ASAM paper

chapter two

Immigration and Livelihood, 1840s to 1930s

A sian immigrants came to the United States primarily to earn a living. Work was available because the entrepreneurs who operated within America's capitalist economy wanted the cheapest labor they could find,

so that they could maximize their profits. However, Euro-American workers who felt threatened by the Asian competition and nativists from all classes who felt hostile toward them for racist reasons agitated to stop their coming. With the exception of Koreans, members of each immigrant group managed to enter without restriction for only two or three decades before they were excluded.

Though there were many similarities in the occupational history of the five major Asian immigrant groups, differences also existed. Hawaii and California were frontiers in the early 1850s, when the Chinese came; they were undergo- ing rapid economic transformation in the 1880s, when the Japanese entered; and were becoming mature capitalist economies by the early twentieth century, when Asian Indians, Koreans, and Filipinos arrived. Given the shortage of Euro-American workers in California during the 1850s and 1860s, the Chinese there found work in a wide range of occupations. But as more and more Euro- Americans settled along the Pacific Coast after the first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, they wanted the better jobs for themselves. Through a variety of means-including discriminatory legislation and taxes, boycotts, and barring nonwhites from unions and consequently unionized jobs-they in- creasingly confined the Chinese and the other Asians who came after them to low-status menial work.

The first Asians to set foot in the New World came with the Manila galleon trade. Filipino and Chinese sailors and stewards were employed in the specially constructed ships that carried cargoes of Chinese luxury goods between Manila and Acapulco from 15 6 5 to 1815. A number of Filipinos apparently had settled in Acapulco by the late sixteenth century, while some Chinese merchants had set up shop in Mexico City by the seventeenth. Marina E. Espina and Fred Cordova have surmised that the Filipinos known as Manilamen found in the marshlands of Louisiana's Barataria Bay (about thirty miles south of New Orleans) in the 1760s were descendants of sailors who had worked on the Manila galleons. 1

The historical record is dearer with regard to the earliest Chinese arrival in Hawaii. Several Chinese artisans being taken by a British sea captain to build ships in Nootka Sound in British Columbia touched shore at the mid-Pacific

25

26 Immigration and Livelihood, 1840s to 19 30s

islands in l 789-only 11 years after Captain James Cook first landed there and named them the Sandwich Islands. Ships engaged in the China trade soon began calling at Hawaiian ports and took sandalwood, which grew abundantly in the islands, to sell in China. For that reason, Chinese have called the Hawai- ian islands Tanxiangshan (Tanheungsan, "the Sandalwood Mountains") from the time they learned of their existence.

The first Chinese to reside in Hawaii for any length of time were men skilled at sugar making. According to Tin- Yuke Char, long before the first sugar planta- tion was established in 1835, a Chinese "sugar master" had reportedly reached Hawaii by 1802 on a ship engaged in the sandalwood trade, bringing with him boiling pans and other paraphernalia for sugar making. 2 That he should have done so is not surprising, as Guangdong province is one of China's major sugar-producing areas. By the 1830s several Chinese sugar companies were in operation on the islands of Maui and Hawaii. At least half a dozen Chinese sugar masters and their mills were at work in the 1840s. The first sizable batch of Chinese-195 contract laborers recruited from the city of Amoy in Fujian province-arrived in 1852, imported into Hawaii in response to fundamental changes occurring in the kingdom.

When plantations were first organized, their managers relied on Hawaiian labor, but since many of the local people still had subsistence plots to depend on for smvival, they did not take readily to the harsh work regime that sugarcane cultivation required. More important, the indigenous population was declining rapidly: its size in 1860 was at most a fifth of what it had been in 1778 when Captain Cook appeared. This sharp decline had multiple causes. Many Hawaiians with no immunity to the diseases brought by Americans and Europeans died from them, while others succumbed to cold and exposure as they went up the mountains to cut sandalwood. The commercialization of the islands' economy-in particular, a new system of land tenure urged upon the king by his American advisers-also deprived an increasing number of com- moners of their traditional means of livelihood.

The alienation of land occurred very rapidly, as Edward D. Beechert has documented.

3 In the 1840s the king first made informal grants to Westerners,

then signed formal leases with them, and finally allowed them to buy land outright. The changes culminated in the Great Mahele or land redistribution of 1848. Land that hitherto had been communally held could thenceforth be sold. This enabled more and more missionary-entrepreneurs to acquire large tracts for sugar plantations.

Because sugarcane cultivation is so labor-intensive, however, before planta- tions could materialize a sufficient and dependable labor supply had to be secured. Several pieces of legislation were passed in 1850 toward this end. In that year, because Hawaiians, like other people from around the world, were joining the California gold rush, a law was enacted to forbid them to leave the islands without permission. Another law made it illegal for them to sign on as sailors on outbound ships. Finally, "An Act for the Governance of Masters and Servants" specified how apprentices and contract laborers were to be treated, while a judicial and administrative apparatus with penal sanctions was set up to implement it. In 1850 also, the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society came into being for the purpose of obtaining labor needed for land development. It was succeeded by the Planters' Society and a Bureau of Immigration in 1864.

Immigration and Livelihood, 1840s to 1930s 2 7

As cane acreage expanded-albeit slowly at first-and as the Hawaiian population dwindled, an attempt was made to import Chinese laborers. The group that came in 1852 had five-year contracts. Each man received free passage and three dollars a month, including food and lodging. No more Chi- nese were brought in under contract again until 1865, but a handful of free immigrants entered every year in the interim. The renewed attempt to import contract laborers was a reflection of the fact that sugar production had in- creased greatly during the American Civil War, when sharply rising prices boosted Hawaii's output from under 600 to almost 9,000 tons. The 1865 arriv- als were paid eight dollars a month; each man was supplied with two suits of clothing, a warm jacket. a pair of shoes. a bamboo hat, a mat, a pillow, and a blanket. A greater leap in numbers occurred after 1876, following the signing of the Reciprocity Treaty, which allowed Hawaiian-grown sugar to enter the United States duty-free. According to figures compiled by Ronald Takaki, sugar tonnage rose to 32,000 in 1880, 130,000 in 1890, 300,000 in 1900, and more than 500,000 in 1910. 4 Whereas only 151 Chinese had entered in 1875, 1.283 did so in 1876. Arrivals averaged more than 2,000 a year for the next decade. A very large percentage came in under contract, but there were also some who paid their own way. Altogether, around 50,000 Chinese set foot on Hawaiian soil between 1852 and the end of the nineteenth century.

As the number of Chinese increased, different groups of people began to find fault with them. Though the plantation owners considered the Chinese satisfactory workers, the fact that most of them declined to sign on for a second term after their contracts expired posed a problem. The Chinese left the sugar plantations as soon as they could because the luna (overseers) were abusive and the working conditions extremely unpleasant. Some became peddlers and merchants in towns such as Honolulu and Hilo, while others went into indepen- dent rice farming (some as owner-operators, others as tenants) and truck gar- dening. For several decades, rice was the second most important source of income in the Hawaiian economy, and Chinese were its main cultivators. 5 Rice acreage rose from about 1,000 acres in 1875 to almost 7,500 in 1890 to over 9,000 by 1900. A good portion of the crop grown in Hawaii was shipped to California to help feed the Chinese there.

Meanwhile, as Edward C. Lydon has recounted, the native Hawaiians, as well as missionaries and politicians who claimed to champion their welfare, thought that the increasing Chinese presence endangered the survival of the Hawaiian population. The Chinese were accused of introducing dreaded dis- eases, such as leprosy and smaJlpox, and immoral habits, such as opium smok- ing and gambling. Though some Chinese men had married or cohabited with Hawaiian women, their critics did not consider them a desirable vehicle for replenishing the islands' declining population. When Walter Murray Gibson, a Mormon missionary-turned-politician and an opponent of Chinese immigra- tion, became simultaneously minister of foreign affairs and premier under King Kalakaua in 1882, he issued one regulation after another to restrict the Chinese influx, which finally ended in 1886. The planters did not protest because before stopping the flow of Chinese, Gibson had made sure a supply of Japanese would be forthcoming. 6 The Hawaiians also welcomed the change, as they considered the Japanese a more compatible "cognate" race for the purpose of repopulating the kingdom.

28 Immigration and Livelihood, 1840s to 1930s

Far more Chinese landed in California than did in Hawaii because of the gold rush. In 1852-the same year that the first 200 or so Chinese contract laborers set foot in Hawaii-more than 20,000 Chinese passed through the San Francisco Customs House enroute to the gold fields in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Fewer than 5,000 stepped ashore in 1853, partly because California had imposed a Foreign Miners' Tax, which greatly reduced the income of non-American pros- pectors, but also because news of the gold discovery in Australia had by then reached Guangdong province, causing thousands to rush southward instead of eastward. However, more than 16,000 came in 1854. For the next decade, arrivals in California fluctuated between 2,000 and 9,000 a year. Then between 1867 and 1870, partly in response to recruitment efforts by the Central Pacific Railroad Company, which was building the western section of the first transconti- nental railroad, some 40,000 Chinese poured into the country.

The singular importance of gold to the early immigrants in California is reflected in the folk memory of many Chinese around the world to this day: until quite recently, they called San Francisco Jiujinshan (Gaogamsan, "the Old Gold Mountain"), while Australia is known as Xinjinshan (Sungamsan, "the New Gold Mountain"). A few statistics will also illustrate the significance of gold in Chinese American history. The 1860 census takers found that virtually 100 percent of the Chinese in the continental United States were still living in California. The state continued to hold a majority of the nation's Chinese population until the tum of the century: 78, 71, 67, and 51 percent of them lived in California in 1870, 1880, 1890, and 1900, respectively. Within the state itself, 84, 45, 32, 13, and 12 percent of them were found in the mining counties in 1860, 1870, 1880, 1890, and 1900, respectively. 7 Unlike the independent white prospectors, most of whom had left the mining regions by the late 1850s, sizable numbers of Chinese remained there until the 1880s.

In terms of occupational distribution, in 1860, when surface deposits had already been depleted, fully 85 percent of the Chinese in the mining counties were still panning or digging for gold. A decade later, 65 percent of them were doing so, while in 1880, 59 percent persisted in prospecting. Since the manu- script schedules of the 1890 census were lost in a fire, no computation can be made with regard to how many Chinese miners were still at work that year, but census takers counted over 2,000 Chinese miners in California in 1900-a year when the overall Chinese population was 45,753 in the state and 89,863 in the nation.

Three principal methods were used for obtaining the precious metal: placer, hydraulic, and deep-shaft or quartz mining. The vast majority of the Chinese worked only placer claims. In the early years, when surface deposits were abundant, many miners, including Chinese, used nothing more complicated than a pan, into which they placed a small amount of gold-bearing dirt, swirl- ing it to wash the lighter earth off the rim while letting the gold settle at the bottom. A more efficient contraption was the rocker or cradle-a wooden box with cleats (called riffles) nailed across the bottom and mounted on rockers. "Pay dirt" was placed with water into the box, which was then rocked back and forth. Such motion separated the heavier gold dust and nuggets from the rest of the dirt; as water flowed over the mixture, the gold was caught by the cleats at the bottom, while the nonauriferous dirt flowed out the open end. Another device, the long-tom, was a longer rocker that remained stationary.

Immigration and Livelihood, 1840s to 1930s 29

Mounted at an angle with a continuous stream of water flowing through it, it could handle a large volume of dirt with a minimal amount of human labor. Sluices-a series of open troughs with cleats-evolved from long-toms, requir- ing large volumes of water for their proper functioning.

Chinese miners used all of the above devices and also introduced some implements of their own. The most notable was the waterwheel, similar to those used by farmers in China. Mounted with buckets to scoop water from a stream or river, the wheel, as it turned slowly, emptied the buckets of water into a trough that carried the water to where it was needed. Chinese were also skilled at building wing darns that diverted water either from a small tributary or one section of a river, in order to expose the riverbed for mining. Perhaps they resorted to such ingenious contrivances because, as J. D. Borthwick ob- served in the early 1850s, they did not seem to like standing in water for long periods. Borthwick thought that the way Chinese mined resembled "scratch- ing": instead of pushing their shovels forcefully into the ground as Euro- Arnerican miners did, they scraped its surface to loosen the gravel. 8

Only a small number of Chinese attempted hydraulic mining. The most likely reason is that this method, which shot powerful jets of water against ore- bearing hillsides to wash down the dirt, required considerable capital. Since Chinese miners were periodically subjected to violence, investing a lot of money in heavy equipment was simply too risky. Those who did engage in hydraulic mining did so in rather remote areas, largely in the Siskiyou and Trinity mountains of northwestern California.

Documentation regarding Chinese participation in quartz mining-digging tunnels into the mountains that contained veins of ore-is conflicting. Some accounts suggest that no Chinese could be hired by the mining companies extracting gold this way because unionized Euro-Arnerican miners- particularly imported ones from Cornwall, who were the world's most skillful deep-shaft operators-stopped any attempts by the companies to employ Chi- nese. Other sources claim that a large number of Chinese miners worked for companies from the late 1860s on, and although their authors do not indicate the mining methods these companies used, they could not have been exploit- ing placer claims, which had been completely depleted by then.

The presence of so many miners among the Chinese influenced what other Chinese did for a living. Wherever groups of miners congregated, merchants opened stores to provision them and to serve their social and recreational needs. 9 Merchants imported a variety of ingredients needed for Chinese cook- ing. Invoices of Chinese import-export firms found at San Francisco's Custom House in the early 1850s list rice, noodles, beans, yams, sugar, tea, vinegar, peanut oil, dried vegetables, bamboo shoots, dried mushrooms, ginger, cured eggs, sweetmeats, sausages, salted fish, dried shrimp and oysters, dried bean curd, and dried as well as fresh fruits. The immigrants' diet was supplemented with vegetables grown by local Chinese truck gardeners, with meat from pigs, ducks, and chickens raised by Chinese farmers, and with fish caught by Chi- nese fishermen. Once in a while, they also ate American canned sardines and ham, as well as fresh beef purchased from Euro-American butchers.

In addition, merchants brought in Chinese textiles and clothing, although the Chinese miners early learned to wear American leather boots. In time, some workers grew to favor durable blue jeans over baggy Chinese cotton

30 Immigration and Livelihood, 1840s to 1930s

pants. As shown in many photographs taken of them, another item of Ameri- can apparel they seemed to fancy was felt hats, although men working in the countryside continued to depend on imported conical bamboo hats.

Merchants made it possible for Chinese immigrants to be surrounded by all the essential and familiar items of their material culture. Even rice paper and Chinese ink and brushes found their way across the Pacific, as did matches, firecrackers, joss sticks (made from Hawaiian sandalwood), washbasins, pots and pans, Chinese-style weights and measures, and a large array of herbs. Opium entered without restriction during the early years, but it was not the only recreational drug the Chinese used: most Chinese stores, even those in remote mountain areas, also stocked American cigarettes and whiskey.

Merchants played such a critical role that they became the wealthiest mem- bers and most important leaders of the community, even though in the rural areas and small towns they usually comprised only about 3 percent of the population. The larger the urban center. however. the more numerous they were. In San Francisco, not counting the gamblers, brothel owners, and other underworld entrepreneurs, merchants hovered around lO percem of the gain- fully employed.

One development that affected both Chinese miners and merchants was the building of the western half of the first transcontinental railroad-a project that employed more than 10,000 Chinese workers at its peak, many of whom were former miners.

10 In fact the railroad company's effort to recruit Chinese labor-

ers provided the impetus that finally took large numbers of Chinese away from the mines. Meanwhile, Chinese merchants profited from the construction proj- ect, since they served as labor contractors who gathered the men into gangs, charged each one a commission for finding him work, and provisioned the whole lot.

Proposals for a transcontinental railroad had been made since the 1840s, but it took the Civil War to spur Congress finally to pass a bill that made the construction possible. To enable private entrepreneurs to finance such a mo- mentous undertaking, the federal government issued bonds on behalf of and granted public land to the railroad companies-land they were supposed to sell to raise the capital needed. The amount of land granted depended on the miles of tracks laid and on the difficulty of the terrain traversed. The Union Pacific Railroad Company got the contract to build westward from the Missouri River, while the Central Pacific Railroad Company, formed by four Sacramento mer- chants, was to build eastward from that city. Unlike the Union Pacific, which could lay one mile of track a day across open plains using cheap Irish immi- grant labor, the Central Pacific had to traverse several ranges of high mountains and had, moreover, to deal with the fact that California had the nation's high- est wages.

First hired as an experiment to do grading in 1865, Chinese workers num- bered 3,000 by the end of the year. Despite the skepticism that was expressed about their physical strength, Chinese soon became the backbone of the com- pany's construction crews, providing the bulk of the labor not only for un- skilled tasks but for highly demanding and dangerous ones as well. Regardless of the nature of the work they did, however, all Chinese were paid the same wage, which was considerably lower than what Euro-American skilled work- ers received.

Immigration and Livelihood, 1 840s to 19 30s 31

The first true test the Chinese faced was a huge rock outcrop called Cape Hom, around which no detour was possible. To carve a ledge on the rim of this granite bulk, Chinese were lowered by rope in wicker baskets from the top of cliffs. While thus dangled, they chiseled holes in the granite into which they stuffed black powder. Fellow workers pulled them up as the powder exploded. Those who did not make it up in time died in the explosions.

As the road ascended into the high Sierras, it often took 300 men a month to clear and grub a bare three miles. Grading the way thus cleared took even more effort. As the crew neared the crest of the mountain range, they began the almost impossible task of drilling a tunnel through solid granite. Before they got very far, winter came and snow fell. Nevertheless, the company decided to press on, conscious that its rival was racing across the plains and getting the larger share of the land grants. Thousands of Chinese worked underground in snow tunnels around the clock through the winter of 1866. It took all summer and fall to grade the route thus created, but before tracks could be laid, winter descended again with even heavier snowfalls. As one of the Central Pacific's engineers admitted years later, "a good many men" (i.e., Chinese) were lost during the terrible winter of 186 7. II The bodies of thos~ buried by avalanches could not even be dug out until the following spring. Once the tracks de- scended the eastern slopes of the Sierras. the Chinese crews sped across the hot, dry plateaus of Nevada and Utah until the two ends of the railroad joined at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869. Despite their heroic feat, the Chinese were not invited to the jubilant ceremonies that marked the completion of America's first transcontinental railroad, hailed as one of the most remarkable engineer- ing feats of its time.

But the railroad was more than a technological wonder: it transformed the American West, especially California. Before its completion, California was geographically isolated from the rest of the country. Immigrants had to come by wagon train, while manufactured goods from the eastern United States arrived by ship around the tip of South America. The state's exports-primarily wheat from the 1860s through the I880s-traveled by the same long route to Atlantic seaboard and British pons. The railroad's full effect was not felt for more than a decade after its completion because high passenger and freight rates limited its usage. In the mid-1880s, after a second transcontinental railroad was built, the two engaged in a cutthroat rate war. The fares they charged became so cheap that hordes of people rode the trains to California-if not to settle, then at least to sightsee.

The manner in which railroad construction was financed also affected Cali- fornia's development. The railroad company was supposed to have sold most of the land the federal government granted it-some 9 to ll million acres, depending on how one counts-but it never did so, keeping the land, instead, for speculation. Because prices were so high, few settlers in California could afford to buy land. They blamed the railroad, on the one hand, and the Chi- nese, on the other, for their plight. As Varden Fuller has argued, in their eyes, were it not for the availability of Chinese "cheap labor," owners of large tracts would have been forced to subdivide and sell the plots at affordable prices. 11

But there was little that angry citizens could do to break the railroad company's power: with its enormous economic assets, it controlled state politics for decades.

32 Immigration and Livelihood, 1840s to 1930s

Ironically for the Chinese, the completion of the railroad affected them negatively. The company retained several hundred of them for maintenance work, but discharged the rest, thereby instantaneously rendering almost 10,000 Chinese jobless. These former employees were not even allowed to ride the trains free of charge back to California. Instead, they straggled on foot westward in small groups, finding work wherever they could, mostly as com- mon laborers and migrant fannworkers. But as more and more Euro- Americans appeared in California, they began to compete with the Chinese for jobs. Their resentment helped to fan the flames of the anti-Chinese movement.

Discharged Chinese railroad workers could find work in agriculture because California in the 1870s was one of the world's leading producers of wheat, a large percentage of which was shipped to LiverpooL headquarters of the world wheat market. The long and rainless California summers proved to be a real advantage: because the wheat could be thoroughly dried before being loaded in the holds of ships, it did not mold during the long voyage down the South American coast, around Cape Horn through the Straits of Magellan, and across the South and North Atlantic Ocean to LiverpooL where it brought premium prices due to its superior quality. Chinese helped to harvest the wheat but also found employment cultivating, harvesting, and packing a wide variety of other crops.

Farm owners welcomed Chinese workers when they discovered that em- ploying them was convenient: instead of having to deal with individual sea- sonal laborers, they could simply arrange with a Chinese crew leader or labor contractor to have so many men at a given place on a given date, paying the contractor a lump sum for a specified job. Moreover, the Chinese boarded themselves and even provided their own tents or slept under the stars. Each group of men either chose one of their own to do the cooking or jointly paid the wages of a cook. Some of the contractors were local merchants, who charged each man a small commission for finding him a job and earned sizable profits by selling the crews their provisions.

But harvest labor was not the only kind of agricultural work the Chinese performed. In California's great Central Valley as well as smaller coastal valleys and plains, in Washington's Yakima Valley, Oregon's Hood River Valley, and in arable areas in other states west of the Rocky Mountains, Chinese leased land to become tenant farmers. For the most part, they specialized in labor-intensive vegetables, strawberries and other small fruits, deciduous tree fruits, and nuts. In the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a reclaimed marshland that is one of the most fertile agricultural areas of California, Chinese tenant farmers grew pota- toes, onions, and asparagus-leasing large plots, many of which they had earlier helped to drain, dike, and put under the plow. Other Chinese became commission merchants, selling the crops that their fellow countrymen as well as Euro-American farmers produced. Yet others worked as farm cooks, feeding the farm owners' families as well as the workers the latter employed.

Life was quite different for the Chinese in San Francisco, the metropolis of the Pacific Coast, where thousands of Chinese artisans and factory workers lived. Manufacturing occupied some two-fifths of the gainfully employed Chi- nese in the city in the 1870s and early 1880s. In crowded, poorly lit and ventilated sweatshops and factories, they made shoes, boots, slippers, overalls, shirts, underwear, woolen blankets, cigars, gunny sacks, brooms, and many

Immigration and Livelihood, 1840s to 1930s 33

other items. In orher towns along the Pacific Coast, Chinese also worked in a few nascent manufacturing industries, but they did so only in very small num- bers: before such places as Sacramento, Stockton, Marysville, Portland, or Seattle could develop into industrial centers, Chinese had already been driven out of light manufacturing as a result of anti-Chinese sentiment and activities. Boycotts against Chinese-made goods in the second half of the 1880s effec- tively eliminated them from the market.

One occupation that acquired a special significance in Chinese American history is laundering. 13 Large numbers of Chinese eventually became laundry- men, not because washing clothes was a traditional male occupation in China, but because there were very few women-and consequently virtually no washerwomen of any ethnic origin-in gold-rush California. The shortage was so acute that shirts were sent all the way from San Francisco to Honolulu to be washed and ironed at exorbitant prices in the early 1850s.

According to one anecdotal account related by Paul C. P. Siu, the first Chinese laundryman to appear in San Francisco was Wah Lee, who hung a sign, "Wash'ng and Iron'ng," over his premises at the corner of Dupont Street (now Grant Avenue) and Washington Street in 185 l.t 4 By 1860 there were 890 Chinese laundrymen in California, comprising 2.6 percent of the total em- ployed Chinese in the state. By 1870 almost 3,000 Chinese in California (6 percent of the gainfully employed) were washing and ironing clothes for a living. A decade later, the number had increased to more than 5,000, represent- ing 7. 3 percent of the working Chinese in the state. There were still almost 4,800 laundrymen ( 11 percent of the gainfully employed Chinese) in Califor- nia at the turn of the century, even though the overall Chinese population had declined drastically from the peak it had reached in the early 1880s.

Important as they were in California, laundries were even more significant in other parts of the United States, for laundering was one of four "pioneer" occupations that enabled Chinese to move eastward across the continent. Just as mining drew Chinese to the Pacific Northwest and the northern tier of the states in the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, and railroad construction introduced Chinese first to Nevada and Utah and then to Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, so operating laundries and restaurants allowed them to find an economic niche for themselves in towns and cities of the Midwest and along the Atlantic seaboard. By rendering a much needed service, Chinese laundry- men found a way to survive wherever they settled.

Siu's detailed study of laundries in Chicago gives an idea of how they grew. The first Chinese laundry in the city opened in 1872. Eight years later, there were 6 7; in 188 3, 199; and ten years later, 313. The peak was reached in 1918 with 523; after that, the numbers declined. More interesting than the numeri- cal increase was the spatial spread and the kind of people who made use of Chinese laundries. At first, the laundries were confined to the periphery of the central business district, but they soon became established in more outlying residential neighborhoods. Young married couples with both spouses em- ployed in white-collar salaried jobs and single men and women living in room- ing houses were the laundries' two main groups of customers. Relatively few laundries existed in neighborhoods with single-family dwellings; an even smaller number was found in industrial areas occupied by recent European immigrants.

34 Immigration and Livelihood, 1840s to 19 30s

Laundries both sustained and entrapped those who relied on them for survival. On the one hand, washing and ironing clothes was one of the few occupations the host society allowed the Chinese to follow after the 1880s. On the other hand, as one person interviewed by Siu observed: "white customers were prepared to patronize him as a laundryman because as such his status was low and constituted no competitive threat. If you stop to think about it, there's a very real difference between the person who washes your soiled clothing and the one who fills your prescription. As a laundryman he occupied a status which was in accordance with the social definition of the place in the economic hierarchy suitable for a member of an 'inferior race.' " 15

Precisely because laundering was deemed an "inferior" occupation, those who relied on it for a living were isolated from and subservient to the larger community. Though Chinese laundries were located primarily in white neigh- borhoods, their occupants lived in a self-contained world. A great deal of both their business and social needs were met by people who came to their doors. Agents of laundry supply companies visited them regularly to take and deliver their orders; drivers of ''food wagons" brought them cooked food. fresh pro- duce, and staples; tailors came to take their measurements for custom-tailored suits that they could pay for by installment; jewelers tried to sell them gold watches and diamond rings (two of the conspicuous-consumption items that Chinese laundrymen seemed to fancy); and. on occasion, prostitutes dropped by to see if they felt in need of sex. Most laundrymen left their stores only on Sunday afternoons to eat. gamble, or visit friends in Chinatown.

Restaurants likewise enabled Chinese to settle and survive in communities with few of their fellow countrymen, for their business did not depend solely on a Chinese clientele. In gold-rush California, which was filled with men but had few women, men of any nationality willing to cook and feed others found it relatively easy to earn a living. A few observant Chinese quickly realized that cooking could provide a more steady income than many other occupations. In time, thousands of Chinese worked as cooks-in private homes, on farms, in hotels and restaurants-all over the American West. In the late nineteenth century, Chinese started moving to other parts of the country to open restaur- ants. Establishments in the larger towns and cities generally served only Chi- nese food and used only fellow Chinese as waiters and busboys, but those in the smaller communities dished up large plates of American-style beef stew, pork chops, or fried chicken as well as Chinese spare ribs, sweet and sour pork, fried rice, or chow mein, and relied on Euro-American waitresses for help.

One feature common to Chinese enterprises-be they mining claims, grocer- ies, laundries, or restaurants-was that a large number of the people who worked in them owned shares in the business, and were thus partners, albeit often unequal ones. This practice, together with the fact that the men were often bound by kinship ties and lived in the same premises. modulated what- ever conflicts might have arisen between the "bosses" and the "workers." The ability to get along with each other in close quarters was crucial: given the inhospitability of the larger society in which they found themselves, "ethnic confinement" was an important survival mechanism.

Chinese-and the other Asian immigrant groups who came after them- could find economic niches that sheltered them because of the nature of Ameri- can capitalism. In the late nineteenth century, as firms became bigger and more

Immigration and Livelihood, 1840s to 1930s 35

oligopolistic through mergers and the growth of new industrial sectors, inde- pendent artisans found it more and more difficult to survive. This development was by no means universal, however: there has always been considerable room in the less-developed parts of the economy for small businesses to oper- ate. Chinese laundries persisted until the 1950s and restaurants to this day because they fill needs unmet by the corporate stmcture.

At the tum of the century, the emerging capitalist structure affected not only industries but also agriculture. In the development of the large-scale cultivation and marketing of specialty crops for the export market, Hawaii and California led the nation. By the 1880s neither region was a frontier any longer, and immigration into each was dictated in large part by the needs of the agribusi- ness that became the very foundation of both their economies. But Hawaii and California did differ in one important way: Hawaii's economy has been based on one crop, sugar, and has been dominated by five big companies, while that in California has been more diverse. in terms of what crops are grown as well as the pattern of landownership and the marketing of crops. The capital to develop both places. however, came initially from the eastern United States and, to a smaller extent, from Great Britain.

Sugar production increased rapidly in Hawaii between 1876, when the Reciprocity Treaty was signed, and 1891, when the McKinley tariff eliminated the duty-free status of Hawaiian sugar and restored protection to American producers on the mainland. Important as the Reciprocity Treaty was, the Ha- waiian sugar boom could not have occurred without the importation of a new group of Asian laborers, the Japanese. 16 The newcomers soon outnumbered Hawaiians and Chinese, up to that time the mainstays of the plantation labor force. Although Hawaiians and part- Hawaiians still comprised a majority of the workers, their numbers were declining. Chinese, meanwhile, were coming both from China and the Pacific Coast, but these arrivals were barely sufficient to replace the Chinese leaving the plantations after their contracts expired. Thus, new labor supplies had to be found if the Hawaiian sugar industry was to take advantage of the preferential treatment conferred by the Reciprocity Treaty.

By the time Japanese started coming, commercial sugar production was concentrated in what historians of Hawaii have called "industrial plantations"-a more efficient, large-scale system that enabled the yield per acre to increase from just under 6,500 pounds in 1895 to almost 8, 700 pounds in 1900. The importation of Japanese laborers for these plantations was much more organized than it had been for the Chinese. Under the Irwin Convention, before each Japanese worker left home, he or she signed a contract that speci- fied which plantation he or she would be assigned to. With the exception of the first two shipments, all the emigrants sailed to Hawaii on Japanese ships. Family groupings were kept intact, and more often than not, people from the same villages ended up in the same plantations.

After Irwin stopped supervising labor emigration, private companies took over. They operated under close government supervision between 1894 and 1908. Their representatives negotiated with plantation owners for the number of workers the latter desired, the terms of the contracts, as well as the amount ($30 in the 1890s) the companies would receive for each worker brought to the islands. After the 1900 Organic Law made Hawaii a formal U.S. territory, the

36 Immigration and Livelihood, 1840s to 1930s

entry of contract laborers became illegal. Thereafter, arriving passengers had to prove they were free immigrants, each with a minimum of $50 in his or her pocket.

Furthermore, Japanese ships no longer monopolized the Yokohama- Honolulu traffic. Japan's fleet was tied up during the Sino-Japanese War ( 1894-95), which gave American lines such as the Pacific Mail Steamship Company (the major carrier of Chinese passengers to the United States) and the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company a chance to enter the Japanese steerage-passenger business. From the late 1890s on, American vessels domi- nated the Japanese passenger traffic to both Hawaii and the mainland. The emigration companies' agents, along with representatives of the Planters' Labor and Supply Company (which became the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association in 1895) and officials of the Bureau of Immigration (and after 1900, federal immigration officers), met each incoming shipload. Inspectors, doctors, and interpreters all participated in the landing process. Before the workers could be distributed to the plantations, each of them had to register with the Japanese consulate in Honolulu. Japanese destined for plantations in Oahu were trans- ported there without further ado, while those intended for the other islands had to reboard inter-island steamers for the final leg of their journey.

Living conditions on the plantations were primitive. On most plantations, workers of various national origins were segregated in different camps. Single men slept in bunkhouses on wooden shelves several feet above the ground, while families were assigned cottages where these were available. On planta- tions without such separate dwellings, families were crammed into rooms created in bunkhouses with partitions that went up only to the rafters, thus offering no auditory privacy. Sometimes women with crying babies were told to leave the bunkhouse; they had to spend the night in the cane fields so others could sleep. Campsites in general, and the water supply in particular, were frequently unsanitary. Neither cookipg nor recreational facilities were available in the early years. These were built only after laborers repeatedly engaged in work stoppages and strikes to demand improved working conditions, and after rising desertion rates alarmed the planters.

Plantation work was both regimented and unpleasant. A 5 A.M. whistle roused the camps each morning. After a quick breakfast, laborers divided into gangs, each led by a luna, and set off for the fields at 5:30. These luna super· vised each step in the production process, frequently on horseback. Some wert. infamous for their cruelty: they not only verbally abused the laborers but on occasion hit and kicked them to maintain discipline and to keep up the pace of production. They did not allow the workers to talk in the fields or even to stand up to stretch while hoeing weeds.

During different stages of the cane's growth cycle, workers performed differ- ent tasks in the fields and mills: plowing and cultivating the fields in prepara- tion for planting; planting, watering, and otherwise caring for the growing cane; hoeing the earth between the rows of cane to get rid of weeds; digging ditches for irrigation and maintaining them; stripping dead leaves from the stalks before the 12-foot-tall cane was cut and harvested; loading the stalks onto cans or trams running on movable single-gauge tracks; transporting the loads to the mills and unload~ng them; placing the cane into crushers to extract the juice; boiling the liquid to make molasses; and desiccating the thick syrup

Immigration and Livelihood, 1840s to 1930s 37

into coarse brown sugar. The final process of turning the moist, brown lumps into dry, white granules was usually carried out somewhere else, often in refineries on the mainland. Because cane leaves have tiny, sharp bristles, the field workers wore several layers of clothing to protect their hands and bodies, despite the humid heat under which they labored. The dust during harvesting was also awful, clogging nostrils and windpipes. Given such harsh working conditions, it is little wonder, then, that plantation laborers were not eager to renew their contracts or to stay on the plantations if they had saved up suffi- cient funds to leave.

When the 1900 Organic Law made all contracts null and void in Hawaii, labor recruiters from the mainland, working in conjunction with Japanese boardinghouse owners in both the pons of departure and arrival, descended on Hawaii to lure Japanese workers away with the prospect of higher wages. Railroad companies, lumber mills, and farmers in the Pacific Northwest and in California all desired Japanese labor. (The recruiters did not try to entice Chi- nese because Chinese exclusion, as chapter 3 recounts, had been in effect in the United States since 1882.) Between the beginning of 1902 and the end of 1906, almost 34,000 Japanese left the islands for Pacific Coast ports. To plug this leakage, plantation owners successfully urged the territorial government to pass a law in 1905 requiring each recruiter to pay a $500 license. Two years later, President Theodore Roosevelt signed an executive order to prohibit Japa- nese holding passports for Hawaii, Mexico, or Canada from remigrating to the continental United States. As a result, the Japanese exodus to the continental United States soon became a mere trickle. By the 191 Os a vast majority of the Japanese departing from Hawaii was headed for Japan, and not the mainland United States.

The lives of Korean and Filipino plantation workers were no different from those of Japanese. By the late 1920s Filipinos had become the largest ethnic group in the plantation labor force, working in plantations whose average size had grown steadily from an average of slightly over 400 acres in 1880 to almost 2,500 acres in 1900 to over 5,300 acres by 1930. Along with the size increase came improvements in housing, recreational facilities, and sanitation conditions. Plantation owners and managers had learned by then that they could better control and keep workers by small acts of kindness than by harsh treatment.

Japanese, Korean, Asian Indian, and Filipino immigrants along the Pacific Coast likewise performed farm work, but because Hawaiian plantations and mainland agribusiness are organized differently, the lives of Asian farm workers in the islands and on the mainland were dissimilar in one fundamental way: plantation workers remained in one place, while mainland farm workers moved with the crops. Given the great variety of crops grown along the Pacific Coast, something is being harvested virtually every month of the year, but each harvest lasts only two to six weeks. Once it is over, the farm workers must move on, a migrant labor force constantly in search of work. Nevertheless, despite the fact that a migratory existence was, in many ways, even harsher than plantation life, the mainland offered a better chance for climbing up the so-called agricultural ladder, whereby laborers save up enough money to lease land as tenant farmers and eventually to buy land as farm owner-operators. The Japanese, in particular, had a penchant to use this channel of advancement. 17

38 Immigration and Livelihood, 1840s to 19 30s

The fact that Japanese immigrants were able to benefit from the rapid growth in the production of specialty crops in the western United States is reflected in immigration statistics. Before 1908 only 55,000 Japanese had come to the mainland, compared to the more than l 50,000 landing in Hawaii. But between 1908 and 1924 more than 120,000 arrived at Pacific Coast ports, in contrast to the 48,000 entering the islands. Japanese first entered the California migrant farm labor force in 1888, when several dozen students hatvested crops during their summer vacation in the Vaca Valley of Solano County, located to the northeast of San Francisco. Two years later, several hundred Japanese appeared as grape pickers in the Fresno area of the San Joaquin Valley. From this modest beginning, Japanese farm workers eventually found their way to all the other major agricultural regions up and down the Pacific Coast and into the Southwest and the intermountain states. During the first years of the twenti- eth century, fully two-thirds of the Japanese in California (about 16,000 indi- viduals) earned a living as farm laborers. 18 That number remained stable for the next decade as a result of a change in the pattern of immigration: although the Gentlemen's Agreement cut off any further influx of male laborers, immigrants found a loophole by sending for brides and younger relatives known as yobiyose (those "called" abroad by kinsmen), who worked for their husbands or elder relatives after arrival.

By saving their wages and by pooling resources. many immigrants scraped together the funds needed to lease small plots usually to grow strawberries, medium-size tracts to plant tomatoes, celery, onions. and a wide variety of other vegetables and fruits, or even rather large acreages to cultivate row and field crops. By 1913, when California passed its first alien land law, more than 6.000 Japanese had become tenant farmers. This number increased to 8,000 four years later. The growth of Japanese tenant farming was likewise highly visible in Oregon and Washington and to a lesser degree in the other western states. In Utah and Colorado many Japanese produced and harvested beets on contract. Those farmers who purchased land in California tended to specialize in grapes-a fact that caused them considerable financial hardship when Prohi- bition went into effect in 1919.

The agricultural productivity of Japanese immigrants in the western United States reached its zenith in 1917, when the United States finally entered World War L greatly increasing the country's need for food while simultaneously removing male citizens from their farms for military setvice. In that year Japa- nese in California produced almost 90 percent of the state's output of celery, asparagus. onions, tomatoes, berries, and cantaloupes; more than 70 percent of the floricultural products; SO percent of the seeds; 45 percent of the sugar beets; 40 percent of the leafy vegetables; and 35 percent of the grapes. 19

The achievements of Korean and Asian Indian tenant fanners were less spectacular simply because there were far fewer of them. 20 Unlike Japanese farmers, who were found virtually everywhere. Korean tenant farmers worked largely in the San Joaquin Valley around the towns of Reedley and Dinuba, where they specialized in deciduous fruit; in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. where they grew row crops; and in the upper Sacramento Valley, where they cultivated rice. A handful of Koreans also grew sugar beets on contract in Colorado and Utah. Small numbers of Asian Indian tenant farmers were found in scattered locations. but the bulk of them congregated in the Imperial and

Immigration and Livelihood, 1840s to 19 30s 3 9

Coachella valleys in southern California, where they raised cotton, canta- loupes, and winter lettuce, after irrigation works made the desertlike land there arable.

Filipinos became the largest group of Asian farm laborers along the Pacific Coast in the 1920s, but they never managed to climb the agricultural ladder for reasons related to the timing of their arrival. 21 First, various anti-alien land laws had been passed by the time they came in large numbers. Whereas the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Asian Indians-either by virtue of having American-born children in whom alien parents could vest title to whatever land they owned, or by relying on relationships they had formed earlier with landowners who continued to lease to them-found ways to continue farming, the newly arrived Filipinos could use no such loopholes. Second, farm prices were falling drastically in the early 1920s, following the prosperity agriculture had enjoyed during World War I. So, even if there had been no legal obstacles, Filipinos would have found it difficult to become tenant farmers or indepen- dent owner-operators in those years. Finally, by the time Filipinos came, the defenders of Euro-American supremacy had had more than half a century to refine and perfect mechanisms for keeping nonwhites in their place. In short, by the 1920s economic niches such as those the Chinese and Japanese had catved out for themselves were much harder to find.

Two other outdoor occupations that had sustained tens of thousands of Chinese-gold mining and railroad construction-provided a living to only a few of the later-arriving Asian immigrant groups. again because the latter entered an economy that was considerably more mature than the one that had greeted the Chinese. By the late 1880s and early 1890s, when Japanese started coming, the gold rush in California, the Pacific Northwest, and the Dakotas was over. However, several thousand Japanese and dozens of Koreans did work as wage laborers in mining companies. 22 As for the railroads, their trunk lines had been completed. Workers were now needed not so much for laying track as for maintaining what had been built. Accordingly, more than 12,000 Japanese and smaller numbers of Koreans and Asian Indians labored as section hands. 23

Unlike mining, fishing is an extractive industry whose resource is less easily depleted. Following the footsteps of the Chinese, who had been among the pioneer fishermen of the Pacific Coast--catching not only fish but also shrimp and abalone, which they dried and exported to China-many Japanese oper- ated their own small fleets all the way from Baja California in the south to Alaska in the north. Meanwhile, thousands of Japanese and Filipinos (along- side some Chinese) worked in the salmon canneries of Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska every summer. 24

In towns and cities, similarities and differences also existed in the occupa- tional history of the various Asian immigrant groups. Large numbers of Japa- nese entered the labor market as domestic setvants, just as the Chinese had done. In fact, Japanese first competed successfully against the Chinese by ac- cepting lower wages. There were three kinds of Japanese domestics. "School boys"-young men from poor families who worked as live-in setvants while attending school part-time-usually received free room and board plus a token weekly or monthly salary. Day workers cleaned houses, washed windows. prepared meals, washed and ironed clothes, or tended yards and gardens for a daily wage, while living in Japanese-operated boardinghouses. The third kind

40 Immigration and Livelihood, 1840s to 1930s

Asian Indian workers in a lumber camp, Canada, ca. 1903. Courtesy Public Archives Canada

of domestic workers found long-term employment in restaurants and Japanese-owned companies, performing whatever tasks their employers de- sired. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the U.S. Immigra- tion Commission estimated that 12,000 to 15,000 Japanese in the western United States earned a living in domestic service. 25

Filipino boys and men were also readily hired as household servants, as janitors in office buildings and other institutional facilities, as bellhops and doormen in hotels, and as waiters and cooks in restaurants and other eating facilities. Few Koreans or Asian Indians, however, relied on domestic service for their livelihood, for reasons that have not yet been studied.

Unlike the Chinese who actively pursued manufacturing for a quarter cen- tury in San Francisco, only a few Japanese immigrants and an even smaller handful of Koreans, Asian Indians, or Filipinos did so. In 1886 Euro-Americans launched a boycott of merchandise made by Chinese, which drove the latter out of producing merchandise for the wider market. Thereafter, Asian entrepre- neurs were confined to manufacturing ethnic foodstuffs. Chinese and Japanese made soy sauce and tofu (soybean cake) and germinated bean sprouts; Japa- nese made miso (bean paste for seasoning broth and other dishes) and kamaboko (fish cake); and Koreans made kimchi (hot pickled vegetables).

Like the Chinese, many Japanese became merchants, importing cooking

Immigration and Livelihood, 1840s to 1930s 41

ingredients for fellow immigrants, and curios and art goods such as lac- querware, china, parasols, fans, scrolls, tea, and silk goods for Euro-American customers. One special group of Japanese merchants were silk importers in New York, who worked hard over several decades to capture a share of the silk trade between Japan and the United States. According to Scott Miyakawa, the pioneers in this venture landed in New York in 1876, only four years after a Japanese consulate had been established in that city. At that time, all silk from Japan that entered the United States came via Europe, Japanese silk export being entirely in the hands of Western merchants. When the Japanese mer- chants showed samples of the silk threads spun in Japan that they had brought with them to some of New York's largest silk importers, they were told that their threads were neither strong enough nor uniform enough in size for the fast machinery then in use in America. Only after years of effort, as well as a vast improvement in the quality of their merchandise, did these Japanese silk merchants succeed in setting up direct shipments of silk from Japan to the United States. In time, silk became the most valuable item in the trade between the two countries. 26

Very few Koreans and almost no Asian Indians or Filipinos became mer- chants in t)le United States for a variety of reasons. Though the earliest Koreans to enter the continental United States were ginseng (a medicinal root) mer- chants, few persons with a business background came during the brief period of Korean mass emigration to Hawaii. Then after Japan declared Korea its protectorate in 1 90 5, and especially after it colonized the country in l 91 0, Japanese officials prohibited Koreans from engaging in the import-export trade. Moreover, given the small size of the immigrant community, there was no ready-made ethnic market to speak of. Koreans in Hawaii who went into business kept boardinghouses and bathhouses or ran used furniture and cloth- ing stores.

No study has yet been done to discover why Asian Indian immigrants did not become merchants. One likely reason is that most of them werejats, mem- bers of a farming caste. The Indian caste system prescribed what occupations various groups could follow, so people rarely took up work that was not traditional among their ancestors. Even though Sikhs, as members of a separate religion, did not subscribe to Hindu beliefs and were theoretically outside of the caste system, they nevertheless adhered to certain broad cultural norms, which, though based on the tenets of Hinduism, affected Hindus and non-Hindus alike.

In the case of Filipinos, history provides an answer to why so few of them entered business in the United States. Since Spanish colonial days, retail trade in the Philippines had been in the hands of immigrant Chinese merchants, so relatively few of the indigenous people acquired experience in trade. Those who did so tended to be Filipinas, and not Filipinos. In the United States, Filipinos ran only very small operations: cigar stalls, candy stands, and barber- shops. In Hawaii, they were barbers, tailors, grocers, and importers of Philip- pine consumer goods.

Quite apart from the cultural baggage that various groups of immigrants brought with them, and the different timing of their entry, differences in the regional economies of the United States have also affected the manner in which

42 Immigration and Livelihood, 1840s to 1930s

each has been incorporated into American society. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while millions of European immigrants found jobs in the growing metallurgicaL chemicaL and electrical industries of eastern and midwestern cities, hundreds of thousands of incoming Asians worked in the fields. orchards, households. laundries. and restaurants of the American West. Each new group of European immigrant industrial workers initially expe- rienced economic exploitation. but in time. most of them managed to secure a measure of protection through unionization. In contrast wage earners in agri- culture and in the service sector. regardless of their ethnic origins, have been extremely difficult to organize, as their work is seasonaL migratory, or part- time. To this day, farm and service workers. the vast majority of whom are either nonwhite or female. remain trapped in nonunionized. dead-end jobs. Ironically, as will be seen in chapter 5, even when Asian immigrant workers did try to organize. their petitions for affiliation with national unions were rejected.

Economic factors alone. however, do not account fully for the obstacles the early Asian immigrants encountered. Social. political. and legal barriers, which became increasingly clearly defined vis-a-vis Asians as the nineteenth century progressed. have also played a significant role in delimiting the world in which they lived. That is why, although Chinese initially found work in many sectors of the economy and over a wide geographic area, they eventually had to retreat to urban enclaves. Most members of the later-arriving groups likewise found themselves relegated to the lowest echelons of the labor market. Briefly put, racial discrimination is what separates the historical experience of Asian immi- grants from that of Europeans, on the one hand. and makes it resemble that of enslaved Africans and dispossessed Native Americans and Mexican Americans. on the other hand.