The Transpacific Experiment
Copyright © 2019 by Matthew Sheehan
First hardcover edition: 2019
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
To explore photos, videos, and interactive graphics related to this book, visit transpacificexperiment.com.
ISBN: 978-1-64009-214-3
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Jacket design by Sarah Brody
Book design by Jordan Koluch
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
TO ALL OF MY TRANSPACIFIC FAMILY—YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE
塞翁失马，焉知非福
The old frontiersman lost his horse—how to know it’s not a blessing?
—CHINESE PROVERB
Contents
Introduction: Welcome to the Transpacific Experiment
2 | Silicon Valley’s China Paradox
3 | Toward the New Tech Landscape
4 | Is Mickey Mouse an American?
6 | A Phoenix Rising from the Toxins
7 | “Chinese Americans for Trump”
Conclusion: Backlash or New Beginning?
WELCOME TO THE TRANSPACIFIC EXPERIMENT
Nestled against the western shores of the San Francisco Bay, Angel Island is both a monument to the past and a window into the future of the world’s two most powerful countries. On the northeast corner of the island lies the Immigration Station, a relic of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. That act of Congress was the capstone to the first era of major face-to-face engagement between Chinese and American people. California was the stage on which these two groups made their first introductions and impressions. They didn’t exactly hit it off.
After the discovery of gold in 1849, tens of thousands of Chinese men made landfall in San Francisco—a city they called “Gold Mountain.” Fleeing famine at home and dreaming of rivers running with precious metals, these men left their villages in southern China and clambered onto wooden ships that would carry them across the Pacific. In California they dug for nuggets, cooked for cash, and earned a reputation as cheap but extremely valuable laborers. When Leland Stanford and his fellow robber barons set out to build the western segment of the transcontinental railroad, they enlisted Chinese workers for the most crucial and the most dangerous tasks.
But these men entered an America rife with economic anxiety and racial resentment. To Irish laborers in San Francisco—men like my great-great-grandfather—these Chinese arrivals were seen as a threat to their jobs and an affront to their identity. Newspapers and dime novels spread fears of a “yellow peril” descending on American shores. Demagogues thrived, blaming the new Chinese arrivals when banking crises dragged down the American economy. Thugs carried out lynchings at Chinese labor camps, and California’s own governor demanded that Congress “check this tide of Asiatic immigration.”
Those clamoring for a law excluding Chinese laborers sparred with men like Wong Chin Foo, a naturalized American citizen who became one of the most outspoken defenders of Chinese rights.
“As residents of the United States, we claim a common manhood with all other nationalities,” Wong wrote in 1893, “and believe we should have that manhood recognized according to the principles of common humanity and American freedom.”
But those principled appeals largely fell on deaf ears among white immigrants resentful of the new competition. My own great-great-grandfather arrived in San Francisco in the 1870s, working at the Pacific Rolling Mill and living in a tough part of town known as Irish Hill. Our family doesn’t have any record of him participating in anti-Chinese activity, but he certainly fit the demographic profile: a working-class Irish Catholic immigrant laborer, scratching to carve out his space in a new city and country.
His son and my great-grandfather, Tommy Sheehan, was born in San Francisco in 1879, three years before the Chinese Exclusion Act became law. Orphaned at a young age, Tommy grew up in Saint Vincent’s Home for Boys and went on to become a San Francisco longshoreman and union organizer. In that role, he befriended Peter C. Yorke, a priest and vocal advocate for Irish laborers. Tommy used to drive Yorke around the city on weekends, smoking cigarettes and talking shop. In our family, Yorke is remembered as a righteous defender of the working man. But he did not extend that empathy to Chinese laborers. Keynoting the 1901 California Chinese Exclusion Convention, Yorke railed against Chinese people who remained in the country during the exclusion era.
“We are face-to-face with an immigration which is emphatically not Christian,” Yorke told the crowd. “Their thoughts are not our thoughts; their blood is not our blood; their outlook is not our outlook.”1
Four years after that speech, construction began on the Angel Island Immigration Station, where thousands of Chinese people looking to make a home in California would be held. One of the few exceptions in the Chinese Exclusion Act allowed for children and spouses of Chinese people in America to follow their relatives over. The Immigration Station hosted interrogations designed to separate out true blood relatives from “paper sons”—people who would claim a false familial relation in order to enter the country.
Immigration officials would have new arrivals draw their family trees and maps of their home villages. Virtually all Chinese laborers in the U.S. were recruited from just a handful of counties in the