It is not a small topic-- people have been written BIG books on it- and this article from Wikipedia contains more information than most people want to know, so I have edited it.
History of Chinese Americans
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The history of Chinese Americans or the history of ethnic Chinese in the United States relates to the three major waves of Chinese immigration to the United States with the first beginning in the 19th century. Chinese immigrants in the 19th century worked as laborers, particularly on the transcontinental railroad, such as the Central Pacific Railroad. They also worked as laborers in the mining industry, and suffered racial discrimination at every level of society. While industrial employers were eager to get this new and cheap labor, the ordinary white public was stirred to anger by the presence of this "yellow peril". Despite the provisions for equal treatment of Chinese immigrants in the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, political and labor organizations rallied against the immigration of what they regarded as a degraded race and "cheap Chinese labor". Newspapers condemned the policies of employers, and even church leaders denounced the entrance of these aliens into what was regarded as a land for whites only.
So hostile was the opposition that in 1882 the United States Congress eventually passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited immigration from China for the next ten years. This law was then extended by the Geary Act in 1892. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the only U.S. law ever to prevent immigration and naturalization on thebasis of race.[1] These laws not only prevented new immigration but also brought additional suffering as they prevented the reunion of the families of thousands of Chinese men already living in the United States (that is, men who had left China without their wives and children); anti-miscegenation laws in many states prohibited Chinese men from marrying white women.[2]
In 1924 the law barred further entries of Chinese; those already in the United States had been ineligible for citizenship since the previous year. Also by 1924, all Asian immigrants (except people from the Philippines, which had been annexed by the United States in 1898) were utterly excluded by law, denied citizenship and naturalization, and prevented from marrying Caucasians or owning land.[3]
Only since the 1940s when the United States and China became allies during World War II, did the situation for Chinese Americans begin to improve, as restrictions on entry into the country, naturalization and mixed marriage were being lessened. In 1943, Chinese immigration to the United States was once again permitted — by way of the Magnuson Act — thereby repealing 61 years of official racial discrimination against the Chinese. Large-scale Chinese immigration did not occur until 1965 when the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965[4] lifted national origin quotas.[5] After World War II, anti-Asian prejudice began to decrease, and Chinese immigrants, along with other Asians (such as Japanese, Koreans, Indians and Vietnamese), have adapted and advanced. Currently, the Chinese constitute the largest ethnic group of Asian Americans (about 22%), and have confounded earlier expectations that they would form an indigestible mass inAmerican society.[citation needed]
For example, many Chinese Americans of American birth may know little or nothing about traditional Chinese culture, just as European Americans and African Americans may know little or nothing about the original cultures of their ancestors.
As of the 2010 United States Census, there are more than 3.3 million Chinese in the United States, about 1% of the total population. The influx continues, where each year ethnic Chinese people from the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and to a lesser extent Southeast Asia move to the United States, surpassing Hispanic and Latino immigration by 2012.[6]
Fields of work for first wave immigrants
The Chinese came to California in large numbers during the California Gold Rush, with 40,400 being recorded as arriving from 1851 to 1860, and again in the 1860s when the Central Pacific Railroad recruited large labor gangs, many on five-year contracts, to build its portion of the Transcontinental Railroad. The Chinese laborers worked out well and thousands more were recruited until the railroad's completion in 1869.
Chinese labor provided the massive labor needed to build the majority of the Central Pacific's difficult railroad tracks through the Sierra Nevada mountains and across Nevada. The Chinese population rose from 2,716 in 1851 to 63,000 by 1871. In the decade 1861-70, 64,301 were recorded as arriving, followed by 123,201 in 1871–80 and 61,711 in 1881–90. 77% were located in California, with the rest scattered across the West, the South, and New England.[36] Most came from Southern China looking for a better life; escaping a high rate of poverty left after the Taiping Rebellion. This immigration may have been as high as 90% male as most immigrated with the thought of returning home to start a new life. Those that stayed in America faced the lack of suitable Chinese brides as Chinese women were not allowed to emigrate in significant numbers after 1872. As a result, the mostly bachelor communities slowly aged in place with very low Chinese birth rates.
California Gold Rush[edit]
The last major immigration wave started around the 1850s. The West Coast of North America was being rapidly colonized during the California Gold Rush, while southern China suffered from severe political and economic instability due to the weakness of the Qing Dynasty government, internal rebellions such as the Taiping Rebellion, and external pressures such as the Opium Wars (1839–1860). As a result, many Chinese emigrated from the poor Taishanese- and Cantonese-speaking area in Guangdong province to the United States to find work.
For most Chinese immigrants of the 1850s, San Francisco was only a transit station on the way to the gold fields in the Sierra Nevada. According to estimates, there were in the late 1850s 15,000 Chinese mine workers in the "Gold Mountains" or "Mountains of Gold" (Cantonese: Gam Saan, 金山). Because anarchic conditions prevailed in the gold fields, the robbery by European miners of Chinese mining area permits were barely pursued or prosecuted and the Chinese gold seekers themselves were often victim to violent assaults. At that time,"Chinese immigrants were stereotyped as degraded, exotic, dangerous, and perpetual foreigners who could not assimilate into civilized western culture, regardless of citizenship or duration of residency in the USA".[38] Chinese In response to this hostile situation these Chinese miners developed a basic approach that differed from the white European gold miners. While the Europeans mostly worked as individuals or in small groups, the Chinese formed large teams, which protected them from attacks and, because of good organization, often gave them a higher yield. To protect themselves even further against attacks, they preferred to work areas that other gold seekers regarded as unproductive and had given up on. Because much of the gold fields were exhaustingly gone over until the beginning of the 20th century, many of the Chinese remained far longer than the European miners. In 1870, one-third of the men in the Californian gold fields were Chinese.
However, their displacement had begun already in 1869 when white miners began to resent the Chinese miners, feeling that they were discovering gold that the white miners deserved. Eventually, protest rose from white miners who wanted to eliminate the growing competition. From 1852 to 1870 (ironically when the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was passed), the California legislature enforced a series of taxes.
In 1852, a special foreign miner's tax aimed at the Chinese was passed by the California legislature that was aimed at foreign miners who were not U.S. citizens. Given that the Chinese were ineligible for citizenship at that time and constituted the largest percentage of the non-white population, the taxes were primarily aimed at them and tax revenue was therefore generated almost exclusively by the Chinese.[36] This tax required a payment of three dollars each month at a time when Chinese miners were making approximately six dollars a month. Tax collectors could legally take and sell the property of those miners who refused or could not pay the tax. Fake tax collectors made money by taking advantage of people who could not speak English well, and some tax collectors, both false and real, stabbed or shot miners who could not or would not pay the tax. During the 1860s, many Chinese were expelled from the mine fields and forced to find other jobs. The Foreign Miner's Tax existed until 1870.[39]
The position of the Chinese gold seekers also was complicated by a decision of the California Supreme Court, which decided, in the case The People of the State of California v. George W. Hallin 1854 that the Chinese were not allowed to testify as witnesses before the court in California against white citizens, including those accused of murder. The decision was largely based upon the prevailing opinion that the Chinese were:
| “ | ...a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior, and who are incapable of progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point, as their history has shown; differing in language, opinions, color, and physical conformation; between whom and ourselves nature has placed an impassable difference" and as such had no right " to swear away the life of a citizen" or participate" with us in administering the affairs of our Government.[40] | ” |
Transcontinental railroad
After the gold rush wound down in the 1860s, the majority of the work force found jobs in the railroad industry. Chinese labor was integral to the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad, which linked the railway network of the Eastern United States with California on the Pacific coast. Construction began in 1863 at the terminal points of Omaha, Nebraska and Sacramento, California, and the two sections were merged and ceremonially completed on May 10, 1869, at the famous "golden spike" event at Promontory Summit, Utah. It created a nationwide mechanized transportation network that revolutionized the population and economy of the American West. This network caused the wagon trains of previous decades to become obsolete, exchanging it for a modern transportation system. The building of the railway required enormous labor in the crossing of plains and high mountains by the Union Pacific Railroad and Central Pacific Railroad, the two privately chartered federally backed enterprises that built the line westward and eastward respectively.
Since there was a lack of white European construction workers, in 1865 a large number of Chinese workers were recruited from the silver mines, as well as later contract workers from China. The idea for the use of Chinese labor came from the manager of the Central Pacific Railroad, Charles Crocker who at first had trouble persuading his business partners of the fact that the mostly weedy, slender looking Chinese workers, some contemptuously called "Crocker's pets", were suitable for the heavy physical work. For the Central Pacific Railroad, hiring Chinese as opposed to whites kept labor costs down by a third, since the company would not pay their board or lodging. This type of steep wage inequality was commonplace at the time.[36] Eventually Crocker overcame shortages of manpower and money by hiring Chinese immigrants to do much of the back-breaking and dangerous labor. He drove the workers to the point of exhaustion, in the process setting records for laying track and finishing the project seven years ahead of the government's deadline.[42]
The Central Pacific track was constructed primarily by Chinese immigrants. Even though at first they were thought to be too weak or fragile to do this type of work, after the first day in which Chinese were on the line, the decision was made to hire as many as could be found in California (where most were gold miners or in service industries such as laundries and kitchens). Many more were imported from China. Most of the men received between one and three dollars per day, but the workers from China received much less. Eventually, they went on strike and gained small increases in salary.[43]
The route laid not only had to go across rivers and canyons, which had to be bridged, but also through two mountain ranges—the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains—where tunnels had to be created. The explosions had caused many of the Chinese laborers to lose their lives. Due to the wide expanse of the work, the construction had to be carried out at times in the extreme heat and also in other times in the bitter winter cold. So harsh were the conditions that sometimes even entire camps were buried under avalanches.[44]
The Central Pacific made great progress along the Sacramento Valley. However construction was slowed, first by the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, then by the mountains themselves and most importantly by winter snowstorms. Consequently, the Central Pacific expanded its efforts to hire immigrant laborers (many of whom were Chinese). The immigrants seemed to be more willing to tolerate the horrible conditions, and progress continued. The increasing necessity for tunnelling then began to slow progress of the line yet again. To combat this, Central Pacific began to use the newly invented and very unstable nitro-glycerine explosives—which accelerated both the rate of construction and the mortality of the Chinese laborers. Appalled by the losses, the Central Pacific began to use less volatile explosives, and developed a method of placing the explosives in which the Chinese blasters worked from large suspended baskets that were rapidly pulled to safety after the fuses were lit.[44]
The well organized Chinese teams still turned out to be highly industrious and exceedingly efficient; at the peak of the construction work, shortly before completion of the railroad, more than 11,000 Chinese were involved with the project. Although the white European workers had higher wages and better working conditions, their share of the workforce was never more than 10 percent. As the Chinese railroad workers lived and worked tirelessly, they also managed the finances associated with their employment, and Central Pacific officials responsible for employing the Chinese, even those at first opposed to the hiring policy, came to appreciate the cleanliness and reliability of this group of laborers.[45]
Military[edit]
A small number of Chinese fought during the American Civil War. Of the approximately 200 Chinese people in the eastern United States at the time, fifty-eight are known to have fought in the Civil War, many of them in the Navy. Most fought for the Union, but a small number also fought for the Confederacy.[48]
Union soldiers with Chinese heritage
- Corporal Joseph Pierce, 14th Connecticut Infantry.[49]
- Corporal John Tomney/Tommy, 70th Regiment Excelsior Brigade, New York Infantry.[50]
- Edward Day Cohota, 23rd Massachusetts Infantry.[49][51]
- Antonio Dardelle, 27th Connecticut Regiment.[52]
- Hong Neok Woo, 50th Regiment Infantry, Pennsylvania Volunteer Emergency Militia.[53]
- Thomas Sylvanus, 42nd New York Infantry.[54]
- John Earl, cabin boy on USS Hartford.[55]
- William Hang, landsman on USS Hartford.[55]
- John Akomb, steward on a gunboat.[55]
Confederate soldiers with Chinese heritage[56]
- Christopher Wren Bunker and Stephen Decatur Bunker, the sons of conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker. 37th Battalion, Virginia Cavalry.
- John Fouenty, draftee and deserter.
- Charles K. Marshall
Statistics on employed Male Chinese in the Twenty, Most Frequently Reported Occupations, 1870
This table describes the occupation repartition among the Chinese male in the twenty.[63]
| # | Occupation | Population | % |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Miners | 17 069 | 36.9 |
| 2. | Laborers (not specified) | 9 436 | 20.4 |
| 3. | Domestic servants | 5 420 | 11.7 |
| 4. | Launderers | 3 653 | 7.9 |
| 5. | Agricultural laborers | 1 766 | 3.8 |
| 6. | Cigar-makers | 1 727 | 3.7 |
| 7. | Gardeners & nurserymen | 676 | 1.5 |
| 8. | Traders & dealers(not specified) | 604 | 1.3 |
| 9. | Employees of railroad co., (not clerks) | 568 | 1.2 |
| 10. | Boot & shoemakers | 489 | 1.1 |
| 11. | Woodchoppers | 419 | 0.9 |
| 12. | Farmers & planters | 366 | 0.8 |
| 13. | Fishermen & oystermen | 310 | 0.7 |
| 14. | Barbers & hairdressers | 243 | 0.5 |
| 15. | Clerks in stores | 207 | 0.4 |
| 16. | Mill & factory operatives | 203 | 0.4 |
| 17. | Physicians & surgeons | 193 | 0.4 |
| 18. | Employees of manufacturing establishments | 166 | 0.4 |
| 19. | Carpenters & joiners | 155 | 0.3 |
| 20. | Peddlers | 152 | 0.3 |
| Sub-Total (20 occupations) | 43 822 | 94.7 | |
| Total (all occupations) | 46 274 | 100.0 |
Indispensable workforce[edit]
Supporters and opponents of Chinese immigration affirm[dubious ] that Chinese labor was indispensable to the economic prosperity of the west. The Chinese worked in mines, swamps, construction and in factories, which could be life-threatening and not easy to accomplish, many jobs that the Caucasians did not want to do was left to the Chinese. Some believed that the Chinese were inferior to the white people and should be doing the white people's inferior work.[64]
Manufacturers depended on the Chinese workers because they had to reduce labor cost to save money and the Chinese labor was cheaper than the Caucasian labor. The labor from the Chinese was cheaper because they did not live like the Caucasians, they needed less money because they lived with lower standards.[65]
The Chinese were often in competition with African-Americans in the labor market. In the south of the United States, July 1869, at an immigration convention at Memphis, a committee was formed to consolidate schemes for importing Chinese laborers into the south like the African-American.[66]
Anti-Chinese movement[edit]
In the 1870s several economic crises came about in parts of the United States, and many Americans lost their jobs, from which arose throughout the American West an anti-Chinese movement and its main mouthpiece, the Workingman's Party labor organization, which was led by the Californian Denis Kearney. The party took particular aim against Chinese immigrant labor and the Central Pacific Railroad that employed them. Its famous slogan was "The Chinese must go!". Kearney's attacks against the Chinese were particularly virulent and openly racist, and found considerable support among white people in the American West. This sentiment led eventually to the Chinese Exclusion Act and the creation of Angel Island Immigration Station. Their propaganda branded the Chinese migrants as "perpetual foreigners" whose work caused wage dumping and thereby prevented American men from "gaining work". After the 1893 economic downturn, measures adopted in the severe depression included anti-Chinese riots that eventually spread throughout the West from which came racist violence and massacres. Most of the Chinese farm workers, which by 1890 comprised 75% of all Californian agricultural workers, were expelled. The Chinese found refuge and shelter in the Chinatowns of large cities. The vacant agricultural jobs subsequently proved to be so unattractive to the unemployed white Europeans that they avoided to sign up; most of the vacancies were then filled by Japanese workers, after whom in the decades later came Filipinos, and finally Mexicans.[67] The term "Chinaman", originally coined as a self-referential term by the Chinese, came to be used as a term against the Chinese in America as the new term "Chinaman's chance" came to symbolize the unfairness Chinese experienced in the American justice system as some were murdered largely due to hatred of their race and culture.
Exclusion era[edit]
Settlement[edit]
Across the country, Chinese immigrants clustered in Chinatowns. The largest population was in San Francisco. Some estimated over half of these early immigrants were from Taishan.[citation needed] At first, when surface gold was plentiful, the Chinese were well tolerated and well received. As the easy gold dwindled and competition for it intensified, animosity to the Chinese and other foreigners increased. Organized labor groups demanded that California's gold was only for Americans, and began to physically threaten foreigners' mines or gold diggings. Most, after being forcibly driven from the mines, settled in Chinese enclaves in cities, mainly San Francisco, and took up low end wage labor such as restaurant work and laundry. A few settled in towns throughout the west. With the post Civil War economy in decline by the 1870s, anti-Chinese animosity became politicized by labor leader Denis Kearney and his Workingman's Party as well as by Governor John Bigler, both of whom blamed Chinese "coolies" for depressed wage levels.
Discrimination[edit]
Main article: Anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States
The flow of immigration (encouraged by the Burlingame Treaty of 1868) was stopped by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This act outlawed all Chinese immigration to the United States and denied citizenship to those already settled in the country. Renewed in 1892 and extended indefinitely in 1902, the Chinese population declined until the act was repealed in 1943 by the Magnuson Act.[36] Official discrimination extended to the highest levels of the U.S. government: in 1888, U.S. President Grover Cleveland, who supported the Chinese Exclusion Act, proclaimed the Chinese "an element ignorant of our constitution and laws, impossible of assimilation with our people and dangerous to our peace and welfare."[68]
Many Western states also enacted discriminatory laws that made it difficult for Chinese and Japanese immigrants to own land and find work. Some of these Anti-Chinese laws were the Foreign Miners' License tax, which required a monthly payment of three dollars from every foreign miner who did not desire to become a citizen. Foreign-born Chinese could not become citizens because they had been rendered ineligible to citizenship by the Naturalization Act of 1790 that reserved naturalized citizenship to "free white persons".[69] This remained in place until voided by the Civil Rights Act of 1870.[citation needed]
By then, California had collected five million dollars from the Chinese. Another was "An Act to Discourage Immigration to this State of Persons Who Cannot Become Citizens Thereof", which imposed on the master or owner of a ship a landing tax of fifty dollars for each passenger ineligible to naturalized citizenship."To Protect Free White Labor against competition with Chinese Coolie Labor and to Discourage the Immigration of Chinese into the State of California" was another law (aka Anti-Coolie Act, 1862) that imposed a $2.50 tax per month on all Chinese residing in the state, except Chinese operating businesses, licensed to work in mines, or engaged in the production of sugar, rice, coffee or tea. In 1886, the Supreme Court struck down a Californian law, in Yick Wo v. Hopkins, judging that although it was race-neutral on its face, it was administered in a prejudicial manner was an infringement of the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The law aimed in particular against Chinese laundry businesses.
However, this decision was only a temporary setback for the Nativist movement. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act made it unlawful for Chinese laborers to enter the United States for the next 10 years and denied naturalized citizenship to Chinese already here. Initially intended for Chinese laborers, it was broadened in 1888 to include all persons of the "Chinese race". And in 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson effectively canceled Yick Wo v. Hopkins, by supporting the "separate but equal" doctrine.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Surgeon General Walter Wyman requested to put San Francisco's Chinatown under quarantine because of an outbreak of bubonic plague; the early stages of the San Francisco plague of 1900–1904. Chinese residents, supported by governor Henry Gage (1899–1903) and local businesses, fought the quarantine through numerous federal court battles, claiming the Marine Hospital Service was violating their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, and in the process, launched lawsuits against Kinyoun, director of the San Francisco Quarantine Station.[70]
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake allowed a critical change to Chinese immigration patterns. The practice known as "Paper Sons" and "Paper Daughters" was allegedly introduced. Chinese would declare themselves to be United States citizens whose records were lost in the earthquake.[71]
A year before, more than 60 labor unions formed the Asiatic Exclusion League in San Francisco, including labor leaders Patrick Henry McCarthy (mayor of San Francisco from 1910 to 1912), Olaf Tveitmoe (first president of the organization), and Andrew Furuseth and Walter McCarthy of the Sailor's Union. The League was almost immediately successful in pressuring the San Francisco Board of Education to segregate Asian school children.
California Attorney General Ulysses S. Webb (1902–1939) put great effort into enforcing the Alien Land Law of 1913, which he had co-written, and prohibited "aliens ineligible for citizenship" (i.e. all Asian immigrants) from owning land or property. The law was struck down by the Supreme Court of California in 1946 (Sei Fujii v. California).
One of the few cases in which Chinese immigration was allowed during this era were "Pershing's Chinese", who were allowed to immigrate from Mexico to the United States shortly before World War I as they aided GeneralJohn J. Pershing in his expedition against Pancho Villa in Mexico.[72]
The Immigration Act of 1917 banned all immigrations from many parts of Asia, including parts of China (see map on left), and foreshadowed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. Other laws included the Cubic Air Ordinance, which prohibited Chinese from occupying a sleeping room with less than 500 cubic feet (14 m3) of breathing space between each person, the Queue Ordinance,[73] which forced Chinese with long hair worn in aqueue to pay a tax or to cut it, and Anti-Miscegenation Act of 1889 that prohibited Chinese men from marrying white women, and the Cable Act of 1922, which terminated citizenship for white American women who married an Asian man. The majority of these laws were not fully overturned until the 1950s, at the dawn of the modern American civil rights movement.
Segregation in the South[edit]
Chinese immigrants first arrived in Mississippi Delta during Reconstruction Era of the United States as cheap laborers when the system of sharecropping was being developed.[74] They gradually turned to operate grocery stores in mainly African American neighborhoods.[74]
Chinese carved out a distinct role in the predominantly biracial society of Mississippi Delta. In a few communities, Chinese children were able to attend white schools, while others study under tutors, or establish their own Chinese schools.[75] In 1924, a nine-year-old Chinese-American named Martha Lum, daughter of Gong Lum, was prohibited from attending the Rosedale Consolidated High School in Bolivar County, Mississippi, solely because she was of Chinese descent. The ensuing lawsuit eventually reached the Supreme Court of the United States. In Lum v. Rice (1927), the Supreme Court affirmed that the separate-but-equal doctrine articulated in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), applied to a person of Chinese ancestry, born in and a citizen of the United States. The court held that Miss Lum was not denied equal protection of the law when she was given the opportunity to attend a school which "receive[d] only children of the brown, yellow or black races".
Chinatown: Slumming, gambling, prostitution and opium[edit]
In his book published in 1890, How The Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis characterized the Chinese of New York as "a constant and terrible menace to society",[76] who "are in no sense a desirable element of the population".[77] Riis was referring to the reputation of New York's Chinatown as a place full of illicit activity, including gambling, prostitution and opium smoking. To some extent, Riis' characterization was true, though quite often the sensational press exploited the great differences between Chinese and Anglo-American language and culture to sell newspapers,[78] exploit Chinese labor and promote Americans of European birth. Especially in the press, opium smoking and prostitution in New York's Chinatown were greatly exaggerated, while many reports ofindecency and immorality were simply fictitious.[79] Casual observers of Chinatown believed that opium use was rampant since they constantly witnessed Chinese smoking through water pipes. In fact, local Chinatown residents often smoked tobacco through such pipes.[80] In the late-19th century, many European-Americans experienced Chinatown through the phenomenon known as "slumming", wherein affluent New Yorkers formed groups, accompanied by a guide, to explore vast immigrant districts such as the Lower East Side.[81] Slummers often frequented the brothels and opium dens of Chinatown in the late 1880s and early 1890s.[82] However, by the mid-1890s, slummers rarely participated in Chinese brothels or opium smoking, but instead were shown fake opium joints where Chinese actors and their white wives staged illicit scenes for the benefit of their audiences.[82] Quite often, such staged shows, which included gunfights that mimicked those of local tongs, were the doings of the professional guides or "lobbygows"—often Irish-Americans—who paid the actors.[83] Especially in New York, the Chinese community was unique among immigrant communities in so far as its illicit activity was turned into a cultural commodity.
Perhaps the most pervasive illicit activity that took place in Chinatowns of the late-19th century was gambling. In 1868, one of the earliest Chinese residents in New York, Wah Kee, opened a fruit and vegetable store on Pell Street while keeping rooms upstairs available for gambling and opium smoking.[84] A few decades later, local tongs, which originated in the California goldfields around 1860, controlled most gambling (fan-tan, faro, lotteries) in New York's Chinatown.[79] One of the most popular games of chance was fan-tan where players guessed the exact coins orcards left under a cup after a pile of cards had been counted off for at a time.[85] Most popular, however, was the lottery. Players purchased randomly assigned sweepstakes numbers from gambling-houses, with drawings held at least once a day in lottery saloons.[86] According to Henry Tsai, there were ten such saloons found in San Francisco in 1876, which received protection from corrupt policemen in exchange for weekly payoffs of around five dollars per week.[86] Such gambling-houses were frequented by as many whites as Chinamen, though whites sat at separate tables.[87]
Between 1850 and 1875, the most popular complaint against Chinese residents was their involvement in prostitution.[88] During this time, Hip Yee Tong, a secret society, imported over six-thousand Chinese women to serve as prostitutes.[89] Most of these women came from southeastern China and were either kidnapped, purchased from poor families or lured to ports like San Francisco with the promise of marriage.[89] Prostitutes fell into three categories, namely, those sold to wealthy Chinese merchants as concubines, those purchased for high-class Chinese brothels catering exclusively to Chinese men or those purchased for prostitution in lower-class establishments frequented by a mixed clientele.[89] In late-19th century San Francisco, most notably Jackson Street, prostitutes were often housed in rooms 10x10 or 12x12 feet and were often beaten or tortured for not attracting enough business or refusing to work for any reason.[90] In San Francisco, "highbinders" (various Chinese gangs) protected brothel owners, extorted weekly tributes from prostitutes and caused general mayhem in Chinatown.[91] However, many of San Francisco's Chinatown whorehouses were located on property owned by high-ranking European-Americans city officials, who took a percentage of the proceeds in exchange for protection from prosecution.[92] From the 1850s to the 1870s, California passed numerous acts to limit prostitution by all races, yet only Chinese were ever prosecuted under these laws.[93] After the Thirteenth Amendment was passed in 1865, Chinese women brought to the United States for prostitution signed a contract so that their employers would avoid accusations of slavery.[89] Many Americans believed that Chinese prostitutes were corrupting traditional morality and thus the Page Act was passed in 1875, which placed restrictions on female Chinese immigration. Those who supported the Page Act were attempting to protect American family values, while those who opposed the Act were concerned that it might hinder the efficiency of the cheap-labor provided by Chinese males - no one was concerned about the exploitation of Chinese women.[94]
Statistics of the Chinese population in the United States (1840–2010)[edit]
The table shows the ethnic Chinese population of the United States (including persons with mixed-ethnic origin).[105]
| Year | Total U.S. population | Of Chinese origin | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1840 | 17,069,453 | not available | n/a |
| 1850 | 23,191,876 | 4,018 | 0.02% |
| 1860 | 31,443,321 | 34,933 | 0.11% |
| 1870 | 38,558,371 | 64,199 | 0.17% |
| 1880 | 50,189,209 | 105,465 | 0.21% |
| 1890 | 62,979,766 | 107,488 | 0.17% |
| 1900 | 76,212,168 | 118,746 | 0.16% |
| 1910 | 92,228,496 | 94,414 | 0.10% |
| 1920 | 106,021,537 | 85,202 | 0.08% |
| 1930 | 123,202,624 | 102,159 | 0.08% |
| 1940 | 132,164,569 | 106,334 | 0.08% |
| 1950 | 151,325,798 | 150,005 | 0.10% |
| 1960 | 179,323,175 | 237,292 | 0.13% |
| 1970 | 203,302,031 | 436,062 | 0.21% |
| 1980 | 226,542,199 | 812,178 | 0.36% |
| 1990 | 248,709,873 | 1,645,472 | 0.66% |
| 2000 | 281,421,906 | 2,432,585 | 0.86% |
| 2004 (US Census estimate) | 285,691,501 | 3,353,486 | 1.17% |
| 2010 | 308,745,538 | 3,794,673 | 1.23% |
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