CHAPTER IX
THE ORIENTAL
America, midway between Europe and Asia, was destined to be the meeting-ground of Occident and Orient. It was in the exciting days of '49 that gold became the lodestone to draw to California men from the oriental lands across the Pacific. The Chinese for the moment overcame their religious aversion to leaving their native haunts and, lured by the promise of fabulous wages, made their way to the "gold hills." Of the three hundred thousand who came to America during the three decades of free entry, the large majority were peasants from the rural districts in the vicinity of Canton. They were thrifty, independent, sturdy, honest young men who sought the great adventure unaccompanied by wife or family. Chinese tradition forbade the respectable woman to leave her home, even with her husband; and China was so isolated from the world, so encrusted in her own traditions that out of her uncounted millions even the paltry thousands of peasants and workmen who filtered through the port of Canton into the great world were bound by ancient precedent as firmly as if they had remained at home. They invariably planned to return to the Celestial Empire and it was their supreme wish that, if they died abroad, their bodies be buried in the land of their ancestors.
The Chinaman thus came to America as a workman adventurer, not as a prospective citizen. He preserved his queue, his pajamas, his chopsticks, and his joss in the crude and often brutal surroundings of the mining camp. He maintained that gentle, yielding, unassertive character which succumbs quietly to pressure at one point, only to reappear silently and unobtrusively in another place. In the wild rough and tumble of the camp, where the outlaw and the bully found congenial refuge, the celestial did not belie his name. He was indeed of another world, and his capacity for patience, his native dignity without suspicion of hauteur, baffled the loud self-assertion of the Irish and the Anglo-Saxon.
During the first years of the gold rush, the Chinaman was welcome in California because he was necessary. He could do so many things that the miner disdained or found no time to do. He could cook and wash, and he could serve. He was a rare gardener and a patient day laborer. He could learn a new trade quickly. In the city he became a useful domestic servant at a time when there were very few women. In all his tasks he was neat and had a genius for noiselessly minding his own business.
As the number of miners increased, race prejudice asserted itself. "California for Americans" came to be a slogan that reflected their feelings against Mexicans, Spanish-Americans, and Chinese in the mines. Race riots, often instigated by men who had themselves but recently immigrated to America, were not infrequent. In these disorders the Chinese were no match for the aggressors and in consequence were forced out of many good mining claims.
The labor of the cheap and faithful Chinese appealed to the business instincts of the railroad contractors who were constructing the Pacific railways and they imported large numbers. In 1866 a line of steamships was established to run regularly between Hong Kong and San Francisco. In 1869 the first transcontinental railway was completed and American laborers from the East began to flock to California, where they immediately found themselves in competition with the Mongolian standard of living. Race rivalry soon flared up and the anti-Chinese sentiment increased as the railroads neared completion and threw more and more of the oriental laborers into the general labor market. Chinese were hustled out of towns. Here and there violence was done. For example, in the Los Angeles riots of October 24, 1871, fifteen Chinamen were hanged and six were shot by the mob.
This prejudice, based primarily upon the Chinaman's willingness to work long hours for little pay and to live in quarters and upon fare which an Anglo-Saxon would find impossible, was greatly increased by his strange garb, language, and customs. The Chinaman remained in every essential a foreigner. In his various societies he maintained to some degree the patriarchal government of his native village. He shunned American courts, avoided the Christian religion, rarely learned much of the English language, and displayed no desire to become naturalized. Instead of sympathy in the country of his sojourn he met discrimination, jealousy, and suspicion. For many years his testimony was not permitted in the courts. His contact with only the rough frontier life failed to reveal to him the gentle amenities of the white man's faith, and everywhere the upper hand seemed turned against him. So he kept to himself, and this isolation fed the rumors that were constantly poisoning public opinion. Chinatown in the public mind became a synonym for a nightmare of filth, gambling, opium-smoking, and prostitution.
Alarm was spreading among Americans concerning the organizations of the Chinese in the United States. Of these, the Six Companies were the most famous. Mary Roberts Coolidge, after long and careful research, characterized these societies as "the substitute for village and patriarchal association, and although purely voluntary and benevolent in their purpose, they became, because of American ignorance and prejudice, the supposed instruments of tyranny over their countrymen."[[45]] They each had a club house, where members were registered and where lodgings and other accommodations were provided. The largest in 1877 had a membership of seventy-five thousand; the smallest, forty-three thousand. The Chinese also maintained trade guilds similar in purpose to the American trade union. Private or secret societies also flourished among them, some for good purposes, others for illicit purposes. Of the latter the Highbinders or Hatchet Men became the most notorious, for they facilitated the importation of Chinese prostitutes. Many of these secret societies thrived on blackmail, and the popular antagonism to the Six Companies was due to the outrages committed by these criminal associations.