through the countryside, their pro gress drew onlookers and hushed conver-
sations. This was also to be expected. Even from a distance, their wide-
brimmed straw hats, braided queues, and poles slung across their shoulders
set them apart from the familiar sight of white workers. To be Chinese in
Amer ica was to be con spic u ous. But they arrived at the Wold Brothers hop
farm without incident and pitched sixteen small tents. It was Saturday,
September 5, 1885.
Was Gong aware that three days earlier twenty- eight Chinese miners had
been massacred in Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory? There is no way to
know. The story was on the front page of every American newspaper, but
few Chinese workers could read the headlines. Perhaps rumors of faraway
vio lence gave him some inkling of what was to come, or perhaps he was taken
by surprise when twenty- five men descended on his camp that after noon,
brandishing weapons and lobbing insults. Gong did not have to understand
En glish well to comprehend the mob’s meaning. This was a warning.
On Sunday all was quiet. Then Monday work began. Since it was har-
vest time, the hop fields were thick with vines that towered above him and
made it impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. Though Gong feared
trou ble, he witnessed none. The vigilantes, it turned out, were busy elsewhere;
as Gong labored in the fields, the mob intercepted a second group of Chinese
91
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Puyallup Valley (1889). Chinese and white workers harvesting hops near the site of the
1885 Squak Valley murder and expulsion. University of Washington Libraries, Special
Collections, Boyd and Brass, photographer, UW38226.
workers bound for the Wold Brothers farm. What exactly happened be-
tween the vigilantes and the newcomers is unknown, but the outcome
speaks for itself. The Chinese turned and fled.
Monday night, Gong was asleep in his tent when the vigilantes returned
without warning in the darkness. “So many shot fired it sounded all same
[as] China New Year,” he told a coroner’s jury a few days later. As bullets
blew holes through the workers’ tents, all was chaos. Gong ran for the forest,
hunkered down at a safe distance, and watched as the tents burned. He re-
turned to the camp to find the bodies of men he had labored beside only
hours before. There was thirty- five- year- old Fung Wai, shot in the chest,
and thirty- two- year- old Mong Goat, shot in the belly. Beside the bodies
was a gravely wounded man, Yung Son. “Yung Son was shot through left
arm, through both thighs and through ankle,” testified Gong. After Yung
passed the next morning, the Chinese packed up their remaining posses-
sions and took the road out of Squak Valley.1
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93
Gong stayed behind, minding the bodies of the three who died, bringing
shell casings to the local sheriff as evidence, and serving as a witness in the
coroner’s inquest and criminal trial. He had been defenseless against the mob,
but now he could fight for retribution. In emotional testimony, Gong tried
to convey the anguish of Yung’s death. He told the jury that “[Yung] was
sorry to die. Got a son [at] home, too young, no one to send him money.
[Yung] did not talk much, but hollered through the night.” Even in the
courtroom, Gong proved powerless. He knew the men who had died, but
nothing of the shooters. All he could say was, “Monday night white men
come to kill Chinamen.” Who were these “white men”? Why did they kill
the “Chinamen”? Gong did not know.2
For the Chinese, this is how the vio lence began, with shock, fear, and lin-
gering questions. Histories of vio lence, however, rarely start this way. It is
difficult to begin the history of anti- Chinese vio lence with its victims because
the story of racial vio lence is, inevitably, a narrative of action and reaction,
perpetrator and prey. Searching for cause and effect, history favors stories of
people who instigate events over those who suffer the aftermath. The Chi-
nese make unnatural protagonists because they did not set these violent epi-
sodes in motion, nor did they hold the power to stop them. They also make
problematic narrators because, like Gong, they often could not name their
attackers or pinpoint their motivations.
Racial vio lence against the Chinese relied on the power of surprise. The
Chinese did not know when threats would turn to vio lence, what form the
vio lence would take, or when it would end. While vigilantes sometimes de-
pended on bullets to rid their community of Chinese, they often expelled
them through threats alone. To fully understand the potency of this psy-
chological vio lence, we must start our exploration of racial vio lence with the
Chinese, adopt their vulnerable state of ignorance, and attempt to under-
stand what it means to live in terror.
Foregrounding the Chinese perspective also guards against their voices
being drowned out by others.3 The inequalities of the past have produced
disconcerting gaps in our present- day archives. Thousands were expelled
from towns and cities in the U.S. West in 1885 and 1886, but only a handful
of firsthand Chinese accounts still exist. Telling the story of the expelled
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entails searching for these uncommon rec ords but also requires reading si-
lences left behind by those who had no voice. To this end, Part II focuses on
the expulsions in Washington Territory. A combination of dramatic events
and happenstance created the best- preserved Chinese rec ords there. Many
of these accounts come in the form of legal testimony collected by county
courts and federal investigators. This testimony, primarily provided by Chi-
nese merchants or labor contractors, hardly offers a full picture, and is often
translated and incomplete. These contemporaneous accounts can be supple-
mented by oral histories conducted by sociologists in the 1920s. Even these
remembrances, which include working- class narrators, are often guarded and
invariably marked by the passage of time. Imperfect as these sources are, they
offer rare a glimpse of how Chinese mi grants in the U.S. West gave meaning
to the vio lence and navigated its effects. Though the vigilantes were fond of
describing the Chinese as an undifferentiated mass, the diversity of Chinese
responses reveal they were anything but. Even within the severe constraints
of their position in society, Chinese mi grants maintained some power to in-
terpret the vio lence and make individual choices in response.
At times, these responses took the form of outright re sis tance.4 Indeed,
Chinese labor contractors and merchants, who had significant financial rea-
sons to stay put, often attempted to challenge the vigilantes’ authority both
in real time and after the fact. They did so in part by drawing on multiple
relationships with local white leaders. Given that charges of “inassimilability”
and clannishness formed the core of the vigilantes’ expulsion campaign, it
is ironic that the Chinese response reveals the extent of Chinese integration
into the white community. The Chinese businessmen of the Pacific North-
west were strikingly bilingual and bicultural and, at times of crisis, used all
the social capital they could muster to prevent expulsion. But their local
power usually proved inadequate to shield them from vio lence.5
Chinese businessmen were more successful at containing vio lence when
they operated on an international scale. On the streets of Seattle, for ex-
ample, the Chinese appeared defenseless against an armed mob, but their
pleading tele grams to the Chinese consulate helped summon U.S. troops to
their aid. While their status as “aliens ineligible to citizenship” was usually
to their disadvantage, in this circumstance it was a potential source of power.
As Chinese nationals entitled to treaty rights of a “most favored nation,” the
Chinese held status claimed by no other racial minority in the United States.
THE BANISHED
95
By drawing on their transnational connections, Chinese merchant- contractors
thrust the issue of local anti- Chinese vio lence onto the international stage.
In so doing, they reinforced their status as aliens in the United States and
changed the course of Sino- American relations. Geographers have described
similar strategies as “scale jumping.” 6 The Chinese jumped scales when they
harnessed resources available on the international level to overcome the con-
straints encountered on the local level. The Chinese may have been meta-
phor ically and literally outgunned in their own backyard, but they found
power on an international stage.
That said, it is impor tant not to assume that direct re sis tance was the only
form of Chinese agency.7 While some Chinese elites fought to stay, many
Chinese workers chose to leave. Like their more privileged countrymen,
members of the lower classes maintained the ability to make individual
choices, albeit within tight par ameters. Facing a cascading series of events
beyond their control, many Chinese workers deci ded that retreating and re-
grouping elsewhere offered the best hope of finding peace, work, and a
prosperous future. After all, they were mi grant laborers accustomed to sea-
sonal work, and they lacked financial stakes in the local community. Having
crossed the Pacific and traveled inland, they were practiced at using mobility
as a strategy for survival.
This chapter recovers stories of Chinese re sis tance and flight in the face
of white vio lence, but this is not its sole intent. A long and troubling tradi-
tion exists that renders the history of Chinese in Amer i ca as primarily a
history of white oppression.8 There are dangers to selectively shining the
spotlight on moments when Chinese mi grants were objects of white preju-
dice. Doing so reinforces the biases of the past and threatens to deprive
the Chinese of their full humanity. While we consider the Chinese reaction
to racial vio lence, we must also attend to what these spectacular events
reveal about their everyday lives. Moments of crisis and the unique sources
they produce can expose aspects of the Chinese American experience that
usually remain hidden, in this case, critical divisions between workers
and merchant- contractors. Con temporary observers and historians have de-
scribed a community tightly bound by vertically or ga nized businesses and
village kinship networks. The pressure of white vio lence, however, revealed
and accentuated divergent class interests within a seemingly unified Chinese
community.9
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“Like So Many Hogs”
In Squak Valley, the Chinese were banished on arrival. But as vio lence spread
in the fall of 1885, it took hold in communities where Chinese were far from
newcomers. Chinese laborers had worked in the nearby Coal Creek mines
for several years when, days after the Squak Valley murders, fifteen masked
white men armed with pistols came to their camp at midnight. A Chinese
worker, Ching Poy Hing, later reported the shocking scene when men sud-
denly “kicked the door of the house[,] forced an entrance and took hold of
him and other Chinese and forced them out of the building.”10 One man
escaped, running from the house with his clothes in his hands. But others
were not so lucky, suffering beatings before they fled. In an eerie reprise of
Squak Valley, once the Chinese stumbled into the dark woods, they looked
back, seeing all of their possessions go up in flames. If Chinese and white
miners had built any familiarity over three years of daily labor side by side,
the darkness, masks, and vio lence suddenly washed it away.
In nearby Tacoma, the Chinese dated their presence back more than a
de cade, which was a long time in a port town dominated by recent arrivals.
Even before the town got its name in the early 1870s, the Chinese had ar-
rived as railroad and lumber workers. By 1885, when the Chinese made up
only 2.6 percent of the nonindigenous population in Washington Territory,
the Chinese represented 9 percent of the population in Tacoma and sur-
rounding Pierce County (and 12.5 percent of the male population). Though
some of the Chinese workers lived together in wooden shacks along the bay,
Chinese businessmen began to buy plots in the center of town. An early
chronicler of Tacoma bemoaned that “having a Chinese for a neighbor” was
one of the perils of living in town. Indeed, the Chinese elite in Tacoma were
In retrospect, it is tempting to see the anti- Chinese vio lence that rocked
Tacoma as evidence of a wide racial gulf in the community. But Chinese
testimony, gathered by Territorial Governor Watson Squire after the fact,
reveals a more complicated story. In the pro cess of detailing the expulsion,
Tacoma’s Chinese merchant- contractors described their strong ties across the
color line and attempts to use these connections as a means of contestation.
Warnings of vio lence to come made retreat and re sis tance pos si ble in
Tacoma. Kwok Sue, a Chinese merchant- contractor, testified that twenty
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97
white men gathered in front of his store in October 1885. The vigilantes de-
clared that “the Knights of Labor and all the people wanted the Chinamen
to go,” giving them until November 1 to vacate town. Sue estimated that
this deadline alone drove out more than two hundred Chinese workers. “The
reason they were frightened,” explained Sue, “was because the parties who
notified us to go said if the Chinese did not leave they were going to cut
their throats, kill them and destroy their property.”12 Hundreds more packed
up and left town after white employers began to bow to public pressure and
fire Chinese workers indiscriminately. Stil , threats alone did not clear Tacoma
of Chinese. The wealthiest Chinese merchants, who had large financial stakes
in the territory, and the poorest Chinese laborers, who could not easily travel,
deci ded to stay.
Sue, like many merchants, did not immediately take flight. When the
notice to leave arrived, he had lived in the United States for twenty years,
resided in Tacoma for twelve, and worked as a merchant and labor con-
tractor for six. He had painstakingly constructed a life and livelihood in his
adopted country and hesitated to abandon all that he had built. Instead,
Sue drew on his many connections to the elite white establishment of Tacoma.
Seeking advice and protection, he visited a banker, a merchant, and the land
agent of the Northern Pacific Railway. They all told him, he recounted, that
“this business is nothing but talk. The government will take care of you. Go
and behave yourselves, attend to your business and every thing will be allright
[ sic].” Sue believed them.13
Another Chinese merchant- contractor in Tacoma, N. W. Gow, sought
advice more widely. In November 1885, Gow had only been in the city for a
year, but in that short time, using his excellent En glish and his status as a
successful businessman, he had already embedded himself in the local com-
munity. In addition to making business contacts, Gow joined the First Bap-
tist Church, became a regular attendant at Sunday school, and earned the
re spect of the local pastor. When he received the notice to vacate, Gow vis-
ited a local judge to ask if the vigilantes had any legal standing. He was as-
sured that there was no American law that could compel the Chinese to leave.
Even so, Gow reached beyond the local community to contact regional
and international powerbrokers. He first sought help from the Chinese gov-
ernment, notifying the consulate in San Francisco of growing anti- Chinese
agitation in Tacoma. He was not the only Chinese merchant to jump scales,
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calling on faraway diplomats to solve local prob lems. Frederick A. Bee, an
American lawyer hired to represent the consulate, received multiple reports
that “evil- disposed” people had threatened vio lence and that “in fact, the
Chinese are to be expelled from [Washington] Territory.” After relaying the
news to China, Bee wrote to Governor Squire demanding that local gov-
ernment stop the mayhem. When Squire pledged that every effort was being
taken to prevent vio lence, Bee telegraphed Gow to stand his ground.14
A tele gram alone could not calm Gow’s fears. He traveled to the territo-
ry’s capital, Olympia, to meet the governor. There, Squire advised Gow and