The childless Curtises, newspapers noted, considered Ye to be a son and not just a servant. Journalists covering the funeral suggested that the boundaries that divided families from their hired servants, capital from labor, and white Americans from Chinese immigrants could collapse under the weight of the type of mutual affection that the Curtises and Ye had developed for each other. The extravagant cost of Ye’s burial was cited as evidence to this point. The marble, granite, and brick tomb required the labor of three different stonecutting and masonry firms and cost Curtis twelve hundred dollars. It would have taken a Chinese servant in California earning typical wages of twenty-five dollars a month four years to make this sum. The elaborate expense also reflected the security features built into the tomb, which included a twenty-two-hundred-pound granite slab that required twelve men to roll into place. Curtis’s efforts to keep Ye buried and underground became a central fixation of the media, which relayed rumors that the enormous stone lid was installed to prevent Ye’s relatives from exhuming and returning his remains to China. The practice of having Chinese immigrants’ remains sent back to China was frequently cited as evidence that laborers chose to be sojourners in the United States and were uninterested in assimilating.4 In an 1869 speech he delivered in Boston, Frederick Douglass argued that Chinese immigrants’ desire to return posthumously to China would change with time and was not a sufficient reason for denying them the right to citizenship—which the 1870 Naturalization Act would do one year later. Douglass predicted: “He will not be long in finding out that a country which is good enough to live in, is good enough to die in; and that a soil that was good enough to hold his body while alive, will be good enough to hold his bones when he is dead.”5 In Ye’s case, his permanent incorporation into the earth that constituted American sovereign territory was ensured at great cost. It came, however, not as a citizen endowed with equal rights, but as a Christian servant guarded by his master. The intimate labor that Ye performed produced his racial identity and the terms of his inclusion, even in death.6
A North Carolinian by birth, Curtis would have been familiar with the commemorative narratives that white southerners deployed to extol the virtues of deceased “loyal” slaves and, in the postbellum period, free black workers they deemed compliant. The enactment of these rituals actively suppressed “market forces and economic exigency,” historian Micki McElya observes, as well as the violence and inequality that were the very foundations of the master and servant relationship.7 The framing of Ye’s death enlisted similarly evasive tropes, refashioned, however, to commend not only his loyalty but also his spiritual conversion by way of the labor marketplace. Nevertheless, no matter how much the coverage of Ye’s funeral emphasized the emotional and religious bonds between him and the Curtises, the other values produced through this relationship slipped out as well. The New York Times, for instance, informed readers that “the flowers which [Ye] had cultivated in his life are being transplanted to bloom over his grave.”8
The political implications of Curtis’s decision to employ a Chinese servant had different resonances still. By 1874, white antagonism toward Chinese immigration was mounting in California, and as a politician and public figure, Curtis had to be cautious about his hiring practices. The Sacramento Daily Union reported—without referencing its source—that Ye himself favored restrictions on Chinese immigration for religious reasons. Before his death, the paper quoted him as saying: “it was a disgrace to Christian civilization to permit the Chinese to live here, as the class of Chinese who come here were of the lower classes.”9 In 1877, only three years after Ye’s passing, Curtis campaigned for a seat in the California Senate by asserting that he had “always been opposed to Chinese labor and in favor of white labor over Chinese competition.” He added that he had no objections to proposals that called for “arresting Chinese immigration and sending the Chinamen out of the country.” During the same campaign, Curtis tried to deflect attention away from his role in eliminating language from a bill that would have, if passed in its original form, prohibited California counties from issuing Southern Pacific Railroad construction bonds unless the company agreed to employ white labor exclusively.10 The inconsistencies between Curtis’s anti-Chinese pledges and his personal and professional actions failed to doom his campaign, and he emerged victorious in the election.
Curtis may have refused to see a contradiction in his love of Ye and his support for Chinese exclusion. He may have indeed believed that, as a Christian servant, Ye belonged to an entirely different class of Chinese altogether. More pragmatically, California’s middle classes were reluctant to surrender the services that they had become dependent upon. It was one thing to rhetorically invoke “pioneer” days gone by when, as one memoirist recalled, even the governor of California tended his own garden.11 It was another matter to enact this type of self-sufficiency in practice.
The hypocrisy of white employers who opposed Chinese immigration but continued to rely on Chinese servants did not go unnoticed. In October 1877, for instance, a cartoon in the Wasp attacked Richard Josiah Hinton, the editor of the San Francisco Post, who frequently penned columns castigating businesses that employed Chinese immigrants. In the cartoon, Hinton is shown eagerly awaiting the delivery of his meal from his Chinese cook, while a Chinese servant dusts in the background. (The cartoon, “A Hint-On the Chinese Question,” appears as Figure 2 in the insert to this book.)
To those who heeded the Post’s advice, the cartoon offered (in what the editors no doubt thought was a clever pun) a “hint on” the complex realities of the “Chinese Question.” In November 1882, six months after the passage of the first Chinese Restriction Act, the Christian Advocate derided the soon-to-be Democratic governor of California, George Stoneman, after it was discovered that he employed Chinese servants at his family’s estate in the San Gabriel Valley. Eager to paint western politicians as engaging in the state’s anti-Chinese furor for cynical, vote-hunting reasons, the Advocate observed that Stoneman’s actions showed “the precise degree of sympathy which dwells in the bosoms of these politicians for the ‘poor, down-trodden white laborer, who is ruined by Chinese cheap labor.’ ” Stoneman, meanwhile, defended his family’s employment practices by claiming that his wife managed the family’s household affairs without his input.12 While Stoneman sought to reinforce a neat distinction between public and domestic affairs, it is clear that the politics of employing Chinese labor had eroded these boundaries.
How Ye viewed the social and economic relationship that he entered into with the Curtis family is impossible to determine with any certainty. His most immediate actions must be understood in the context of his need to plot for his survival as a nine-year-old boy apparently living alone in San Francisco. Accepting an arrangement that made him a dependent of the Curtises would have been an obvious move in the absence of kin or other Chinese immigrants willing to protect him. Orphans of all backgrounds were fostered out and brokered as labor, in order to relieve whatever costs that governments and social welfare institutions might otherwise have to assume for their care. As Ye aged, he seems to have developed a genuine belief in the Presbyterian faith that the Curtises exposed him to, to the extent that he was willing to identify with white restrictionists’ goals for limiting “heathen” and unassimilable Chinese laborers. Then again, if he was indeed the son of more affluent Chinese immigrants, he may have been predisposed to such views anyway. Since he died when he was only eighteen, it is hard to forecast what the future might have held for him. It was not uncommon for Chinese servants to use white missionaries and Christianity, whether they were believers or not, to advance their own interests. Missionaries overwhelmingly belonged to the middle class and were valuable allies to Chinese servants who wished to open laundries, restaurants, or other businesses that allowed them to transition from household service to service work where they controlled the means of production. Whether he went on to pursue a career in the ministry or another vocation, it is doubtful that Ye would have remained a devoted servant for the remainder of his life. If the Curtises indeed saw him as a son, would they have wanted him to?
* * *
When I visited Ye’s grave site in March 2014, it beckoned both as a monument to the historical subjects whose lives had already commanded my focus for years, and as a figurative