Chinese Railroad Laborers and Their Transnational Funeral Debate on Chinese Laborer’s Deaths Lisa See’s great-great-grandfather Fong (邝) Dun Shung was an herb doctor serving a crew of Chinese laborers building the Central Pacific section of the Transcontinental Railroad (the Railroad hereafter) during 1864-1869. Fong did not work on the tracks. His responsibility was to attend to the sick, serve them herb tea he brewed, and talk to the gang boss when a sick man needed to rest. In winter, Fong prepared herb soup to help the laborers get rid of “chills, fever, phlegm, coughs, and nausea.” In summer, he had medicine “to cool a man’s body when he suffered headstroke, or to soothe insect bites or sunburn.” “All year round, he had poultices for cuts, scrapes, abrasions, sprains, or broken bones.” Dr. Fong was only helpless when explosives torn his fellow Chinese apart during the construction. Building railroad was a dangerous job and cost many Chinese lives. Fong dutifully saw to their burial after the accident, making a mark, “noting the site so that eventually the bones would be unearthed, cleaned, and sent back to China for proper reburial.” Chinese bone collectors followed the footsteps of the laborers to various worksites, looked for “a heap of stones marked by a wooden stake” or other signs, and dug out and collected bones under the stones. Next to the skeleton was usually “a wax-sealed bottle holding a strip of cloth inscribed with the worker’s name, birthdate and district of origin.” During and after the Railroad construction, numerous bone sets were sent back to China. In January 1870, Elko Independent reported: “Six cars are strung along the road between here and Toano, and are being loaded with dead Celestials for transportation to the Flowery Kingdom. We understand the Chinese Companies pay the Railroad Company $10 for carrying to San Francisco each dead Chinaman. Six cars, well stuffed with this kind of freight, will be a good day’s work. The remains of the females are left to rot in shallow graves while every defunct male is carefully preserved for shipment to the Occident.” On June 30, 1870, Sacramento Reporter reported that a train carried 20,000 pounds of Chinese laborers’ bones to San Francisco for reburial in China. The news report estimated that the 20,000 pounds of bones were equivalent of 1,200 Chines lives and “nearly all of them are the remains of the employees of the company who were engaged in the building the road.” As a retired engineer and descendent of a Chinese railroad laborer, William F. Chew was deeply concerned about facts and truth of Chinese contribution to the Railroad. His book Nameless Builders of the Transcontinental Railroad was a rare Railroad scholarship focusing on the number of Chinese laborers and their deaths. Using the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) payroll records of nineteen months as primary source and early newspaper reports as supporting materials, Chew estimated that a minimum of 23,004 Chinese laborers had worked on the Railroad. Assuming that the average weight of Chinese laborers was 119 pounds; bones were fourteen percent of human weight; and therefore about 16.67 pounds per body, Chew concluded that 20,000 pounds of human bones were equivalent to at least 1,346 bodies. The Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum (the Museum) disagreed and insisted that no more than 150 Chinese died in the Railroad 1 construction. The Museum and its contributing writers argued that Chew’s calculation was invalid because even “bones of a small woman” should at least be thirty-five pounds. The lighter bones must be buried underground over 100 years. In their opinion, over one thousand Chinese deaths in building the CPRR was a myth and a huge exaggeration. And if there were considerable Chinese deaths, it must be the result of smallpox spread among themselves. Smallpox was a contagious disease. Chinese railroad laborers worked in groups and lived in tents or simple wooden houses big enough to shelter four to fifteen people. Each group of twelve to twenty laborers had a cook to prepare food. If one person became infected by smallpox, it would lead to numerous deaths unless most of them were immune to the disease. (Most of them were probably immune. See my discussion in Chapter 4.) Stanford historian Gordon Chang documented fourteen newspaper reports on Chinese laborers’ death from April 1866 to May 1869. Four reports were on deaths caused by explosion, five on deaths by snow slides, and three on deaths by avalanche and excavating. None of the reports told smallpox outbreak among Chinese laborers. Discovered bones of deceased Chinese from Carlin, Nevada also confirmed that “Chinese railroad workers experienced injury, disease, and death as a direct result of their working and living conditions.” The debate between Chew and the Museum neglected one important fact. There are altogether 206 pieces of bones per human being. When searching and digging, Chinese bone collectors may not find the whole skeleton buried along the railroad tracks. In many cases, they could only find a few pieces of bones per body, sometimes just a tooth, a queue or just a written note in a sealed bottle. A complete skeleton was often hard to find. Many bones were lost. When counting and packing bones, bone collectors often recorded “skull of one piece, one pigtail, cheek bones of a complete set or three broken pieces, or feet of nineteen for each plus three small bean-like bones.” Bone collectors had at least eighteen categories when they documented what they could collect. If counted by pieces of bones, twenty thousand pounds of bones reported by the Sacramento Reporter could only imply a much greater number of Chinese deaths than Chew’s estimate. The weight of bones or the average weight of human skeleton cannot be the basis to calculate Chinese deaths. It is almost impossible to find out the exact number of Chinese deaths since the Railroad hired Chinese as teams of laborers through labor contractors without a full name-list. Nor did the Railroad company keep a record of laborers’ deaths. The Railroad did not hire doctors for the sick and injured or provide coffins for the dead laborers. “The almost complete absence of attention to worker fatalities in the correspondence among the CPRR ‘s top leaders is itself evidence of the low regard they gave to the dangers facing the workers.” Though we could not find a fatality record, a heavy death toll of Chinese laborers was a sad truth. Six cars or 20,000 pounds of bones were a huge amount and represented more than one thousand deaths. The train shipment in 1870 was neither the beginning nor the end of bone repatriation in Chinese migration. As early as 1855, a Chinese charity organization sent back close to 100 sets of bones to China. The shipment marked the beginning of a large-scale, sustained bone repatriation practice in Chinese migration, which was 2 not ended until the 1970s. Bone repatriation was a significant part of Chines American history. Exploring this history helps us understand who Chinese laborers were; why they came; what risks and challenges they encountered during the construction; and mostly importantly why and how Chinese in America became transnationals alive and dead. Chinese Laborers in the History of “Empire Express” Chew’s calculation looked disturbing to many American scholars because it meant “approximately five Chinese deaths for every three miles of track laid from Sacramento, California to Promontory Summit, Utah, a total of 690 miles.” This is a heavy cost of human lives. Many scholars of the Railroad history were uncomfortable to accept Chew’s estimate. A contributing writer of the Museum bluntly said, “The question here is, did the Central Pacific actually lose, by death, more than 10% of their Chinese labor force and at the rate of nearly two men to the mile. No photographs, no reports, no written records, nothing in all the reminisces written by key people in later years, nothing in the newspapers. Nothing at all reporting the slaughter of two men per mile...” Historian David Haward Bain insisted that it was a fabrication that thousands of Chinese had died when building the Transcontinental Railroad. Bain’s Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad was a classic, 700-page publication in the Railroad historiography. For many scholars, the Railroad was “an American miracle” accomplished by “vision, money, and ambition.” It should not be “stained” by a huge loss of Chinese lives. The “Empire Express” physically transformed the United States and more than doubled her size. After its completion, California was no longer a frontier area in America but the nearest shore to China. Long before the Gold Rush, Boston merchants were interested in China and wanted to acquire California because of the China Trade. The Mexican War (1846-1848) paved the political obstacle of California acquisition. Through the Railroad, the United States was rising rapidly as a Pacific power. On its path to join the Western imperialist club, the nation took over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam Island, and the Philippines from Spain through the Spanish-American War in 1898. Most publications on the Railroad celebrated it as a symbol of “American greatness” in “technological, political, economical development” Few of them wanted to acknowledge that this “Great and Shining Road” cost numerous Chinese lives, and this “Epic Story” also destroyed thousands of acres of Native Americans’ hunting and herding land and consequently numerous their lives. The Railroad obviously did not “benefit us all” as some historians claimed. The Railroad was essentially a project of U.S. empire building and has been documented as such. In its historiography, Chinese were merely nameless laborers physically building it. As mentioned earlier, the Central Pacific Railroad did not have a full list of all Chinese laborers nor it had a record of their injuries, illness or deaths, or other aspects of their work and life. Though exploding mountains was the most dangerous job, we still do not know if Chinese used wooden baskets, bamboo chairs, or something else when they lowered their fellow laborers down the cliffs to do the job. The Railroad hired Alfred as its commissioned photographer from 1864 to 1869. There was not photo on how Chinese exploded rocks. When the Railroad was 3 completed, the official celebration did not invite Chinese laborers. Andrew J. Russell’s historic photo “East and West Shaking Hands” did not include a single Chinese. A hundred years later, at the Railroad centennial commemoration at Promontory Summit, Secretary of the Interior John Volpe boasted: “Who else but Americans could drill tunnels in mountains 30 feet deep in snow?” He twisted history and commended white Americans for the work accomplished by Chinese laborers. No wonder Chinese contribution was not a prominent theme and their death not a serious concern in the Railroad historiography. If Volpe told the truth, he would say: “Who else but Chinese could drill tunnels in mountains 30 feet deep in snow?” While the Railroad was celebrated as a great piece of American nationalist dream, Chinese contribution was a side story and Chinese laborers’ death a footnote to that story. An Impossible Mission What Chinese accomplished with their muscle and lives was almost an impossible mission. Though shorter than the Union Pacific Railroad, the Central Pacific Railroad was far more difficult to build. The construction went through the granite mountains of Sierra Nevada, some of which were as high as 7,000 feet. Chinese needed to excavate fourteen tunnels through the mountains. As CPRR President Leland Stanford claimed, the construction was “the most difficult ever yet surmounted by any railroad in the Unites States, if not in Europe.” In January 1864, several hundred Chinese started the construction along the Sacramento River. Soon several thousand more joined them, “shoveling, wheeling, carting, drilling and blasting rocks and earth.” They worked in gangs of fifteen to thirty on a shift of twelve hours a day and six days a week. Often pressured to make faster progress than scheduled, Chinese worked shoulders to shoulders, “chipped and backed at the steellike rock faces” with simple tools like two-wheel dump carts, wheelbarrows, mules, shovels, axes, ropes, black powder and newly invented nitroglycerin as explosives. They cleared bushes, removed dirt, filled ravines, and blasted rocks. Some ravines were one to two thousand feet long and thirty to fifty feet deep and needed immense quantities of earth to fill in. Excavating granite mountains required blasting and removal of thousands of cubic yards of rocks and earth. In September 1865, Chinese laborers reached Colfax and faced the precipitous Cape Horn mountain (牛角岭) where they allegedly used ropes, bamboo chairs and big baskets to lower down fellow laborers over cliffs to drill holes and fill in explosives. After lighting the fuse, the driller needed to be lifted back fast otherwise he would be gone with the rocks. During the explosion, tons of rocks fell like stone rain and echoes of the explosion were heard even after the debris ceased to fall. “Over four years, thousands of Chinese worked in “blizzard conditions, doing incredibly difficult and dangerous work with only manual labor, black powder, and nitroglycerine manufactured on the spot.” Scholars still debate if Chinese really used baskets or not when lowering down a driller in the construction. Chinese probably did as it had been reported by several journal and newspaper articles in the 1870s. Baskets could be used to carry tools and explosives. But ropes must be the crucial tool for this dangerous task. When drilling holes on rocks, the laborer needed to get out of the basket to secure a firm footing. It was impossible to swing sledgehammer standing in 4 a unsteady basket. It was also safe for the driller to be directly secured to the ropes. Ropes they used were probably imported from China. As mentioned in Chapter 1, hemp and ropes were important commodities carried by trading companies in Canton. The most difficult task in construction was to tunnel through the Sierra mountains, about a hundred miles away from the Sacramento. Chinese laborers excavated fourteen tunnels here and two more close to the Nevada border. Exploding rocks was a scary task. According to a traveler’s account in 1869, Chinese drilled an eight-feet hole near a seam first and then “lightly loaded and fired” to enlarge it. They carefully repeated the light loading and exploding several times until the seam was large enough to hold an immense amount of explosive. The final exploding tore apart three thousand tons of granite. The shake was felt like an earthquake and the rock drops fell like a stone shower. As an observer put it, “I observed one rock, measuring seventy tons, a third of a mile away from its accustomed place; while another weighing 240 pounds, was thrown over the hotel at Donner Lake – a distance certainly, of two-thirds of a mile.” Chinese used both black powder and nitroglycerin. The latter was fluid in format but far more dangerous and powerful than black powder. As a precarious explosive, it was often manufactured on the spot. At first, a Scottish man named James Howden mixed the explosive powder on site. The job was a good pay but a hazard task. When James was too drunken to do it, Chinese took it over. Their speeded from 1.18 feet per day to 1.82 feet per day. Chinese laborers used nitroglycerin when excavating Tunnel No. 6, 7, and 8. Tunnel 6 was sixteen feet wide, twenty-three feet high, and 1,699 feet long - equivalent of five football fields in length. This tunnel was the most difficult one to construct and known as the Summit Tunnel on the Sierra crest. Chinese excavated it from both ends and the top working twenty-four hours a day in two shifts. It still took them thirteen months and many of their lives to complete it. Snow was another major cause for Chinese deaths. For more than three years, Chinese were working in the Sierra mountains where snow fell in September and storms followed in October. When Chinese began to blast and drill the Summit Tunnel in March 1867, snow was still around. The winters of 1866 and 1867 had forty-four heavy snows. To reach work site, Chinese laborers sometimes had to dig through “snow tunnels” of a hundred feet long, breathed through air shafts, and worked by lamplight. Snow drifts could be sixty-feet thick and quietly bury Chinese camps and canvas tents. Sudden snow slides were often. On the Christmas Day, 1866, “a gang of Chinamen employed by the railroad were covered up by a snow slide and four or five of them died before they could be exhumed… The snow fell to such a depth that one whole camp of Chinamen was covered up during the night.” In the winter of 1867, snow of fifty feet buried several dozens of Chinese laborers. When their bodies were found in the spring of 1868, it was a “ghastly sight of dead Chinese standing, still holding their shovels in their stiff hands.” Snow slides washed away rocks, camps, tents, houses and laborers. “In some cases, entire camps were carried away and the bodies of the men not found until the following spring.” An engineer recalled that snow slides were rapid, noiseless and could sweep away entire 5 team of the laborers. They were frequent in Sierra. At Tunnel No. 10, one slide carried away fifteen to twenty laborers. A tough-minded railroad official recalled in empathy: “The snow slides carried away our camps and we lost a good many men in the slides, and did not find them until the next season when the snow melted.” Snow actually took more Chinese lives than the explosives. In salary, Chinese laborers earned considerably less than white laborers. According to Ping Chiu and Paul M. Ong, Chinese made forty to sixty percent less than white laborers. But Chinese were not “coolie” laborers. In the opinion of railroad capitalist Charles Crocker, Chinese were “very trusty,” “very intelligent,” “always out-measured the Cornish miners, and lived up to their contracts.” A journalist wrote in 1869 that a Chinese laborer was “an artist with shovel or drill, wheelbarrow and cart,” and “has proved himself unsurpassed.” In July 1867, some 3,000 Chinese laborers went on a well-organized, week-long strike demanding eight hours a day and same pay as the whites. Railroad capitalist Charles Crocker refused their demand but eventually compromised with a two-dollar raise making Chinese pay thirty-five dollars a month. When building the Railroad, Chinese laborers had other job options like mining or farming. In fact, railroad capitalists were constantly worried that they might quit. But Chinese had a reputation that they abided contract. A contractor said that he had never known a single case “where a Chinaman has broken his contract.” Chinese laborers accepted lower wage because railroad job was not subject to senseless robbery and murder. When working in mining fields, Chinese were constantly robbed, attacked and killed. In May 1887, thirty-four Chinese were ambushed and killed by seven white men at the Hells Canyon in eastern Oregon. It was one of the most brutal massacres of Chinese in American history. (A discussion of the massacre is the next chapter.) When building railroads, Chinese were large in number, worked in gangs, had guns and could defend themselves if being attacked and robbed. Railroad capitalists would not allow any harassment or disruption of their work because construction speed was crucial to the company’s survival. Railroad job was also secure in payment. There were several hundred of Chinese contractors working with the laborers. They made sure that the laborers receive wage on time and in the amount promised in the contract. They could also help them remit money home. Chinese laborers demanded payment in gold coins which was as preferred money as Mexican silver dollars (大洋元 Da Yang Yuan) in Canton. What Chinese laborers made was also considerably higher than what they could earn in China. When they remitted American gold coins home, it meant a lot of money. Chinese railroad laborers belonged to a labor force of diverse skills and abilities. Many shoveled the earth, pulled carts, or drilled and blasted rocks; some were carpenters and blacksmiths. Herb doctors took care of the injuries and sickness. Chefs cooked and prepared hot tea and bathing water. Contractors and gang bosses supplied food, obtained tools from the Railroad, and assigned responsibilities to the laborers. As historian Shucheng Chan pointed out, Chinese railroad laborers did sixteen different jobs. Blacksmiths were paid more than other jobs from $1.34 to $2.88 a day. Those laborers blasting rocks received one dollar bonus a month. Cooks 6 and waiters were paid less than a dollar day. Chinese paid their contractors or gang bosses six dollars for food and one dollar and half for herbal medicine. They also paid one dollar and fifty cents for a shovel and two dollars and fifty cents for a pick as the Railroad did not provide free tools. Chinese gang bosses rented carts for five dollars a day or a house and cart for fifteen dollars a day. Chinese laborers also paid one dollar a month to their district organizations. In return, Chinese district organizations would send their bones if they died. After the Sierra Mountain, Chinese laborers built the line at a faster speed. In 1868, they completed 363 miles as compared with forty-six miles in 1867. On May 10th, 1869, they reached Promontory Point and completed the 690 miles of the Central Pacific Railroad. Life of Chinese Laborers When working on the Railroad, Chinese took care of their own food. A standard ration per laborer per day included two pounds of rice, one-third ounce of tea, one pound of beef, pork or fish, one-third ounce of vegetables, and a small amount of oil. What they ate was actually better and more diverse than the ration suggested. Food items procured by the contractors included rice, noodles, pork, beef, chicken, duck, eggs, salted cabbage, rice crackers, various dried vegetables, bamboo sprouts, and dried mushrooms, several kinds of dried fruit, Chinese bacon, peanut oil, sugar, soy sauce, vinegar, onion, and gingers. As coastal people, Cantonese consumed seafood such as dried shrimp, oysters, abalone, cuttlefish, and seaweed. Chinese laborers also fished and gamed for turkey, deer, jackrabbits, and other wild animals with their guns. They collected local herbs and seeds of various wild fruits. Chinese in Aspen Section Camp in Wyoming even raised chickens for eggs and fresh meat. Though paying their own food, Chinese laborers “ate more varied and nutritious food than did their European and American counterparts.” On Chinese laborers’ camps, historians and archaeologists have discovered a surprisingly rich variety of food containers, cooking tools, utensils, and tableware. Blue-white porcelain bowl with a Chinese character Xi 喜 motif (often in double meaning double happiness) was commonly used by the laborers. There were also more refined Four Season and Winter Green brand tableware, British porcelain tableware, brown-glazed earthen jars, ceramic jugs and glass bottles. It seems that Chinese cooks had plenty of tools, spices and seasoning to prepare meals. They could use jars and urns to store salted or preserved vegetables; ceramic jugs and glass bottles to contain soil sauce, vinegar, cooking wine, or liquor; and metal containers, funnels, bean sprout germinators and kettles of different size to meet many food preparation needs. Chinese took care of their own health problems as well. Many containers were used to carry Chinese medicine or medical herbs. Chinese laborers also took Western medicine and used patented drugs like bitters for stomach problems, malaria, fever or chills, Sarsaparillas for syphilis, or Liniments for muscle aches. The key for Chinese laborers to maintain a good health was to eat cooked, warm food, and drink boiled water and hot tea. Cantonese liked to drink semifermented tea. It helped them digest food and keep body warm. Several times a day, gang cooks carried hot tea to the worksite using bamboo poles and wood buckets. 7 They also prepared hot water for laborers to bath themselves after work. They built Ushaped hearths in pairs fit for big woks to boil water, cook rice, stew meat, stir-fry dishes, and prepare herb medicine soup. Chinese had a grain-based diet and followed a fan-cai (饭菜) concept in eating. Rice, noodle, steamed or baked bread were staple food with meat and vegetables as dishes. But Chinese laborers also consumed nonChinese food like American canned beef, fish, sardine, lard beans tomatoes, fruits, bottled mustard, pickles, salad dressing and bouillon food. When cooking, they even used the famous Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce seasoning. As food anthropologist Eugene N. Anderson put it, “The Chinese have rarely been uninterested in new foods.” For leisure consumption, Chinese preferred opium smoking to alcohol. But they also drank whiskey, wine, and beer. Coming from a cultural background that was open to outside influence, Chinese immigrants were always willing to try new food and drinks. Their interest in new things often made them keen consumers of local commodities. Chinese merchants established a well-connected supply chain that linked the railroad camps to farms in California and stores in Hong Kong and Canton. When Chinese laborers worked for the Houston and Texas Railroad in December 1869, their provision list was rich and long including 200 pounds of ginger root, fifty pounds of orange peel, 200 pounds of cuttlefish, ten boxes of soy, twenty reams of Chinese writing paper, 200 Chinese pencils, ten daily account books, five pieces of paper for lights, 300 pounds of California abalones, 40 pounds of red melon seed, two dozen frying-pan shovels, four dozen copper spoons, fifty pounds sugar candy, fifty pounds red dates, one pound of Chinese ink, 100 Chinese pens, ten paper boxes of pills, ten bottle medicine powder, 100 gallons of China nut oil, 700 pounds salt turnip, forty sets bowls, forty sets of chopsticks, one dozen knives, 2000 pounds salt shrimps, 1,950 pounds salt fish, 200 bags fungus, 50,000 firecrackers, 55 pounds of fried oysters, 250 pounds black peas, 250 pounds red pea, 18 large kettles, sixteen small kettles, 120 pairs Chinese shoes, joss papers and sticks, and goods for Chinese new year. The long list of supply gives us a detailed picture of Chinese life. They used kettles to boil water, orange peel as medicine, red melon seed for leisure consumption, firecrackers to celebrate holidays. The list included medicine because many Chinese laborers had medical knowledge and there were herb doctor serving the crew. The list also included ink, paper, pens, or pencils as many Chinese laborers wrote letters home. A superintendent of the Railroad claimed that he never heard of one who could not read and write among his thirteen thousand Chinese laborers. They sent letters home with money. The Golden Mountain trading firms (Jinshan Zhuang 金山庄) in San Francisco and Hong Kong provided reliable transnational networks to help Chinese immigrants send “remittance letters” (Yinxin 银信) to family and friends at home. The Burlingame Treaty The number of Chinese laborers grew dramatically due to the Burlingame Treaty signed between China and the United States in 1868. Since the Opium War in 1839-40, Western powers and Japan established spheres of influence in China through 8 unequal treaties, trade privileges and colonial concessions. America grasped its own opportunity in the Western scramble of China. In 1844, President John Tyler sent Caleb Cushing to China with four military ships and forced China to sign the Wangxia Treaty that granted America the rights and privileges Britain had received from the Opium War. (Wangxia 望夏 was a small fishing village in Macau.) In 1856-1860, Britain and France launched the second Opium War that forced China to open more treaty ports, further lower tariff for Western imports, allow wider Western religious penetration, and lift immigration ban in Guangdong Province. The United States again shared the fruits of the war by making China accept the Tianjin Treaty of 1860 that specified that America should receive all the privileges that Chinese government had granted to Britain and France or would grant to any other country. In 1861, the Qing government reluctantly accepted foreign legations in Beijing. The following year, Anson Burlingame arrived as the first American minister plenipotentiary in Beijing. He was a friendly diplomat who maintained a good relationship with the Qing government and introduced Mark Twain’s writing and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetry to China. When his term came to an end, Burlingame proposed to represent China to negotiate treaties with the United States and other Western powers. The Qing government agreed. In 1868, the two countries signed the Burlingame Treaty that recognized free migration between China and the United States, provided expanded opportunities and protection to American merchants and missionaries in China, and guaranteed the most-favored-nation treatment to each other’s immigrants and permanent residency right in each other’s country. A major agenda in the Burlingame Treaty was to promote Chinese labor migration to America. After the Burlingame Treaty, Chinese population “suddenly skyrocketed in 1868, 1869, and 1870 primarily in response to the railroad’s needs for Chinese labor.” The number of Chinese entering the San Francisco Customer House in these three years grew tripled compared with the previous four years. Chinese population in America grew from 46,897 in 1860 to 71,084 in 1870 and reached 104,991 in 1880. If the arrival of Chinese before 1860 was due to the Gold Rush, a much larger number of Chinese arrived after 1864 because of the railroad construction. As labor historian June Mei noted, “American companies played an active role in publicizing the need for laborers, recruiting them, and even financing their journeys.” Turning Chinese migration into a pipeline of laborers, the Burlingame Treaty promoted a significant increasing use of Chinese labor in America’s infrastructure construction. When more Chinese were used, more deaths occurred. According to William Speer, about 1,400 Chinese died in America in 1856 while 9,000 of them returned to China, and 43,000 remained. In 1868, Chinese death toll increased to about 3900, while 42,800 of them returned and 106,000 remained in America. After the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, Chinese laborers were needed everywhere in American infrastructure construction. Labor recruiting activities intensified in South China. Northern Pacific Railway Company hired over 430 Chinese from Hong Kong to work in southern Portland as rail laborers in 1868. At a Southern planters’ convention in Memphis in 1869, Holland-born labor contractor Cornelius Koopmanshoop boasted to have contracted 30,000 Chinese 9 laborers to California and could do more. Chinese labor contractor Leo Quoon allegedly contracted several thousand “Leos” from his village for the work. Loomis observed in 1869, “Where railroads are to be constructed, roads to be cut over mountains, and highways to be thrown up through the marshes in order to give distant [portions of the country outlets to market, and to increase the families for travel, the timely arrival of [Chinese] laborers who can perform these things for us is undoubtedly to be hailed as a blessing.” By the end of 1872, more than 1,500 Chinese workers were laying rail tracks and telegraph lines in Oregon. Henry Villard, owner of the Northern Pacific, boasted to have recruited 15,000 Chinese to lay rails in northern Washington. He also employed over 6,000 Chinese in 1882 and 1883 for railroad construction in Idaho and Montana. Chinese laborers began to build railroads in Mexico and Canada as well. In 1877, Li Chudu recruited more than 200 people from Taishan to work in the United States. In 1891, Wei Laoying recruited 1,800 Chinese from Hong Kong, Macau, and Guangdong to build railroads in Mexica for British and American companies. More than half of them died at work. In 1898, Ma Zhuo helped a British firm recruit 1,000 laborers to build railroad in America. In 1884, 5,056 Cantonese went to build railroads in British Columbia in Canada. The railroad mileage grew almost tripled in the 1870s and 1880s. In 1869, railroad miles in the United States was 46,844. In twenty years, the figure grew to almost 170,000. After 1869, Chinese worked for both the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, and scores of other railroad companies. Stanford chair professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin meticulously documented that Chinese built and maintained seventy-one railroads across the country. “In the second half of 1869, they worked on eleven lines. During the 1870s, they worked on thirty-six additional lines, and in the 1880s they worked on twenty-four more.” The railroads they built transformed America. Denver became a city of commerce, banking, and tourism; Reno in Nevada a commercial center and hub; and Texas a state of cattle and cotton industry. From the American West, Chinese railroad laborers went to work in the Northwest, Midwest, South, East, and Northeast. In California, Chinese built more than two dozen of railroads that connected San Francisco to Sacramental via Oakland and linked Northern California to Southern California. Hired by the Western Pacific Railroad, Chinese completed the Sacramento-Stockton leg of the transcontinental route in August 1869 and built the Central and Southern Pacific’s main lines down the San Joaquin Valley in 1870 and 1871.” Working for the California Southern Railroad, over 20,000 Chinese built a railroad linking San Diego to the San Luis Rey River via Temecula Canyon to San Bernadine, a line of 160 miles. They also “worked on the hook-up to Los Angeles and the famous loop over Tehachapi Pass, both completed in 1876.” Chinese laborers suffered a heavy death toll for railroad construction in California. When they were tunneling for a line that connected San Jose to Santa Cruz, one explosion took thirty Chinese lives on November 18, 1879. Four days later, a second explosion inside the tunnel killed another thirty-two Chinese. In addition to railroad construction, several hundred of Chinese farming laborers reclaimed thousand acres of swampland in the Sacramento-San Joaquin 10 Delta, built miles of dikes and ditches, and constructed canals of irrigation. “Working in waist-deep muck under the most in salubrious conditions, many reclamation laborers probably caught chills or pneumonia. Malaria was also prevalent in the swamps.” Chinese labor turned the Delta into one of the world’s richest agricultural areas. In the Salinas Valley, Chinese laborers dug six miles of ditches to drain the land, “cutting the peat soil with huge knife-like spades and pitching it out with steel forks and hooks,” and boosted the value of the land from eighteen dollars in 1875 to 100 dollars per acre two year later. Many Chinese were farmers themselves in China. Some of them taught their employers how to plant, cultivate and harvest orchards and garden crops. Chinese were always interested in learning how to farm crops that they were not familiar with such as asparagus. Hundreds of Chinese became asparagus farmers and laborers in both Northern and Southern California from the 1890s to the 1940s. Some Chinese also owned asparagus canneries. Their asparagus canneries sprang up in Rio Vista, Walnut Grove, and other river towns. Thomas Foo Chew, “the Asparagus King” of San Francisco, owned several hundred acres of asparagus land in the 1920s. When his Bayside canneries were at their peak, they canned an estimated 600,000 cases or more per year with a gross revenues of around $3 million per year. As historian George Chu claimed: “A single crop, asparagus, delayed the urbanization of the Chinese in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta by about fifty years.” In the second half of the nineteenth century, as historian Sucheng Chan meticulously documented, thousands of Chinese worked as “truck gardeners, farmers, commission merchants, fruit and vegetable vendors and peddlers, fruit packers, and harvest laborers in California.” They transformed California agriculture from wheat growing to more profitable fruit and vegetable farming. This transition accomplished by Chinese labor made California a leading agricultural state in the United States. Without Chinese, as Carey McWilliam and George Chu argued, the transition would be delayed for a quarter of a century. With the railroads that Chinese had built, the fruits and vegetables in California were shipped all the way to Midwest, East Coast America, and Europe. Railroads linked agricultural products in California to the national and international markets. The Rise of Bone Repatriation Chinese immigrants understood that to make a living in America was risky, especially working in railroad construction. They may die at work and not be able to return home safely. All Chinese were requested by their district associations to pay “exit permit” (chugangzhi 出港纸) fees to cover bone repatriation service cost if death occurred. The “exit permit” guaranteed that their bones would be sent back home for reburial if they died in America. Like a life insurance policy, it could mentally prepare Chinese laborers for death. In Chinese death culture, reburial was a tradition of only certain ethnic groups in South China or just an individual choice when someone died away from home area but wished to be buried back at home. Friends and relatives would unearth his coffin after a few years, take out the bones, clean them, and bring them back for reburial. But bone repatriation was not an individual choice. It was a strategy to deal with death by Chinese immigrants as a 11 collective. Bone repatriation does not mean that there were no deceased Chinese buried in America. Gunther Barth noted that burial of wealthy deceased Chinese merchants was in “American style with a richly trimmed mahogany coffin, first class hearse, and thirty carriages of attendants” in the early 1850s. On March 1, 1854, a newspaper reported that a Chinese funeral became “quite a singular sight” in San Francisco. “The hearse was magnificently decked with waving plumes of black.” Following it was one carriage of musicians, eight to ten carriages of mourners, and then “a long string of Chinese, each wearing on his left arm a piece of white linen as a mourning badge.” “Next month the Chinese festival of ‘Ching Ming’ or the ‘Spring Offering,’ when the Celestials visit the graves of their departed friends, will take place.” In the same year, a traveler saw a small group of Chinese cremating their dead and a larger group burying the dead in graves in the California Mother Lode district. In 1858, Daily Alta California reported that Chinese had graves at Lone Mountain Cemetery and “a vault in which they deposit those corpses which are to be sent to China.” Those who deposited their corpses obviously wished to have their bones sent back to China but others may intend to be buried in America. This was probably the first documented Chinese cemetery in America. “Burial Ritual At Lone Mountain, San Francisco” was a well-known painting. Harpers’ Magazine carried a photo of it in 1882. Chinese laborers preferred reburial in China because most of them came with families left behind. They noticed that life in America was risky, death often occurred, and Chinese graveyard had no protection. On May 16, 1855, the ship Sunny South left San Francisco for Hong Kong with “with a cargo of 200 bags of potatoes and “94 boxes of dead Chinamen.” According to Hong Kong historians Elizabeth Sinn (冼玉 仪) and Hon-ming Yip (叶汉明), this was the first organized bone returning shipment by Chinese immigrants. Fook Yum Tong (Fuyintang 福荫堂), a charity society (shantang 善堂) of Nanhai County from Siyi (Sze Yup Four County district) in San Francisco, arranged the delivery. Before long, several shipments followed up. In 1856, Xiangshan District Association shipped 336 sets of bones back with 217 of their own natives and 119 from other counties. In January 1858, a French ship carried 321 sets of bones to Hong Kong. In February of the same year, an American ship carried another 200 sets of bones. In 1859, Xingantang (行安堂) of Shunde County also shipped bones to Hong Kogn. When several hundreds of bone sets were shipped back by charity societies every year, it meant Chinese community began to make serious and coordinated efforts to search and gather bones of deceased Chinese in the 1850s. Shortly after their arrival, Chinese immigrants established community organizations based on their home region such as Sanyi huiguan (会馆 Sam Yup or Three District Association) or the Siyi huiguan (See Yup or Four District Association). Then district associations formed Chinese Six Companies (or Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association) as an umbrella organization representing all Chinese in America. Several district associations purchased burial grounds in San Francisco in the early 1850s but were forced to relocate them several times. Then Six Companies acquired a “united Chinese graveyard” in San Mateo and decided to unearth the bones every few years and send them back to China. Every district association established 12 its own charity society (shan tang 善堂) to raise fund to support and facilitate bone repatriation efforts. There were also charity societies in Hong Kong to assist in funding and bone repatriation. District associations collected “exit permit” fees from their members. In 1894, membership fee of a district association was nine dollars: three for the Six Companies; three for the district association and three for bone returning fee. Without the “permit,” Chinese immigrants could not purchase return ticket. District associations used temples and joss houses to shelter dead bodies or place the collected bones before shipping them out. In 1853, Sanyi huiguan hired architect Lewis R. Townsend to build a big temple in San Francisco. In 1864 when Chinese began to work on the Railroad, the Ning Yeong Company invested 16,000 dollars to build another big temple. The two were the largest among thirteen Chinese temples and joss houses in San Francisco. In his book Roughing It published in 1871, Mark Twain wrote: “The See Yup Company is held to be the largest of those. The Ning Yeong Company is next, and numbers eighteen thousand members on the coast. Its headquarters are at San Francisco, where it has a costly temple, several great officers, and a numerous priesthood. In it I was shown a register of its members, with the dead and the date of their shipment to China duly marked. Every ship that sails from San Francisco carries away a heavy freight of Chinese corpses.” Twain was obviously shocked by the heavy death toll of Chinese laborers. Known as Jian Yun (捡运), bone repatriation began in 1855 and ended in the 1970s. While “Jian” means gathering or collecting, “Yun” means delivery. The word “Jian” came from the phrase shi gu chong jian (拾骨重捡) which means “searching and gathering bones for reburial.” A word for word translation of Jian Yun in English should be “bone gathering and shipping.” But the Chinese term connoted sophisticated meanings that its English version could not convey. Jian Yun was a transnational death culture. It reflected how Chinese handled death issue as a collective and valued life through their proper and decent reburial. Jian Yun was a community service organized by Chinese district associations, a charity endeavor funded by committed merchants, and a mutual aid obligation of Chinese immigrants toward each other through the “exit permit” fees. Bone repatriation reflected Chinese understanding of racial environment in America. As most Chinese could not establish family life under Chinese Exclusion Laws, reburial in China was the only option to be close to home at death. As a transnational death culture, bone repatriation lasted almost 120 years. When Chinese laborers started to work on the Railroad in 1864, bone repatriation service had already been in shape. During the construction, Chinese took care of each other in death issue according to their home origin and kinship relationship. When someone died, fellow Chinese laborers would bury him with marks and sighs along the tracks and reported the death to the district association that he belonged to. Later bone collectors would come to the worksite, unearth the bones, and send them back to home village for reburial. If bones got washed away or lost, bone collectors would look for the sealed identity bottle for the dead, place it into a spirit box (追魂箱 zhuihunxiang), and send it back to his home. Death was an 13 important issue in Chinese family culture. Bone repatriation meant a proper reburial at home. Searching and Gathering Bone repatriation was a long and difficult process. It started with searching all places where Chinese had worked and the graves that deceased Chinese had been buried. When looking for graves of their fellow countrymen in the surrounding area of San Francisco, the searching team of Chang How Tong (a charity society of Panyu County, Changhou tang 昌后 means “prosperity to the descendants.” ) “went through rugged mountain paths under the scorching summer sun to reach burial sites just to discover that the areas were flooded, graves inundated, and tombstones washed away. Some remains were even lost.” In a memo on bone repatriation work, the Panyu Association explained: “In 1874, during the Ching Ming Festival (Memorial Day in Chinese calendar), when young and old gathered to pay their respects to the dead, we saw rows and rows of neglected and over-grown graves. The tomb markers have been stripped away by the white people.” The searching team had to look for “those who had perished in a watery grave, those who had been victims of foul play and whose bodies had been hidden in some secluded pace, those who bodies had been stolen by the white people to make fish bait, or those whose graves were missing markers…” To prevent further damage, the Association collected and “shipped 858 coffins and twenty-four spirit boxes of deceased Chinese in the two years between 1874 to 1876.” After the Railroad was completed, Chinese laborers worked on railroads and other jobs all over America. Death toll continued to increase; bone searching and gathering became nationwide. Bone collectors toured from California to New York, searching Chinese cemeteries in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New Orleans and the areas surrounding them. Bone collector Fang Chung toured Washington, Idaho, and California and was able to collect a total of 500 sets of bones and accompanied the bones back to China “where the relatives of the deceased awaited their arrival.” The searching team of the Panyu Association travelled “from east to west, north to south, and their trail took them not only to various parts of the United States, but also Victoria, British Columbia.” “Some of these places were on high mountains, and some were in deep valleys. Neither horse nor vehicle could travel on those narrow winding trails. Still the team managed to carry out their mission.” In order to search a Mr. Wong Sei who had been buried in an isolated area along the Summon River, Idaho, “thousands of miles from the nearest town, not on the route of any boat or vehicle,” the searching team hired horses and mules in 1876, “traveled by day and rested by night, sleeping outdoors in the wild, risking attacks by wild beasts. The whole trip took them more than fifty days.” But the team did not give up. “With such effort and dedication on the part of the living, surely the dead can rest in peace.” Bone searching and gathering was a careful procedure. It included digging, cleaning, drying, packaging, and documenting the collected bones. In June 1888, six years after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, three merchants representing the Six 14 Companies arrived in New York to inspect all graveyards here in order to get bones of diseased Chinese back to China. A few weeks later, bone collectors came. “The Kong Chu Company of San Francisco has sent its agent on a tour of the entire country to gather up the bones of defunct Chinamen and ship them back to their respective places of birth in the Flowery Kingdom for internment in their family burial grounds.” They searched cemeteries where deceased Chinese had been buried, carefully opened the graves, cleaned the bones, dried them, placed the dry bones into sealed bags, and packed them in stout boxes. The most important part of bone returning procedure was to identify and document the deceased person. Bone collectors put the names, home address and other information of the deceased on the boxes in both Chinese and English for the delivery. “They (the boxes) were marked in both Chinese and English characters for their ultimate destination in China.” The ultimate destination was their home village in Guangdong, China where they could rest in peace. Bone collectors were professional death culture practitioners. Digging, cleaning, and packing was a respectful process. When the graves were opened, prayer papers (paper money) would “be burned and incense lighted to keep back the evil spirits during the lifting out of the skeletons.” Bone collectors may burn more prayer fake money for the poor than for the rich hoping that poor people would have enough money to spend in the spirit world. “As soon as the skeletons have been exhumed, the man in charge will scrape all the bones, and wire those of each skeleton together. Each set of bones will be sealed in a tin container.” Dried and cleaned bones would not go moldy or attract rats in ocean transportation. That was why bone collectors carefully unearthed the bones, cleaned, dried them under sun, polished, documented, packed them in sealed or white cotton bags, placed the bags into boxes and shipped them to San Francisco. When arriving in China, the bone sets should be wired in place, put in metal jars and ready to be buried. Bone collectors tried to collect the entire skeleton but could not find all pieces in most cases. When bone collectors prepared several dozens of unearthed bodies in Los Angeles in 1902, men’s queue became an important item. “In several cases, the long black queues neatly braided and perfectly preserved, with bits of scalp attached.” Body could rot and coffin decay, but queue would not. Back in China, the Qing government required every Chinese man to keep a queue like the Manchu men. Many Chinese immigrants in America maintained it though often covered it with a cap. In bone returning practice, this Manchu hair style accidentally became an indispensable part of body to represent a deceased Chinese when other parts of body got lost. In this transnational funeral process, a tooth, a queue, or any part of the body could function as a solid piece for the family to hold a proper reburial and a quality death ritual for the deceased member. As a transnational funeral service, bone repatriation included coffin, bone box, spirit box and prayer service. Initially many caskets or boxes were made of sandal, teak, and other sacred woods and were “highly lacquered with names and social status of the dead and dates of the dead.” In 1908, a Wong family in Los Angeles applied and received permits from the city government to unearth bones. “The wooden caskets in the old Chinese cemetery on the outskirts of the city are to be exhumed by 15 the priests.” The Wong family were familiar with the digging process. The unearthing began with prayer service and the burning of prayer paper money. Then they carefully took out the bones, wrapped them in the finest silks, “sprinkled with the sweetsmelling sandal wood powder, covered with prayer papers, and placed in tiny caskets, the bones will be ready for their last journey.” The “tiny caskets” were the tin container mentioned above. They were zinc (white metal) boxes in standardized size and were commonly used in shipping as bone sets could go moldy if not thoroughly cleaned. In shipping, prayer service followed the bones all the way to China. “During the journey across the ocean, a priest is in attendance upon the dead, muttering prayers and occasionally burning prayer papers to keep the devils of the sea.” Home Coming through Hong Kong In born repatriation, Chinese district associations worked with two types of charity associations. One was based in America and the other in Hong Kong. The former handled searching and shipping. The later assisted the landing of the bones and contacted the families of the dead. Chang How Tong was, for example, based in San Francisco. Its partner Kai Shin Tong (Jishantang 继善 “to inherit kindness.”) was based in Hong Kong. In 1863, four staff members of Chang How Tong escorted their first shipment of 258 sets of bones and fifty-nine spirit boxes to Hong Kong. Kai Shin Tong took over the arrived bones and transported them various villages in Panyu County. The former transferred 25,000 dollars to the later and each set of bones cost approximately seven dollars. The two charity societies arranged another shipment of 858 coffins/bone boxes and twenty-four spirit boxes in 1874-76, and a shipment of 625 coffins/bone boxes and three spirit boxes in 1884-87 from San Francisco to Hong Kong. As bone repatriation shipments increased, Hong Kong became an important transitional place. In 1875, a temple established a charity coffin house known as Niufang Coffin Home (牛房义庄) in Kennedy Town. It was expanded and relocated several times. In 1899, Tung Wah Hospital (东华医院), a hospital of Chinese medicine established in 1872, took over its management and re-named it as Tung Wah Coffin Home (TWCH 东华义庄). “After the vessel had arrived in Hong Kong, the shipping company would ask TWCH to collect the coffins and bones with the bill of lading. Then an undertaker transported the coffins/bones to the TWCH on a small boat.” TWCH housed the coffins/ bones with no rent fee. When the family was notified and the bones were ready to be claimed, TWCH would obtain “a certificate of guarantee bearing the seal of a substantial Hong Kong business establishment and an export certificate issued by the Director for Inland Revenue.” A small fishing boat (known as xiagou boats 虾苟艇) would deliver the coffins and bones to the deceased’s respective hometowns for burial.” The final step was to hold a witnessed and documented handover of the collected bones to the families. Prayer service followed the entire process. Charity societies also facilitated the arrival of the bones. “By the mid-1890s, almost every regional group in Hong Kong had organized bone-repatriation societies.” They helped contact respective families, provided them with reburial money and, more importantly, raised fund to purchase land as graveyards in the home 16 areas for returned bones. In 1893, a charity society of Xinhui County established a landmark Gold Mountain Charitable Cemetery for 387 unclaimed bone sets shipped from San Francisco between 1888 and 1892. With regular shipping and storing service in Hong Kong and financial support from interested merchants, bone repatriation became an institutionalized reverse migration for deceased overseas Chinese. For more than six to seven decades, Hong Kong was “the largest communal repository of coffins and bones” of deceased overseas Chinese and TWCH “the only agency in the world that shouldered this unique kind of charity work on such a vast scale.” In the 1850s, Chinese community shipped bones of deceased Chinese almost every year. The shipping became less frequent but more organized and regular after 1900. Those who had been buried over ten years were given priority consideration in the searching efforts. In about seven years, much of the buried body should have dissipated into nature with only bones left. In 1912, bone collectors came to Watsonville’s Chinese cemetery in the Monterey Bay area and exhumed 120 bodies. They came back the following year and worked for two weeks to exhume the remaining sixty-eight bodies who had been buried over eleven years. In 1913 alone, more than 10,000 boxes of bones were shipped back China. Most shipments carried bones only. To transport a set of bones was a lot easier than to deliver a corpse and took a smaller space in graveyard. With only bones delivered back for reburial, Chinese immigrants and their families adopted a new and more modern form of funeral. Bone repatriation reflected a significant change in death culture in Guangdong, China. Though less frequent, each bone repatriation still carried several hundreds of bone sets. In 1937, the Ning Young Association petitioned the Board of Supervisors of the Los Angeles City for permission to “furnish all necessary labor and tools for exhuming the bodies.” The Association had 400 bodies to be exhumed. It could save the $5 disinterment fee per body if done by its own Association members. Many of the deceased Chinese “have lain twenty years in Evergreen Cemetery” and should be unearthed and shipped back long time ago. Wong Sam Ying was an officer of the Los Angeles branch of the Association and made a living by a small provision shop in North Los Angeles street. He claimed that the membership of the Society had 1,400 members in Los Angeles in the past eighty-five years. Each member would be “taxed” to send these poor bodies back to China. The District Association had obligation and duty to send bones of deceased Chinese back to home. In Chinese lunar calendar, there are at least three festivals that people could revere and memorize deceased ancestors, family members or friends: the Qingming Festival in April, the Zhongyuan Festival in July, and the Chongyang Festival in September. Bone returning service attempted to correspond with those occasions. In July 1937, William F. Ung, a Los Angeles born Chinese and son of a Chinese railroad laborer, hired fifteen “experienced Mexican grave workers to help unearth and prepare bones. Ung needed to exhume 150 bodies in a segregated local Chinese cemetery and a few more hundreds from the Los Angeles County graveyard. On July 30, scores of boxes, filled with bones of dead Chinese buried in Los Angeles, “were 17 loaded for trans-Pacific shipment yesterday.” Three Chinese “benevolent societies the Ning Yung, the Yin Hoi and the Kwong Chow - co-operated to send bones of 850 Chinese, disinterred from two local cemeteries, on a voyage across the ocean to Hong Kong.” When arriving in Hong Kong, bones were sent to TWCH for temporary storage while families of the deceased Chinese were contacted. Bone repatriation required both land and ocean shipping and often needed coordinated efforts between several district associations and charity organizations in Hong Kong. In Chinese American experience, racial discrimination did not end at death. Chinese community purchased their own graveyards because they were not allowed to be buried in cemeteries with white Americans. Sometimes Chinese were buried “on land donated by white Christians who wanted to make sure there was no mixing of burial sites of their loved ones and those of the “heather” Chinese.” Historic Chinese cemeteries were often ravaged for objects like jade jewelry, gold ornaments, bracelets wearing, silver corns, rice bowls, teapots, or opium pipes. Many Chinese believed that death meant to live another life in future. They might still need to use those objects in their “future life.” With those objects, they also expected bone collectors to find their bones before something happened to their graveyard. Chinese knew that their tombs could be ravaged, relocated, or lost. Their worries proved to be true. In 2006, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) announced discovery of 128 sets of Asian remains together with opium pipes, jade jewelry and rice bowls on Lorena and 1st streets in Boyle Heights when building an extension of the Gold Line from the Union Station to East Los Angeles. Some of them could be the Railroad laborers. When MTA announced the discovery, Chinese headstones had been used as decorative lawn ornaments in Boyle Heights. The city of Los Angeles had recorded location, cause of death, dates of the buried including the dates that bones of the buried were recovered and sent back to China but this Chinese graveyard was later occupied and lost anyway. The site was a lost but well-known segregated Chinese cemetery dating from the 1870s to the 1920s next to the Evergreen Cemetery. The burial site was a free public cemetery for the poor and homeless people. But Chinese were charged ten dollars by the county when they were buried there. When bone collectors unearthed their bones and shipped them to China, they needed to pay another ten dollars. Fortunately bones of many Chinese buried in the graveyard had been unearthed and sent to China. By the 1970s, most Chinese cemeteries in America were lost or destroyed. “In Auburn, in Klamath National Forest, in Coulterville and other places in the Mother Lode – and even in the San Francisco Peninsula cemetery town of Colma – historic Chinese cemeteries are being ravaged.” Colma is a city of cemeteries where deceased population greatly outnumbered those who are alive. It has seventeen cemeteries for dozens of nationalities and religions and close to two million graves. Chinese tombs were not even safe there. In May 1971, bones of several hundreds of Chinese Americans, preserved in the earthen urns in the Chinese cemeteries in Colma, were shipped to mainland China through Hong Kong. This was probably the last shipment of Chinese bone repatriation. Jian Yun, a transnational Chinese death culture dated to 18 Gold Rush, finally came to an end. Ancestors or Sojourners? Early American newspapers and magazines described bone repatriation as an exotic practice, labelling bone collectors as “Blissful Bone Baggers.” Politicians testified at public hearing that, “all Chinese contemplate returning… They must be buried in celestial soil. Their superstition and their religion is that there is no approach to the heavenly and celestial realm except from the Celestial kingdom.” In American history, all immigrants missed home. In his study of 17th century British immigration to America, historian David Cressy calculated that as many as one in six of the British immigrants returned to England either permanently or temporarily. Historian Ronald Takaki pointed out, the return rate of the Chinese between 1850 to 1882 was 47 percent compared with 55 percent for Englishmen, 46 percent for the Scots, 42 percent for the Irish, 40 percent for Polish and 50 percent for Italians. Though the return rate was equally high for European immigrant groups, American politicians never labeled them as “sojourners” as they did Chinese. The term “sojourner” denoted a racist nationalistic ideology, implying “un-Americanness” of Chinese immigrants and advocating exclusion of them. Chinese Americans are still sensitive when being called “sojourners.” Chinese did believe in “fallen leaves going back to root.” But root was more than a physical locality. In addition to native place, home, family, kinship, cultural tradition, lifestyle, and social network were all components of a cultural root. Root followed people. When people migrated, settled down, and had family life in a new place as a collective, they would be rooted there. Several Chinese exclusion laws were passed to forbid the entry of Chinese laborers when Chinese laborers were working on railroads and other construction jobs all over America. The laws also consistently restricted wives of Chinese laborers to enter. Bone repatriation became popular among Chinese because many of them could not have family life in America. Burial in America at death meant to die homelessly and to be separate from family in the spirit world. Racial discrimination was a compelling reason to explain why most Chinese in America became transnationals alive and dead. There were surely Chinese who were buried permanently in America as historians Sue Fawn Chung and Priscilla Wegars’ book have pointed out. Usually those were the Chinese with families who could clean the tombs and perform the memorial ritual during the Qingming Festival. Without family care, tombs of deceased Chinese would suffer neglect, damage, and vandalism like the Chinese graves in the Mount Hope Cemetery in Boston. More than 1,500 Chinese were buried there since the 1930s. Most of them were men; 75 percent were born in China; 60 percent were laundrymen and 19 percent restaurant workers. Majority of them or 70 percent were married men. They had no family in America and no one to take care of their tombs. “By the 1980s, hundreds of the Chinese gravestones had eroded or been broken and displaced, due to vandalism and institutional disregard as well as the cumulative effects of harsh winter weather in Boston and the low-cost, poor quality of materials originally used for the stones.” Declined traditional family associations were too weak to take care of the graves. Fortunately, local Chinese American community 19 including Chinese Historical Society of New England (CHSNE) and Asian American Studies programs at the University of Massachusetts assumed their community responsibility to restore and replace crumbling tombs, identity the buried people, and improve the landscape. In bone repatriation practice, Chinese in Hawaii were exceptions. They began to arrive as plantation contract laborers in 1850. Between 1875 to 1887, about 25,497 Chinese came to work on plantation farms. They made 19% of the total population in the islands by 1890. Plantation owners allowed ten to fifteen percent of women to join men in order to stabilize the labor force. By 1900, women made up 13% of Chinese population in Hawaii compared to just five percent of Chinese population in the continental United States. Many Chinese left plantation farms at the end of the contract, opened a small business, and established family life. Some Chinese married Hawaiian women. In 1896, at least 1,387 Hawaiian children were born from such family. Others married Portuguese women or women of other ethnic groups. When the 1902 Chinese Exclusion Law was applied to Hawaii, many Chinese had already established family life. Following Chinese came Japanese, Korean, and Filipino immigrants. Most of them were men but a small percent of women was permitted. When family life was possible, Asians in Hawaii eventually became a majority population. In Hawaii, most Chinese were buried in local graveyards at death because they had families with them. There are at least eight well-known Chinese cemeteries in the island of O’ahu. The Manoa Chinese Cemetery, established in 1851, is the oldest and most famous one. Thirty-one founding families pooled six months of income to purchase the land. Facing the ocean and nestling on the slopes of Manoa Valley in Honolulu, the cemetery of about 10,753 acres in size shelters about 10,000 individual tombs, mostly made of granite. While Chinese in the mainland U.S, had their bones sent back to China for reburial, they kept and cared their tombs and graveyards in America. Chinese wanted to their legacy to be remembered in a country where they had worked, loved, and made significant contributions. They knew that they would become citizens, have family life, and settle down in America if the country did not pass Chinese exclusion laws. In 1908, Pacific Monthly in Portland carried a photo of a Chinese tombstone carved with three Chinese words: 敬如在 (Jing ru zai ). The English inscription above and below the three words was “Chinese Cemetery, In Memory.” The tombstone was inserted in the center of a large piece of stone as a rounded top monument. It was very likely found in the Lone Fir Cemetery, one of the oldest and largest of Portland’s fourteen cemeteries, and the only one on the National Register of Historic Places. Lone Fir has been named one of the world’s top ten cemeteries by National Geographic.) Block 14 in the cemetery buried close to 1500 Chinese men, women, and children and had two massive mass exhumations in 1928 and 1949. Chinse burial logs maintained by the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) contained little information on the remains, except for the directions “Do Not Remove.” The first exhumation sent 615 sets of bones to Hong Kong and the second sent 559 sets. In her documentary film Come Together Home made in 2009, Ivy Lin, 20 an immigrant from Taiwan, traced how these graves were discovered after half a century and how the unearthed bones were shipped to Tung Wah Hospital’s Coffin Home in Hong Kong. There are two other tombstones bearing the same Chinese words found in the contemporary Portland’s Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery. The three Chinese words were not a Chinese name but a memorial inscription meaning: “Honor you as though you were present.” The inscription was based on a famous Confucius saying on death culture: Ji ru zai, ji shen ru shen zai (祭如在, 祭神如神在) which means: “Worship the deceased like God as though they are with us.” While bones of deceased Chinese were shipped back to home, tombstones bearing this inscription were made and delivered from China to America. The tombstones were not in memory of one individual but of the deceased Chinese as a collective. They meant to tell future generations of Americans that Chinese were pioneers in the American West. They made significant contributions to this country. Their legacy was part of American history. As author Maxine Hong Kingston put it: “After the Civil War, China Men banded the nation North and South, East and West, with crisscrossing steel. They were the binding and building ancestors of this place.” Reburial Reversed Again After the 1965 Immigration Act, Chinese immigrants began to come to America in large numbers again. By 2000, Chinese population reached 2,433,000. Most Chinese immigrants came with families. After they settled down in America, some of them purchased graveyards for their deceased parents and brought their remains from Asia. According to USA TODAY in November 1995, “human bones and ashes exhumed from graves in the Far East are arriving in the Bay Area in record numbers.” “Every week, dozens of employees from Bay Area funeral homes head for the airport to pick up remains. Mortuaries that handled reburials once a month in 1988 now do it 10 times a month.” In the early 1990s, many Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong worried about the ending of British colonial rule in 1997. They purchased not only homes in America but also graveyards for their ancestors. Cost for tomb site was also extremely expensive in Hong Kong. In the early 1980, a tomb spot in private cemeteries in Hong Kong could cost 2,500 US dollars. Two public burial yards allowed an “exhumation cycle” of 6-year short stay of the dead and be exhumed to let other dead people for the spot. The reversed reburial followed an immigration procedure. But it was much easier to enter the U.S. dead than alive. “Overseas cemeteries are notified by local mortuaries. Urns containing ashes are padded with Styrofoam. Bones are placed in stainless-steel boxes. Everything goes into a wooden crate and is shipped by air. A death certificate is the only visa needed to get remains into the USA. Customs officials say shipments are opened only if they appear suspicious.” Some Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong sent for ashes of ancestors and buried them in America after they settled down. “In Los Angeles, Universal Chung Wah Funeral Directors handled 50 to 100 Chinese reburials a year; five years ago, the volume was one-third of that. At Rose Hills Memorial Park, in Whittier, California, the number of reburials last year was estimated to be 182 below the record of 242 in 1999 but far above the 21 handful of annual burials in the mid-1990’s.” The reversed reburials returned to Colma too. In 1993, a 13.5-acre graveyard for Chinese was opened and landscaped to conform with thse Chinese feng-shui spirit. The graveyard was filled up quickly. Wealthy people could choose the Skylawn Park cemetery, south of Colma in Half Moon Bay. A family plot with an ocean view would cost up to $287,000. When reversing a tradition that dated to the Gold Rush, Chinese immigrants made one more change in their transnational funeral: they sent for cremated ashes rather than bones of their ancestors. As in bone repatriation, a core value of Chinese death culture remains unchanged in the reversed reburial: home can be relocated but family should not be always apart, even at death. The reversed reburial signaled a confidence and determination of contemporary Chinese immigrants to make America their permanent home, a home not only for themselves and their children but also for their ancestors. 22 Chang, Introduction INTRODUCTION The story of the Chinese in America is the story of a journey, from one of the world’s oldest civilizations to one of its newest. The United States was still a very young country when the Chinese began arriving in significant numbers, and the wide-ranging contributions of these immigrants to the building of their adopted country have made it what it is today. An epic story that spans one and a half centuries, the Chinese American experience still comprises only a fraction of the Chinese diaspora. One hundred fifty years is a mere breath by the standards of Chinese civilization, which measures history by millennia. And three million Chinese Americans are only a small portion of a Chinese overseas community that is at least 36 million strong. This book essentially tells two stories. The first explains why at certain times in China’s history certain Chinese made the very hard and frightening decision to leave the country of their ancestors and the company of their own people to make a new life for themselves in the United States. For the story of the emigration of the Chinese to America is, like many other immigration stories, a push-pull story. People do not casually leave an inherited way of life. Events must be extreme enough at home to compel them to go and alluring enough elsewhere for them to override an almost tribal instinct to stay among their own. The second story examines what happened to these Chinese émigrés once they got here. Did they struggle to find their place in the United States? Did they succeed? And if so, how much more difficult was their struggle because of the racism and xenophobia of other Americans? What were the dominant patterns of assimilation? It would be expected that the first-arriving generations of Chinese, like the first generations of other immigrant groups, would resist the assimilation of their children. But to what degree, and how successfully? This book will also dispel the still pervasive myth that the Chinese all came to America in one wave, at one time. Ask most Americans and even quite a few Americans of Chinese descent when the Chinese came to the United States, and many will tell you of the mid-nineteenth-century Chinese laborers who came to California to chase their dreams on Gold Mountain and ended up laying track for the transcontinental railroad. More than one hundred thousand Chinese laborers, most from a single province, indeed came to America to make their fortunes in the 1849-era California gold rush. But conditions in China were so bad politically, socially, and economically that these émigrés to California represented just a small part of the single biggest migration out of that country in history. Many who left China at this time went to Southeast Asia or elsewhere. Those who chose America were relying on stories that there was enough gold in California to make them all rich quickly, rich enough to allow them to return home as successes, and the decision to leave their ancestral homeland was made bearable only by the promise they made themselves: that no matter what, they would one day return. But most stayed, enduring prejudice and discrimination, and working hard to earn a living, and their heritage is the many crowded Chinatowns dotting America from San Francisco to New York. Of their descendants, however, very few are still laborers or living in Chinatowns; many are not even recognizably Chinese because, like other immigrant groups, their ancestors intermarried. If we restrict the definition of Chinese American to only full-blooded Asians with an ancestral heritage linking them to China, we would exclude the many, many mixed-race descendants of Chinese immigrants. This is just the beginning of the story. In terms of sheer numbers, the majority of Chinese in America probably have no forty-niner ancestors; they are, as I am, either part of later waves or children of those who arrived here more than a century after the gold rush. Life in China had changed dramatically over those one hundred years and sent a second, very different wave of immigrants. After the 1949 Communist revolution, many bureaucrats, professionals, and successful businessmen realized that their futures were not in China. They packed their belongings, often in extreme haste, and left the land of their ancestors. My own parents and grandparents belonged to this group of refugees. For some the destination was America, for others it was Hong Kong, but for most people, such as my family, the next stop would be Taiwan. These émigrés were devoted anti-Communists who longed to return to their homeland. Indeed, many Nationalist legislators considered themselves the official ruling body of China, now forced by wartime expediency to occupy a temporary capital on an offshore island. However, their children were different. For many young Chinese in Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s, nothing was more prestigious or coveted than a scholarship to a top American university. The Nationalist government in Taiwan imposed a restriction on those who wanted to study in the United States—they had to be fluent in English. Thus, making up the second major wave of Chinese coming to America were not just the anti-Communist elites but their most intellectually capable and scientifically directed children. Like many of their peers, my parents came to the United States on scholarships, obtained their doctoral degrees, and later became professors. And across the country, their friends —doctors, scientists, engineers, and academics—shared the same memories and experiences: a forced exile from the mainland as children, first in Taiwan and then in the United States. Most of these newest émigrés did not find their way to the old Chinatowns, other than as tourists, but instead settled in the cities and suburbs around universities and research centers. Because they saw themselves as intellectuals rather than refugees, they were concerned less about preserving their Chinese heritage than with casting their lot with modern America, and eventual American citizenship. It is in connection with these immigrants, not surprisingly, that the term “model minority” first appeared. The term refers to an image of the Chinese as working hard, asking for little, and never complaining. It is a term that many Chinese now have mixed feelings about. Not all of those who arrived here during the mid-twentieth-century second wave were part of this success story, however. Many entered not as students but as political refugees, and often they did end up in American Chinatowns, only to be exploited as cheap labor in factories and restaurants. The arrival of these two disparate contingents in the 1950s and 1960s created a bipolar Chinese community in America, sharply divided by wealth, education, and class. The story does not end here either. A third wave entered the United States during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Interestingly, this large wave encompassed Chinese of all socio-economic groups and backgrounds, who arrived as Sino-American relations thawed and as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) began its rocky transition from a pariah communist state to a tenuously connected capitalist one. Although the three waves came at different times and for different reasons, as Chinese Americans they shared certain common experiences. In the course of writing this book, I discovered that the Chinese in general brought distinctive cultural traits to America—such as reverence for education, hard work, thriftiness, entrepreneurship, and family loyalty— which helped many achieve rapid success in their adopted country. Many Chinese Americans, for example, have served an important “middleman minority” role in the United States by working in occupations in which they act as intermediaries between producers and consumers. As economist Thomas Sowell has noted, middleman minorities typically arrive in their host countries with education, skills, or a set of propitious attitudes about work, such as business frugality and the willingness to take risks. Some slave away in lowly menial jobs to raise capital, then swiftly become merchants, retailers, labor contractors, and money-lenders. Their descendants usually thrive in the professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, or finance. But as with other middleman minorities, the Chinese diaspora generally found it easier to achieve economic and professional success than to acquire actual political power in their adopted countries. Thus the Chinese became, in the words of historian Alexander Saxton, “the indispensable enemy”: a people both needed and deeply feared. Throughout history, both the U.S. government and industry have sought to exploit Chinese labor— either as raw muscle or as brain power—but resisted accepting the Chinese as fellow Americans. The established white elite and the white working class in the United States have viewed the Chinese as perpetual foreigners, a people to be imported or expelled whenever convenient to do one or the other. During an economic depression in the nineteenth century, white laborers killed Chinese competitors and lobbied politicians to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act. Later, in the twentieth century, the United States recruited Chinese scientists and engineers to strengthen American defense during the Cold War, only to harbor suspicions later that some Chinese might be passing nuclear secrets to the PRC. The great irony of the Chinese American experience has been that success can be as dangerous as failure: whenever the ethnic Chinese visibly excelled—whether as menial laborers, scholars, or businessmen—efforts arose simultaneously to depict their contributions not as a boon to white America but as a threat. The mass media have projected contradictory images that either dehumanize or demonize the Chinese, with the implicit message that the Chinese represent either a servile class to be exploited, or an enemy force to be destroyed. This has created identity issues for generations of American-born Chinese: a sense of feeling different, or alien, in their own country; of being subjected to greater scrutiny and judged by higher standards than the general populace. Another important theme has been the struggle of Chinese Americans for justice. A long history of political activism belies the myth that Chinese Americans have stood by and suffered abuse as silent, passive victims. Instead, from the very beginning, they fought racial discrimination in the courts, thereby creating a solid foundation of civil rights law in this country, often to the benefit of other minorities. But with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, large-scale Chinese immigration ceased entirely for eighty years, and at one point the ethnic Chinese population in the United States dwindled to only a few tens of thousands of people. Only new legislation in the middle of the twentieth century permitted the second and third waves of Chinese immigrants to arrive, forcing these newcomers to start almost from scratch as they built their own political coalitions. But build them they did. The stories in this book reveal the ever-precarious status of the Chinese community in America. It has historically been linked to the complex web of international politics, and more recently to the relationship between two of the world’s great powers, the United States and China. When Sino— American relations are excellent, the Chinese Americans benefit as goodwill ambassadors and role models, serving as cultural and economic bridges between the two countries; but when Sino-American relations deteriorate, the Chinese Americans have been vilified as enemies, traitors, and spies—not just in the United States, but in mainland China. To describe the vulnerability of his people, one Chinese American aptly called them “an egg between two big plates.” Throughout history, some Chinese immigrants and even their Americanborn children adopted the naive and misguided notion that if things turned sour for them in the United States, they could always “go back to China.” But as some would learn the hard way, to do so could be dangerous: during the Korean War and the Cultural Revolution, a number of returning Chinese were persecuted in mainland China because of their former association with the United States. Ronald Takaki, an ethnic studies professor at the University of California at Berkeley, once called the Chinese and other Asian Americans “strangers from a different shore.” I propose to take this a step further. At various times in history, the Chinese Americans have been treated like strangers on both shores—a people regarded by two nations as too Chinese to be American, and too American to be Chinese. When I was in junior high school in the early 1980s, a white classmate once asked me, in a friendly, direct manner, “If America and China went to war, which side would you be on?” I had spent all of my twelve years in a university town in Illinois and had never visited either mainland China or Taiwan. Before I could even answer the first question, she continued, “Would you leave and fight for China? Or try to support China from the U.S.?” All I could think of at that moment was how disastrous such a scenario would be for the Chinese American population, who would no doubt find themselves hated by both sides. I don’t remember my exact response, only that I mumbled something along the lines that, if possible, I would try to work for some kind of peace between the two countries. Her question, innocently put, captures the crux of the problem facing the ethnic Chinese today in America. Even though many are U.S. citizens whose families have been here for generations, while others are more recent immigrants who have devoted the best years of their lives to this country with citizenship as their goal, none can truly get past the distinction of race or entirely shake the perception of being seen as foreigners in their own land. Not until many years later did I learn that this very question has been posed to numerous prominent ethnic Chinese throughout American history, ranging from a brilliant aeronautics professor to a political candidate for Congress. Indeed, the attitudes and assumptions behind this question would later drive much of the antiChinese antagonism I have had to describe to make this book an honest chronicle of the Chinese experience in the United States. My classmate unwittingly planted the seed in my psyche that grew into this book. But it was not until the mid-1990s, when my husband and I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, that I really became interested in the history and complexity of the Chinese American population. I learned about a nonprofit organization that would later be known as the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, whose mission was to educate the world about the unrecognized wartime horrors committed by Japan in the Pacific theater. For the first time in my life, I met Chinese Americans who were not simply academics or scientific professionals, but committed activists, driven by idealism I had seen only in organizations such as Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union. These Chinese Americans, working with leaders of other ethnic groups, were outspoken on a wide range of human rights abuses around the globe. Learning from them led me to write The Rape of Nanking, about the rape and massacre of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in the former capital of China. As I toured the United States and Canada giving talks on the subject, I encountered vibrant Chinese American communities that I had not even known existed. The people I met ranged from descendants of transcontinental railroad workers to new immigrants studying here on scholarships, from illiterate factory workers to Nobel laureates at leading universities, from elderly survivors of Japanese wartime atrocities to baby girls adopted by white parents. I had the privilege of talking with several Chinese Americans whose work had transformed entire industries or intellectual disciplines, such as David Henry Hwang, the Tony Awardwinning playwright of M. Butterfly; David Ho, a preeminent medical researcher whose antiviral drugs have helped thousands of AIDS victims; and David Chu, head of the Nautica fashion empire. Soon I learned that all across the United States, Chinese American groups were busy organizing to talk about themselves, their history, and their future, and to make their presence heard in American society. The Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles was preparing a huge exhibit about the Chinese in America. A new museum of Chinese American history was scheduled to open also in Los Angeles. The Chinese community in San Francisco was lobbying for better preservation of the poetry written on the walls of Angel Island, where newly arrived Chinese immigrants were detained and interrogated during the early decades of the twentieth century. Chinese American researchers were demanding full access to the immigration case files stored in the National Archives in San Bruno, California. And new ethnic magazines geared toward younger Chinese and Asian Americans, such as A, Monolid, Face, and Jade, proliferated. It seemed to me there was a big, exciting story to be told. At first, I feared the subject might too broad, but I couldn’t let go of the idea of exploring the history of my people. Moreover, I believed I had a personal obligation to write an honest history of Chinese America, to dispel the offensive stereotypes that had long permeated the U.S. news and entertainment media. Saturday morning cartoons flattened the Chinese into buck-toothed, pigtailed caricatures, with slanted dashes for eyes. Elementary school libraries were still carrying racist, out-of-date textbooks, with images and descriptions of the Chinese eating meals of fermented snails with long, claw-like fingernails. Hollywood films depicted Chinese men as bowing sycophants, spies, or crime kingpins; Chinese women as sex toys or prostitutes. The lack of strong Chinese American role models in popular culture—or even of realistic images of Chinese Americans as diverse and multifaceted human beings—bothered me deeply. People tend to perform at a level society expects of them, not their actual potential, and I imagined there must have been many young Americans of Asian descent who suffered a crisis of confidence as a result of coming to see themselves as they thought others saw them. But worse, I also knew that, based on my knowledge of the literature on genocide, atrocities are more likely to occur if the perpetrators do not see their victims as real people. The first, essential, step toward getting a population to visit torture and mass murder on a group is to dehumanize the group, to reduce them to alien things. This is what those books, films, and television programs were doing; they were far from depicting the kinds of fascinating, complex, accomplished people I knew. There is nothing inherently alien about the Chinese American experience. In the end, the Chinese shared the same problems as all other immigrants—universal problems that recognized no borders: The eternal struggle to make a living and provide their children with food, shelter, and a good education. The exhaustion of striving to sustain cherished values in a changing world. The loss of a place once called home. And yes, the initial reluctance of all people in a new land to drop their cultural habits and risk new associations—only to discover, years later, that they have already done so. If the Chinese American story is a journey, then the writing of this book has been a journey for me as well: one that has taken me deep into a voluminous body of records, including oral histories, autobiographies, Chinese-language newspapers, diaries, court transcripts, immigrations records, and more, all showing the vast range of experiences of a people that have truly helped shape America. Ultimately, in this book, I try to show the Chinese Americans as they really were and are: real, and diverse, flesh-and-blood individuals in search of a dream. All I ask of the reader is to look past ethnicity and see the shared humanity within us all.
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