CHAPTER 54
Of course there was a large Chinese populationⒺexplanatory note in Virginia—it is the case with every town and city on the Pacific coast. They are a harmless race when white men either let them alone or treat them no worse than dogs; in fact they are almost entirely harmless anyhow, for they seldom think of resenting the vilest insults or the cruelest injuries. They are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as industrious as the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist. So long as a Chinaman has strength to use his hands he needs no support from anybody; white men often complain of want of work, but a Chinaman offers no such complaint; he always manages to find something to do. He is a great convenience to everybody—even to the worst class of white men, for he bears the most of their sins, suffering fines for their petty thefts, imprisonment for their robberies, and death for their murders. Any white man can swear a Chinaman’s life away in the courts, but no Chinaman can testify against a white manⒺexplanatory note. Ours is the “land of the free”—nobody denies that—nobody challenges it. [Maybe it is because we won’t let other people testify.] As I write, news comes that in broad daylight in San Francisco, some boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death, and that although a large crowd witnessed the shameful deed, no one interferedⒺexplanatory note.
There are seventy thousand (and possibly one hundred thousand) Chinamen on the Pacific coast. There were about a thousand in Virginia. They were penned into a “Chinese quarter”—a thing which they do not particularly object to, as they are fond of herding together. Their buildings were of wood; usually only one story high, and set thickly together along streets scarcely wide enough for a wagon to pass through. Their quarter was a little removed from the rest of the town. The chief employment of Chinamen in [begin page 370] towns is to wash clothing. They always send a bill, like this belowⒺexplanatory note, pinned to the clothes. It is mere ceremony, for it does not enlighten the customer much. Their price for washing was $2.50 per
All Chinamen can read, write and cipher with easy facility—pity but all our petted voters could. In California they rent little patches of ground and do a deal of gardening. They will raise surprising crops of vegetables on a sand pile. They waste nothing. What is rubbish to a Christian, a Chinaman carefully preserves and makes useful in one way or another. He gathers up all the old oyster and sardine cans that white people throw away, and procures marketable tin and solder from them by melting. He gathers up old bones and turns them into manure. In California he 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 it is usually inflicted on no foreigners but ChinamenⒺexplanatory note. This swindle has in some cases been repeated once or twice on the same victim in the course of the same month—but the public treasury was not additionally enriched by it, probably.
Chinamen hold their dead in great reverence—they worship their departed ancestors, in fact. Hence, in China, a man’s front [begin page 371] yard, back yard, or any other part of his premises, is made his family burying ground, in order that he may visit the graves at any and
A Chinaman hardly believes he could enjoy the hereafter except his body lay in his beloved China; also, he desires to receive, himself, after death, that worship with which he has honored his dead that preceded him. Therefore, if he visits a foreign country, he makes arrangements to have his bones returned to China in case he dies; if he hires to go to a foreign country on a labor contract, [begin page 372] there is always a stipulation that his body shall be taken back to China if he dies; if the government sells a gang of Coolies to a foreigner for the usual five-year termⒺexplanatory note, it is specified in the contract that their bodies shall be restored to China in case of death. On the Pacific coast the Chinamen all belong to one or another of several great companies or organizations, and these companies keep track of their members, register their names, and ship their bodies home when they die. The See Yup Company is held to be the largest of these. The Ning Yeong Company is next, and numbers eighteen thousand members on the coast. Its headquartersⒶemendation are at San Francisco, where it has a costly temple, several great officers (one of whom keeps regal state in seclusion and cannot be approached by common humanity), and a numerous priesthood. In it I was shown a register of its members, with the dead and the date of their shipment to China duly markedⒺexplanatory note. Every ship that sails from San Francisco carries away a heavy freight of Chinese corpses—or did, at least, until the legislature, with an ingenious refinement of Christian cruelty, forbade the shipments, as a neat underhanded way of deterring Chinese immigration. The bill was offered, whether it passed or notⒺexplanatory note. It is my impression that it passed. There was another bill—it became a law—compelling every incoming Chinaman to be vaccinated on the wharf and pay a duly appointed quack (no decent doctor would defile himself with such legalized robbery) ten dollars for itⒺexplanatory note. As few importers of Chinese would want to go to an expense like that, the law-makersⒶemendation thought this would be another heavy blow to Chinese immigration.
What the Chinese quarter of Virginia was like—or, indeed, what the Chinese quarter of any Pacific coast town was and is like—may be gathered from this item which I printed in the Enterprise while reporting for that paper:
Chinatown.—Accompanied by a fellow reporter, we made a trip through our Chinese quarter the other night. The Chinese have built their portion of the city to suit themselves; and as they keep neither carriages nor wagons, their streets are not wide enough, as a general thing, to admit of the passage of vehicles. At ten o’clock at night the Chinaman may be seen in all his glory. In every little cooped-up, dingy cavern of a hut, faint with the odor of burning Josh-lightsⒺexplanatory note and with nothing to see the gloom by save the sickly, guttering tallow candle, were two or three yellow, long- [begin page 373] tailed vagabonds, coiled up on a sort of short truckle-bed, smoking opium, motionless and with their lustreless eyes turned inward from excess of satisfaction—or rather the recent smoker looks thus, immediately after having passed the pipe to his neighbor—for opium-smoking is a comfortless operation, and requires constant attention. A lamp sits on the bed, the length of the long pipe-stem from the smoker’s mouth; he puts a pellet of opium on the end of a wire, sets it on fire, and plasters it into the pipe much as a Christian would fill a hole with putty; then he applies the bowl to the lamp and proceeds to smoke—and the stewing and frying of the drug and the gurgling of the juices in the stem would wellnigh turn the stomach of a statue. John likes it, though; it soothes him, he takes about two dozen whiffs, and then rolls over to dream, Heaven only knows what, for we could not imagine by looking at the soggy creature. Possibly in his visions he travels far away from the gross world and his regular washing, and feasts on succulent rats and birds’-nests in Paradise.
Mr. Ah Sing keeps a general grocery and provision store at No. 13 Wang street. He lavished his hospitality upon our party in the friendliest way. He had various kinds of colored and colorless wines and brandies, with unpronounceableⒶemendation names, imported from China in little crockery jugs, and which he offered to us in dainty little miniature wash-basins of porcelain. He offered us a mess of birds’-nests; also, small, neat sausages, of which we could have swallowed several yards if we had chosen to try, but we suspected that each link contained the corpse of a mouse, and therefore refrained. Mr. Sing had in his store a thousand articles of merchandise, curious to behold, impossible to imagine the uses of, and beyond our ability to describe.
His ducks, however, and his eggs, we could understand; the former were split open and flattened out like codfish, and came from China in that shape, and the latter were plastered over with some kind of paste which kept them fresh and palatable through the long voyage.
We found Mr. Hong Wo, No. 37 Chow-chow street, making up a lottery scheme—in fact we found a dozen others occupied in the same way in various parts of the quarter, for about every third Chinaman runs a lottery, and the balance of the tribe “buck” at it. “Tom,” who speaks faultless English, and used to be chief and only cook to the Territorial Enterprise, when the establishment kept bachelor’s hall two years agoⒺexplanatory note, said that “Sometime Chinaman buy ticket one dollar hap, ketch um two tree hundred, sometime no ketch um anyting; lottery like one man fight um seventy—may-be he whip, may-be he get whip heself, welly good.” However, the percentage being sixty-nine against him, the chances are, as a general thing, that “he get whip heself.” We could not see that these lotteries differed in any respect from our own, save that the figures being Chinese, no ignorant white man might ever hope to succeed in telling “t’other from which;” the manner of drawing is similar to ours.
[begin page 374] Mr. See Yup keeps a fancy store on Live Fox street. He sold us fans of white feathers, gorgeously ornamented; perfumery that smelled like Limburger cheese, Chinese pens, and watch-charms made of a stone unscratchable with steel instruments, yet polished and tinted like the inner coat of a sea-shell.* As tokens of his esteem, See Yup presented the party with gaudy plumes made of gold tinsel and trimmed with peacocks’ feathers.
We ate chow-chow with chop-sticks in the celestial restaurants; our comrade chided the moon-eyed damsels in front of the houses for their want of feminine reserve; we received protecting Josh-lights from our hosts and “dickered” for a pagan God or two. Finally, we were impressed with the genius of a Chinese book-keeper; he figured up his accounts on a machine like a gridironⒶemendation with buttons strung on its bars; the different rows represented units, tens, hundreds and thousands. He fingered them with incredible rapidity—in fact, he pushed them from place to place as fast as a musical professor’s fingers travel over the keys of a piano.Ⓐtextual note Ⓔexplanatory note
They are a kindly disposed, well-meaning race, and are respected and well treated
by the upper
classes, all over the Pacific coast. No
*A peculiar species of the “jade-stone”—to a Chinaman peculiarly precious. [begin page 375] Californian gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman, under any circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the eastⒶemendation. Only the scum of the population do it—they and their children; they, and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise, for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as well as elsewhere in America.
As I write . . . some boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death . . . no one interfered] Clemens probably read the following item in the New York Tribune for 3 June 1871 (1):
San Francisco, June 2.—The police are endeavoring to arrest a gang of boys who stoned to death an inoffensive Chinaman on Fourth-st. yesterday afternoon. Dozens of people witnessed the assault, but did not interfere until the murder was complete. No attempt was then made to arrest the murderers.
In May 1870 (and again in 1906), Clemens recalled having written a similar report himself in 1864, only to have it suppressed by his employer, the San Francisco Morning Call, because of the paper’s anti-Chinese bias. The 1870 article, published in the Galaxy, included an ironic defense of a San Francisco youth arrested for stoning a Chinese, concluding that everything in the boy’s training “conspired to teach him that it was a high and holy thing to stone a Chinaman, and yet he no sooner attempts to do his duty than he is punished for it” (SLC 1870f, 723; AD, 13 June 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE , 256–57; CofC , 24–27).
an exorbitant swindle . . . “foreign” mining tax . . . usually inflicted on no foreigners but Chinamen] In April 1850 California enacted a tax, in the form of an obligatory license, on all foreigners working mining claims; from 1856 to 1870 the fee for this license was four dollars a month. In practice the tax began within a few years to be “exacted exclusively from Chinese miners”:
[begin page 688] The income from the Foreign Miners’ licenses in the decade from 1854 to 1865, amounted to one-eighth, and for the whole period from 1850 to 1870, to one-half, of the total income of the State from all sources. From 1855 onward, it is conceded by all authorities that the Chinese paid practically the whole of these taxes—a sum amounting altogether to nearly five million dollars. (Coolidge, 36)
On 31 May 1870 the tax was invalidated by federal law (Wheat, 353–55 n. 4; Sanger, 140, 144).
Mr. Burlingame said that herein lay China’s bitter opposition to railroads . . . graves of their ancestors or friends] Anson Burlingame (1820–70) was educated at the University of Michigan and Harvard Law School. He practiced law in Boston before turning to politics, serving first in the Massachusetts state legislature, and then as a United States congressman from 1855 to 1861, when he was appointed minister to China. Clemens first met Burlingame in Honolulu in June 1866, when he was en route to China after a leave of absence; he helped Clemens secure an exclusive interview with the survivors of the Hornet shipwreck (see L1 , 343–48). In November 1867 Burlingame resigned his ministry and shortly thereafter accepted an appointment from the Chinese government as a special envoy to the West. In February 1868 he left China on a goodwill tour of Western capitals, traveling first across the United States. In Washington, D.C., he helped to draft a treaty with the United States, the first by a Western power to recognize China’s sovereignty and allow unrestricted immigration ( L2 , 187 n. 2, 238–39 n. 1). Shortly after the ratification of the treaty in July, Clemens, with Burlingame’s collaboration, wrote a lengthy and laudatory analysis of it for the New York Tribune, in which he cautioned,
Let us remember that China is one colossal graveyard—a mighty empire so knobbed all over with graves that the level spaces left are hardly more than alleys and avenues among the clustering death-mounds. . . . The first railroad that plows its pitiless way through these myriads of sacred hillocks will carry dismay and distress into countless households. (SLC 1868g)