this vio lence did not arise every day or affect every one, it was common
enough to loom large over every encounter across the color line. The traces of
this white- on- Chinese vio lence are at once ubiquitous and hidden in the
historical rec ord, overwhelming in their abundance and yet difficult to
see. Even when rec ords exist for a given incident, the par tic u lar nature of
the vio lence is often obscured. Then, as now, it was hard to distinguish be-
tween interpersonal vio lence, which had little to do with color or creed, and
po liti cal vio lence, which articulated vicious messages about race and nation.
Take, for example, the death of Hing Kee. On December 16, 1877, the
Chinese laborer was murdered in his bed in the com pany town of Port Mad-
ison, Washington Territory. It was not a clean death. He was found with
cuts to the fin gers (suggesting a strug gle), two cuts on the side of the head
(deep enough to penetrate the skull), and a slit throat (inflicted by an “ax or
cleaver”). The vio lence against Chinese workers in Port Madison did not end
with this grisly killing; it was quickly followed by expulsion and arson.
Within days, Hing Kee’s countrymen were driven out of town and the
housing they had once shared was burned to the ground. In flight, these two-
dozen Chinese workers left behind their homes and livelihoods. But they
carried with them, no doubt, the haunting image of Hing Kee’s body and
the terror that they would be next.2
17
18 RESTRICTION
From this incident of vio lence and so many others, the only surviving ac-
count is a few paragraphs in the pages of a local English- language news-
paper. But the Seattle Post- Intelligencer, even as it reported the crime, helped
erase it from our historical memory of racial vio lence. Despite the brutality
of the killing, the newspaper dismissed the crime as an act of larceny, em-
phasizing that the deceased was known to have been in possession of “a gold
watch and some money.” To local white journalists, this was just another
unfortunate act of personal vio lence in a society all too familiar with foul
play. A brief investigation turned up nothing, so local authorities, along with
the newspaper, declared the crime to have been committed by a “person or
persons unknown.” When the remaining Chinese were “ordered to leave”
Port Madison only days later, the newspaper did not report the expulsion as
an act of vio lence, or even as a crime. Instead, it was “a solution” to the
prob lem of Chinese labor, one tacitly endorsed by the editors.3
Curiously, on Christmas Day, the paper issued a correction and apology.
It had failed to note that the superintendent of the mill com pany had
ordered the Chinese to leave and the housing “pulled down, and the material
afterwards burned.” 4 Who this retraction was intended to appease is un-
clear. Perhaps the correction was meant to insist to readers, especially those
who read between the lines of print an untold tale of vio lence, that nothing
nefarious had happened. After all, it was a com pany town so the com pany
could do as it pleased. Or perhaps the paper simply wanted to give credit
where credit was due. Either way, the effect was the same: this moment of
racial vio lence was buried under layers of justification, obfuscation, and
euphemism.
And then there was the anti- Chinese vio lence that never made it to print:
vio lence that occurred behind closed doors, as mistresses beat on house boys
and johns assaulted prostitutes. There was vio lence that happened outside the
bounds of white society, in the backcountry of the lumbering industry, along
isolated railroad lines, or within the recesses of Indian reservations. But
there was also plenty of vio lence in plain sight of authorities and news-
papermen, who simply chose to turn away. To white observers, the value
of Chinese lives was so little, and the vio lence against them so abundant,
that most forms of harassment seemed unremarkable.
For the Chinese, these incidents were, of course, far from banal. No one
cared to rec ord the mi grants’ experiences at the time, but de cades later a team
THE CHINESE QUESTION
of academics visited el derly Chinese who remembered the U.S. West in the
1860s and 1870s. Read together, the old- timers’ testaments of fear and abuse
are relentlessly repetitive. “When I first came,” Andrew Kan remembered,
“Chinese treated worse than dog. Oh, it was terrible, terrible. At the time
all Chinese have queue and dress same as in China. The hoodlums, rough-
necks and young boys pull your queue, slap your face, [throw] all kind of
old vegetables and rotten eggs at you. All you could do was to run and get
out of the way.” “O, I awful scared. I think we gonna get killed,” Law Yow
recalled, “they stand on side throw rock, club, say God Damn Chinaman.”
The slurs that most stayed with Daisy Yow were those of the white school
children who called her “Chink,” “yellow face,” and “cheater.” As the white
Americans lobbed objects and insults, the Chinese feared worse was to come.
“Two or three times,” Andrew Kan testified, “I remember Chinese killed by
mob in San Francisco.” In his memoir, Huie Kin wrote, “We were simply
terrified; we kept indoors after dark for fear of being shot in the back.
Children spit upon us as we passed by and called us rats.” “This make me
very mad but what can I do[?]” Chin Chueng testified, “I can’t do anything.”
From the abuse and their own feelings of helpless anger, the Chinese learned
harsh lessons about a new country and their place within it. As Daisy Yow
put it, “I think they feel that we are a very inferior race of people.”5
The mid- nineteenth- century U.S. West saw the rise of anti- Chinese vio lence
and an anti- Chinese movement, but they were not one and the same. A wide
range of people, many of whom had personal rather than po liti cal aims, par-
ticipated in scattered incidents of harassment and assault. In attempting to
prohibit Chinese labor migration, a loosely or ga nized po liti cal movement
sometimes turned to vio lence but also relied on po liti cal lobbying, sandlot
demonstrations, journalistic exposés, congressional petitions, third- party
candidates, and union strikes. From the 1850s to the 1870s, anti- Chinese
vio lence and anti- Chinese politics overlapped, fed off each other, and must
have seemed indistinguishable to Chinese mi grants. But in retrospect it
is clear that racial vio lence, though ubiquitous, was not yet the mainstay of
the anti- Chinese movement.
It was in these first three de cades after their arrival that Chinese mi grants,
anti- Chinese advocates, and cosmopolitan elites established the terms of a
20 RESTRICTION
debate that would continue into the next century. Though the anti- Chinese
movement began almost as soon as the Chinese arrived, the campaign for
Chinese exclusion did not find immediate success because its radical aim to
halt Chinese migration had many detractors. While white Americans la-
mented the “Indian Prob lem” in the West and the �
��Negro Prob lem” in the
South, they continued to be at odds over the “Chinese Question. ” At the
time, Native American and African American inferiority was considered a
known prob lem in need of a solution, but Chinese migration represented
uncharted territory. What did the arrival of Chinese mi grants mean for
Amer ica? And what should the federal government do about it? The Chi-
nese Question proved difficult to answer, because it arose out of a funda-
mental conflict between distinct visions of Amer ica’s imperial future.6
In the nineteenth century, the United States expanded dramatically,
extending its territory across the continent and its commercial interests across
the Pacific. As Americans conquered and settled lands that would become
the western states of the Union, they relied on capital expansion and diplo-
matic coercion to gain nonreciprocal access to Chinese territory, ports, and
markets.7 While in many ways these were twin proj ects of American impe-
rialism, the fraught issue of Chinese migration revealed the under lying
tension between domestic and overseas expansion. Elite cosmopolitan ex-
pansionists saw Chinese mi grants as integral to American penetration of
Chinese markets, whereas working- class colonial settlers of the U.S. West
saw the Chinese as an existential threat to their imagined free white republic.
Thus, the Chinese Question was not simply a question about race. The
vast majority of Americans agreed that the Chinese were a distinct and
inferior race, although they continued to quibble over the details. More fun-
damentally, it was a question about the nature of the American empire.
Though they shared a similar belief in white supremacy, those who dreamed
of overseas expansion saw its fruition in opening China for exploitation, while
others invested in white settler colonialism saw its culmination in Chinese
exclusion. How white Americans viewed Chinese migration depended, in
part, on the scale they used to imagine their world. Comprehending these
divergent worldviews, then, requires us to shift between scales.
There were times that this growing conflict became violent, but more
often it remained in the realms of rhe toric and politics, as people on all sides
voiced divergent dreams for Amer i ca. The arrival of tens of thousands of
THE CHINESE QUESTION
21
Chinese mi grants at mid- century thrust this seemingly intractable debate
onto the national stage.
A Mi grant’s Journey from China to California
One of those mi grants was Huie Kin, the third of five children born in a
tiny, two- room farm house in a small village in the Taishan District of Guang-
dong (Canton) Province, China. His family had lived in the village for two
hundred years, and Kin might have lived and died there if not for rumors of
gold. In the 1860s a cousin returned from California, known locally as “Jin-
shan” or “Gold Mountain,” and recounted “strange tales of men becoming
tremendously rich overnight by finding gold in river beds.” News of a gold
strike at Sutter’s Mill in California quickly traveled to China in 1848. Within
a year, 325 Chinese joined the gold rush, followed by 450 in 1850, 2,176 in
1851, and, suddenly, 20,026 in 1852.8
The talk of gold held power. Even as a child, Kin wrote many years later,
he “knew what poverty meant. To toil and sweat year in and year out, as
our parents did, and get nowhere.” He dreamed of crossing the “ great sea to
that magic land where gold was to be had for free.” At age fourteen, he sum-
moned the courage to ask his father for permission to go, and for money to
cover the cost. To Kin’s surprise, his father readily borrowed the price of
the ticket, thirty U.S. dollars, from a wealthy neighbor, with his farm as
security. “Prob ably [my father] had also dreamed of going abroad,” Kin
hypothesized in his memoir, “but he was married and had a family on his
hands. His son was plucky to want to go, and he might be equally lucky as
the other cousins; then they would not have to toil and strug gle any more.”
If Kin struck it rich, the United States could mean salvation for the entire
family.
Kin followed the same path that thousands of Chinese mi grants took be-
fore and after him. In 1868, he traveled in a small boat or “junk” over the
waterways of the Pearl River Delta, first to Guangzhou (Canton) and then
to Hong Kong, carry ing with him only a roll of bedding and a bamboo
basket containing clothes and provisions. When he reached Hong Kong, he
found a bed in the home of a friend or relative. There he awaited the arrival
of an international steamship bound for Amer ica.9 When Kin left his vil-
lage, he was part of a wave of predominately young, male, lower- middle- class
22 RESTRICTION
mi grants venturing out of Guangdong Province in search of opportunity.
For generations, this same demographic group had left home to seek work
in neighboring towns, provinces, or nations. Now with the help of new trans-
portation lines, they crossed the Pacific. Except for a few merchants’ wives,
servant girls, and prostitutes, Chinese women did not follow. Most men
planned a temporary journey, to leave China only long enough to earn seed
money to support their family in the future. This “sojourner’s mentality”
arose from Chinese cultural traditions and religious beliefs that emphasized
filial duties, but was reinforced by the conditions they found in Amer ica.10
When the day for departure arrived, Kin boarded a large sailing ship,
powered by giant billowing white sails. He lined up on deck in front of the
white captain for inspection and descended to his quarters below. Foreign
vessels, mostly owned by American or British companies, first traveled north
along the Chinese coast through the Formosa Strait and then took the west-
erlies across the Pacific. Most emigrants could not afford the thirty- to fifty-
dollar one- way ticket to the United States, so they borrowed the money (as
Kin did) or used the credit- ticket system, signing contracts with Chinese
brokers promising to repay the price of their ticket through their future
earnings.11
Kin spent most of his journey on the lower deck, in the dark and crowded
space between the top deck and cargo hold. There, Kin and his countrymen
passed two months sleeping, gambling, smoking opium, and talking of the
land they had left behind. Disease killed several passengers, including Kin’s
eldest cousin who traveled with him. Their bodies were lowered overboard
into a “watery grave” far from the land of their ancestors.12
When Kin fi nally disembarked in San Francisco, California, in 1868, he
was tremendously relieved and excited. He remembered: “On a clear, crisp,
September morning . . . the mists lifted, and we sighted land for the first time
since we had left the shores of [Guangdong] over sixty days before. To be
actually at the ‘Golden Gate’ of the land of our dreams! The feeling that
welled up was indescribable. . . . We rolled up our bedding, packed our bas-
kets, straightened our clothes, and waited.”13 When Kin arrived in the por
t
of San Francisco, his appearance was as foreign as his language. He wore
his hair in a long, braided queue and dressed in a loose shirt, wide- legged
trousers, a broad- brimmed straw hat, and a pair of wooden shoes. As their
ship docked, Kin and the other Chinese mi grants entered a scene of loud
THE CHINESE QUESTION
23
confusion. Boatmen, merchants, draymen, customs officials, and spectators
crowded onto piers strewn with baskets, matting, hats, bamboo poles, and
other cargo. Kin remembered, “Out of the general babble someone called
out in our local dialect and like sheep recognizing the voice only, we blindly
followed and soon were piling into one of the waiting wagons.” Other
Chinese mi grants followed Chinese labor brokers on foot, walking single
file with bamboo poles slung across their shoulders, to the Chinese quarter
of the city. By the time Kin arrived in 1868, there were approximately 57,142
Chinese on the Pacific Coast.14
Kin remembered, “The wagon made its way heavi ly over the cobblestones,
turned some corners, ascended a steep climb, and stopped at a kind of club-
house, where we spent the night.” The Chinese Six Companies, a mutual
benefit organ ization established by community leaders in the United States,
had dormitories where they housed newly arrived mi grants until they found
labor contracts or a relative came to pay their bill. Despite being an ocean
away from home, the Chinese enclave had a familiar feel to the newcomers.
Kin recalled, “In the [eigh teen] sixties, San Francisco’s Chinatown was made
up of stores catering to the Chinese only. . . . Our people were all in their
native costume, with queues down their backs, and kept their stores just as
they would do in China, with the entire street front open and groceries and
vegetables overflowing on the sidewalks.”15 Kin had found a piece of home
in this distant and exciting new land.
Kin may have dreamed of gold when he left China, but the Gold Rush
was long over by the time he arrived in 1868, and he needed to find wage
labor. First he acquired a job as the domestic servant of a white American
family in Oakland, California. Even as a servant, Kin could make a wage
that was unimaginable in China. He earned about thirty dollars a month,