Lectures

Lecture 10

The Chinese in California

The first Chinese people arrived in California in the 1600s, with the Spanish explorers. A few more trickled in over the next two centuries, but the Chinese government prohibited travel outside China for its citizens, so they were few in number. But in the 1800s, that changed. Word of the Gold Rush reached China at a time when much of the country was suffering from famine and war, and the temptation of gold was great enough to overcome the prohibitions of law and tradition. Thousands travelled to California to try to make their fortune.

Many were successful. The Chinese tended to work in teams (as opposed to the Anglo miners, who worked alone or in pairs), and they worked hard and usually didn't drink or spend freely when they found gold. They had no intention of settling in California: they were there to make money so they could take it home to China and return to their families.

But before long, their success created jealousy and hostility. In 1850, California passed the Foreign Miners' License Law, which imposed a tax of $20 a month--a huge sum at the time--on all foreign miners. This drove many foreign miners out of business, including many Chinese miners, who moved to San Francisco to try to find work. There, they found work, although they also faced discrimination as well. In 1854, a man named George W. Hall was convicted of murdering a Chinese man. He appealed to the State Supreme Court, where the decision was overturned because all of the evidence against him was from Chinese individuals. The Chief Justice, Hugh Murray, said that Section 14 of the Criminal Act, which stated that "no Black or Mulatto person or Indian shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of, or against, a White man," applied to Chinese as well. From then on, Chinese testimony was not allowed in courts of law in California. Later that same year, the federal courts declared that because Chinese were not white, they could not be granted citizenship. In the 1890s, laws were passed which prohibited immigration to the United States for almost all Chinese people, and in 1924, the National Origins Act extended the prohibition to almost all Asians. In 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the Act to Repeal the Chinese Exclusion Acts, which allowed more Chinese immigration and paved the way for less discriminatory treatment in the courts. By the end of the 1940s, Asian citizens could apply for and be granted naturalization.

The role for which the Chinese are most known in California history is their part in the building of the railroads, especially the Intercontinental Railroad. It was hard to find people to work on the railroads, especially competent people. The work was grueling, and the accident rate, especially among those working with explosives, was higher than in any other job in the United States. Central Pacific General Superintendent Charles Crocker suggested that Chinese be hired, saying that a group who had built the Great Wall of China and invented gunpowder couldn't be all bad. His Irish construction superintendent, J. H. Strobridge, resisted adamantly: "I will not boss Chinese. I will not be responsible for work done on the road by Chinese labor." But eventually, he agreed to try a small crew. He found them so competent that he ended up hiring 12,000 Chinese workers.

They worked under appalling conditions.

They were paid $26-$35 a month for a 12-hour day, 6-day work week and had to provide their own food and tents. White workers received about $35 a month and were furnished with food and shelter. Incredibly, the Chinese immigrant workers saved as much as $20 a month which many eventually used to buy land. These workers quickly earned a reputation as tireless and extraordinarily reliable workers...The work was grueling, performed almost entirely by hand. With pickaxes, hammers, and crowbars, workers chipped out railbeds. Dirt and rock were carried away in baskets and carts. Tree stumps had to be rooted out, tracks laid, spikes driven, and aquaducts and tunnels constructed. To carve out a rail bed from ridges that jutted up 2,000 over the valley below, Chinese immigrants were lowered in baskets to hammer at solid shale and granite and insert dynamite. During the winter of 1865-1866, when the railroad carved passages through the summit of the Sierra Nevadas, 3,000 lived and worked in tunnels dug beneath 40-foot snowdrifts. Accidents, avalanches, and explosions left an estimated 1,200 Chinese immigrant workers dead" ("Chinese Immigrants and the Building of the Transcontinental Railroad").

Frank Chin

Frank Chin was born in 1940 in Berkeley, California. He attended the University of California at Berkeley, the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was the first Chinese-American brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad, and later, the first Chinese-American playwright to have his work staged in New York: The Chickencoop Chinaman was performed at the American Place Theatre in 1972. He has taught at the University of California, Davis and the University of California, Berkeley.

Chin made himself controversial when he attacked Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and several other Chinese-American writers for perpetuating stereotypes of the Chinese.

Among his works are:

• The Chickencoop Chinaman (1971)
• The Year of the Dragon (1974)
• Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974)
• The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co. (1988)
• Donald Duk (1991)
• The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature (1991)
• Gunga Din Highway (1994)
• Bulletproof Buddhists and Other Essays (1998)
• Born in the USA: A Story of Japanese America, 1889-1947 (2002)

If you'd like more information on any of the topics covered in this lecture, go to the Links page. Enjoy!

Some of the information in this lecture derives from:

1. "Chinese Immigrants and the Building of the Transcontinental Railroad," Digital History, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/china1.cfm
2. Wesley S. Griswold, A Work of Giants, 1962.
3. Stephen Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, 2000.

California is a tragic country - like Palestine, like every Promised Land.
~ Christopher Isherwood