three Obediences” (father, husband, eldest son) “Four Virtues” (propriety in behavior, speech, demeanor and household duties)

Anti-Chinese legislation prevented most women from coming.… The Page Act of 1875 was the first federal immigration law and prohibited the entry of immigrants considered "undesirable” in order to “end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women.” “The Chinese Question” by Thomas Nast: ‘Hands off Gentlemen, America means fair play for all men.’ – Columbia

As Chinese women became entangled in a legacy of exclusion and segregation… “The Chinese females who immigrate to this state are, almost without exception, of the vilest and most degraded class of abandoned women.” -- California Senate memorial, 1877 “America shall have a new birth of freedom.” -- Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (1863) … arising from the “watershed” of Civil War and Reconstruction.

While nativist sentiment was nothing new… "'Every Dog' (No distinction of Color) 'Has His Day'." -- Thomas Nast (February 8, 1879) “This class of the people, according to the castes into which Chinese society is divided, are virtually pariahs, the dregs of the population.” -- Memorial of the California Senate, 1877 … the Reconstruction debates over citizenship gave nativists a new weapon for isolating and excluding specific groups.

In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act That hereafter no State court or court of the United States shall admit Chinese to citizenship; and all laws in conflict with this act are hereby repealed For the first time, Federal law proscribed entry of an ethnic working group on the premise that it endangered the good order of certain localities.

The presence of women was feared to stabilize Chinese workforce, but women of exempt classes could gain admission. …a Chinese merchant who is entitled to come into and dwell in the United States is thereby entitled to bring with him, and have with him, his wife and children. The company of the one, and the care and custody of the other, are his by natural right…” -- Judge Matthew Deady of Circuit Court for the District of Oregon in case of merchant wife Chung Toy Ho

Immigration officials, aware of these efforts on the part of the Chinese to circumvent the Exclusion Act, set up an elaborate process by which to keep the Chinese out. “People said that coming to America was like going to heaven, but it was so difficult. You had to memorize all the coaching information – background on your grandparents, your home and neighbors, the distance between places, you know, how many ancestral halls, temples, everything…When I said I wasn’t sure or I didn’t know, they would tell me to say yes or no. They just treated us like criminals.” -- Lee Puey You

Unlike the welcome symbol of Ellis Island on the east coast, “All day long I faced the walls and did nothing except eat and sleep like a caged animal. Others – Europeans, Japanese, Koreans – were allowed to disembark almost immediately. Even blacks were greeted by relatives and allowed to go ashore. Only we Chinese were not allowed to see or talk to our loved ones and were escorted by armed guards to the wooden house.” -- Mai Zhouyi “When the doctor came, I had to take off all my clothes. It was so embarrassing and shameful. I didn’t really want to let him examine me, but I had no choice. Back in China, I never had to take off everything, but it was different here in America.” -- Lee PueyYou passing immigration inspection at Angel Island proved to be a harrowing experience.

Poems engraved in walls tell the woes of those imprisoned on Angel Island “Not only do I sob silently, but my throat tastes bitter.”

Limited opportunities awaited Chinese women once they started their new lives in America. • Unable to travel • Denied or exploited in factory work • Denied access to labor unions

But nearly all Chinese immigrant women worked in the United States. • Fisher women • Miners and railroad workers • Fields of California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii.

The vast majority of Chinese women immigrants in the nineteenth century were sex-workers, In 1860, 85-97% of the Chinese female population in San Francisco was working as prostitutes. In 1870, the figure was 71‐72% and in 1880, 21‐50%. Miners paid an ounce of gold just “to gaze on the countenance of the charming Madame Ah Toy,” but most Chinese prostitutes lived in horrific “cribs,” suffering from disease and destitution.

Further illustrating the complex experience of migration for Chinese women, a story that literature can help exemplify.

Intentions “In 1924 just a few days after our village celebrated seventeen hurry-up weddings-to make sure that every young man who went 'out on the road' would responsibly come home-your father and his brothers and your grandfather and his brothers and your aunt's new husband sailed for America, the Gold Mountain. It was your grandfather's last trip. Those lucky enough to get contracts waved goodbye from the decks. They fed and guarded the stowaways and helped them off in Cuba, New York, Bali, Hawaii. 'We'll meet in California next year,' they said. All of them sent money home.”

Grass Widows • When the family found a young man in the next village to be her husband, she had stood tractably beside the best rooster, his proxy, and promised before they met that she would be his forever. She was lucky that he was her age and she would be the first wife, an advantage secure now. The night she first saw him, he had sex with her. Then he left for America. She had almost forgotten what he looked like. When she tried to envision him, she only saw the black and white face in the group photograph the men had had taken before leaving. • She could not have been pregnant, you see, because her husband had been gone for years. No one said anything. We did not discuss it. In early summer she was ready to have the child, long after the time when it could have been possible. • The village had also been counting.

Disobedient Women “They ripped up her clothes and shoes and broke her combs, grinding them underfoot. They tore her work from the loom. They scattered the cooking fire and rolled the new weaving in it. We could hear them in the kitchen breaking our bowls and banging the pots. They overturned the great waist-high earthenware jugs; duck eggs, pickled fruits, vegetables burst out and mixed in acrid torrents. The old woman from the next field swept a broom through the air and loosed the spirits-of-the broom over our heads. ‘Pig.’ ‘Ghost.’ ‘Pig,’ they sobbed and scolded while they ruined our house.”

Poverty • Adultery is extravagance. • To be a woman, to have a daughter in starvation time was a waste enough. • If my aunt had betrayed the family at a time of large grain yields and peace, when many boys were born, and wings were being built on many houses, perhaps she might have escaped such severe punishment. But the men-hungry, greedy, tired of planting in dry soil-had been forced to leave the village in order to send food-money home. There were ghost plagues, bandit plagues, wars with the Japanese, floods. My Chinese brother and sister had died of an unknown sickness. Adultery, perhaps only a mistake during good times, became a crime when the village needed food.

The Immigration Experience “The emigrants confused the gods by diverting their curses, misleading them with crooked streets and false names. They must try to confuse their offspring as well, who, I suppose, threaten them in similar ways-always trying to get things straight, always trying to name the unspeakable. The Chinese I know hide their names; sojourners take new names when their lives change and guard their real names with silence.”

Forgetting… “In the twenty years since I heard this story I have not asked for details nor said my aunt’s name; I do not know it. People who can comfort the dead can also chase after them to hurt them further – a reverse ancestor worship. The real punishment was not the raid swiftly inflicted by the villagers, but the family’s deliberately forgetting her. Her betrayal so maddened them, they saw to it that she would suffer forever, even after death. Always hungry, always needing, she would have to beg food from other ghosts, snatch and steal it from those whose living descendants give them gifts…My aunt remains forever hungry…”

Remembering

China’s Daughters: