Emergent U.S. Literatures. Cyrus Patell

acres of land were still under Native control, and many Natives were left landless.³³

      Gold Mountain

      When gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1849, white Easterners and European immigrants began to flock to California, but they weren’t the only ones: 325 Chinese migrants arrived in California that year to participate in the Gold Rush, followed the next year by 450 of their compatriots. Starting in 1851, however, the number of Chinese emigrating to California began to rise dramatically, with more than 2,500 arriving that year and more than 20,000 arriving in 1852, bringing the total of Chinese immigrants to about 25,000. By 1870 there were approximately 63,000 Chinese in the United States, the majority of them (77 percent) living in California. By 1890, three years after the Dawes Act, there were 107,488 “Chinese” living in the United States.³⁴ (In the U.S. Census, “Chinese” was a racial definition that included both immigrants from China and their descendants.)

      The Chinese men who first emigrated to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century were known as gam saan haak, “travelers to the Gold Mountain,” and they thought of themselves as “sojourners.” Initially, these Chinese men were welcomed as visitors who could assist in fostering California’s economic growth; mid-nineteenth-century accounts referred to these Chinese migrants as “Celestials” (since China was often called the “Celestial Empire”). California’s leading newspaper, the San Francisco Daily Alta California, wrote in 1852 that “quite a large number of the Celestials have arrived among us of late…. Scarcely a ship arrives that does not bring an increase to this worthy integer of our population. The China boys will yet vote at the polls, study in the same schools and bow at the same altar of our own countrymen.” The governor of California, John McDougal, told the legislature at the beginning of 1852 that the Chinese constituted “one of the most worthy classes of our newly adopted citizens—to whom the climate and the character of these lands are peculiarly suited”—apparently failing to remember that Chinese were prohibited from becoming American citizens by the 1790 Naturalization Act, which restricted the privilege of naturalization to “white” immigrants. Throughout the 1850s, California’s popular press contained numerous articles presenting favorable portraits of Chinese immigrants.³⁵

      These views, however, were not shared by white workers with whom the Chinese were competing for jobs. As early as the spring of 1852, there was considerable anti-Chinese sentiment among white miners, and their agitation led to the passage of a new foreign miners’ license tax, which appeared to apply to all immigrant miners but was in reality aimed specifically at the Chinese. It stipulated that a monthly tax of three dollars was to be paid by any miner who did not intend to become an American citizen; Chinese were prohibited from having this intent. “In California,” wrote Mark Twain in Roughing It (1872), a Chinese man “gets a living out of old mining claims that white men have abandoned as exhausted and worthless—and then the officers come down on him once a month with an exorbitant swindle to which the legislature has given the broad, general name of ‘foreign’ mining tax, but is usually inflicted on no foreigners but Chinamen.”³⁶ This miner’s tax remained in place until it was theoretically abolished by the Civil Rights Act of 1870.

      In “The Grandfather of the Sierra Nevada Mountains,” from China Men (1980), Maxine Hong Kingston imagines the sojourner’s life that her grandfather Ah Goong led while working for the Central Pacific. It was one of Ah Goong’s “peculiarities,” Kingston writes, “that he heard the crackles, bangs, gunshots that go off when the world lurches; the gears on its axis Snap. Listening to a faraway New Year, he had followed the noise and came upon the blasting in the Sierras…. The Central Pacific hired him on sight; chinamen had a natural talent for explosions.” Chinese migrants had begun to work in greater and greater numbers for the Central Pacific Railroad when profits from mining started to decrease in the early 1860s. By 1867, there were 12,000 Chinese working for the line (representing 90 percent of its entire work force).³⁷

      Kingston’s story depicts Ah Goong’s experiences during the strike of 1867, which took place after the railroad proposed to raise wages four dollars per month (to thirty-five) while requiring Chinese workers to work ten-hour shifts. Five thousand Chinese workers walked out, demanding wages of forty-five dollars (a raise of fourteen dollars) and a work-day equal in length to that of white workers: “Eight hours a day good for white man, all the same good for Chinamen” was their slogan. Because the white workers did not join the strike and because the railroad managed to cut off the strikers’ food supply, the matter was settled in nine days, and the final compromise was a four-dollar raise and the same eight-hour shift. “The China Men went back to work quietly,” writes Kingston. “No use singing and shouting over a compromise and losing nine days’ work.” What was a cause for celebration was the completion of the railroad in 1869; Kingston describes the scene at Promontory Point when the two tracks were connected at last: “A white demon in top hat tap-tapped on the gold spike, and pulled it back out. Then one China Man held the real spike, the steel one, and another hammered it in.”³⁸ Contemporary commentators noted the contribution made to the project by the Chinese: “The dream of Thomas Jefferson, and the desires of Thomas Hart Benton’s heart,” wrote one magazine writer in an essay called “Manifest Destiny in the West,” “have been wonderfully fulfilled, so far as the Pacific Railroad and the trade with the old world of the East is concerned. But even they did not prophesy that Chinamen should build the Pacificward end of the road.”³⁹ Ah Goong has misguidedly purchased worthless papers from a “Citizenship Judge,” but it is “having built the railroad” that makes him feel truly American.⁴⁰

      Although Chinese workers were first hired by the railroad in February of 1865, Kingston places Ah Goong with the railroad in the spring of 1863, allowing her to write that Ah Goong was also hired “because there were not enough workingmen to do all the labor of building a new country” and to add wryly that “some of the banging” that Ah Goong heard “came from the war to decide whether or not black people would continue to work for nothing.”⁴¹ The link between Chinese and blacks here is not idle, for as Ronald Takaki has argued, racial characteristics previously associated only with blacks were easily transferred to the Chinese, because many of the Europeans and Americans who were coming to California from the East had never seen a Chinese person before. They therefore simply assumed that the Chinese were equivalent to the non-white peoples with whom they were familiar: Indians and blacks.⁴² After a change in editorial leadership, the Daily Alta California proclaimed in 1853, “we have a class here … who have most of the vices of the African and they are numerous in both town and country. We allude to the Chinese. Every reason that exists against the toleration of free blacks in Illinois may be argued against that of the Chinese here.”⁴³ White miners often referred to the Chinese as “nagurs” and described them along with blacks as savage, childlike, lustful—in short, physically and morally inferior. The black population in California in 1852 was approximately 2,200, less than a tenth of the Chinese population, and it is thought that the stereotypes of blacks found in the popular press were imported by white Southerners who moved to California during the Gold Rush and who represented approximately one-third of the total population of California at this time. But because anti-black racism had been a part of the national consciousness for so long, it provided a ready-made template for the description and judgment of other peoples of color.⁴⁴