MINISTERIO DE DESARROLLO ECONÓMICO

The rumors of vast amounts of gold in the Sierra Nevada Mountains swept across the continent after January of 1848. By the middle of the year, those stories reached South America, Europe, and Asia; and soon hopeful, would-be prospectors from all over the world were planning their journeys to the United States’ newly acquired territory on the west coast. Prior to 1848, California’s coastal towns saw the occasional Chinese sailor or merchant ship, and certainly American sugar plantation owners in the Sandwich Islands281 _{employed Chinese workers.}282 _{Once the rumors of gold deposits and of the}

opportunities that an emerging and growing economy could provide reached Chinese shores, immigrants from mostly southern areas of China began to flow into the western United States.283 _{That flow increased unchecked until 1882 despite the challenges}

presented to non-Anglo newcomers in the United States.284

281 Now Hawaii.

282 Coe, Chop Suey, 2009, 103–143; Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, 79–131.

283 Including the provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi, and Fujian along the southern and southeastern coast of China.

284 The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 halted most Chinese immigration through the main ports but as I will cover later in the chapter, movement across the United States-Mexico border was a

The prospect of gaining wealth in the California gold mines brought the first group of Chinese immigrants into the San Francisco area in early 1849. Not only as prospectors themselves, but as merchants with the intent to bring goods to the west coast for all the gold-seekers to spend their treasure on. Adventurers “needed food, tools, blankets, clothing, shoes, wood, and stone for houses;” those goods could take over three months to reach California from the East Coast, while taking approximately half the time from China.285 _{While some of this first group were hired workers, most paid for their}

own passage to California with plans to prospect, speculate, and open support businesses including restaurants. Before the gold rush, San Francisco’s total population topped out around 300, but now the city’s streets were teeming with people from all over the world looking to make their fortune. Homes and businesses could not be built quickly enough, and the majority of the single men who had made the voyage did not cook for

themselves. New York Tribune writer, Bayard Taylor, described the available culinary offerings as such:

There are French restaurants on the plaza and on Dupont Street; an extensive German establishment on Pacific Street; the Fonda PeruanaI; the Italian Confectionary; and three Chinese houses, denoted by their long three-cornered flags of yellow silk. The latter are much frequented by Americans, on account of

fairly easy task and contributed to the growth of the Chinese community in El Paso and other parts of the U.S. Southwest.

their excellent cookery, and the fact that meals are $1 each, without regard to quantity. Kong-Sung’s house is near the water; Whang-Tong’s in Sacramento Street, and Tong-Ling’s in Jackson street. There the grave Celestials serve up their chow-chow and curry, besides many genuine English dishes; their tea and coffee cannot be surpassed [sic].286

By 1850, there was clearly an array of restaurant choices for those souls who had

ventured to California to make their fortune, and the Chinese options were held in at least as high regard as other choices.

While authors have rightly used quotes like that above from Bayard Taylor to claim that San Franciscans frequented Chinese-owned restaurants because they were the most inexpensive and/or the most exotic meals in the city, clearly contemporary writers like Taylor enjoyed the food as well.287 _{In Chop Suey, Andrew Coe offers several}

286 Bayard Taylor, Eldorado; Or, Adventures in the Path of Empire (New York: Putnam, 1850), 116–17. Eldorado was born out of Taylor’s assignment to cover the gold rush in California for Horace Greeley and the New York Tribune. His journey to California, his experiences in San Francisco and among the gold mines, and his return home via Mexico are collected in the two- volume monograph he titled Eldorado, a nod to the fabled city of gold that Spanish

conquistadores (and others) searched for in the Amazon Basin during the early Spanish colonial period. Perhaps a more accurate and geographically closer title might have been Cibola, the fabled “Seven Cities of Gold” that Cabeza de Vaca had supposedly viewed on his trek across the Southwest and northern Mexico.

287 After the success of Bayard’s Eldorado which reportedly sold 40,000 copies in the first two weeks of publication, he later published an account of his travels in Asia entitled, A Visit to India, China, and Japan in 1853. His attitude toward the Chinese must have changed dramatically

contemporary examples of writers praising the skill of Chinese cooks. For instance, William Shaw states that “the dishes are mostly curries, hashes, and fricassees, served up in small dishes, and as they were exceedingly palatable, I was not curious enough to enquire as to the ingredients.”288 _{In another contemporary account, William Kelly praises}

the Chinese cooks and restaurants in Sacramento for their fare and service in comparison to the “American Tavern, the French Restaurant,” and “the Spanish Fonday”:

But amidst the host of competitors the Celestials carry off the palm for superior excellence in every particular. They serve everything promptly, cleanly, hot, and well cooked; they give dishes peculiar to each nation, over and above their own peculiar soups, curries, and ragouts, which cannot be even imitated elsewhere; and such is their quickness and civil attention, they anticipate your wants, and secure your patronage.289

As noted by Kelly, Chinese restaurants served both traditional dishes from their

homeland as well as plates with recognizably Western ingredients like lamb chops that could be eaten with knives and forks rather than the traditional chopsticks. Chinese

during this trip where his one-time fondness for Chinese cuisine turned into a vicious, racist attack on the Chinese, their culture, and their food.

288 William Shaw, Golden Dreams and Waking Realities (London: Smith, Elder, 1851), 42; quoted in Coe, Chop Suey, 111.

289 William Kelly, An Excursion to California Over the Prairie, Rocky Mountains, and Great Sierra Nevada with a Stroll Through the Diggings and Ranches of That Country, vol. 2 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1851), 244.

restaurant owners cooked to please their clientele no matter their country of origin, much like the merchants who tended to the wants of gold seekers returning from the mountains.

By 1850, local estimates put 750 – 4,000 Chinese immigrants in California.290

That number increased quickly over the ensuing years. An additional 2,716 Chinese arrived in 1851 with 20,026 following a year later, most in search of fortune in the gold mines.291 _{As early as 1850, the earliest Chinese immigrants had made enough money in}

California to return home bearing news of fortunes to be made at Gam Saan or Gold Mountain.292 _{Each successive wave of Chinese returning home prompted many more to}

make the journey to the United States. By 1860, according to the United States census there were 33,149 “Asiatic Males” living in California, in 1870 there were 49,310

290 I found these estimates in both Coe, Chop Suey, 112, and Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, 79. The same numbers are also compiled in Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, American Public Problems (New York: Henry Holt and

Company, 1909), 499. Coolidge’s text compiles estimates from a variety of sources including United States committee reports, the California State census (which was at this time itself an estimate), and numerous reports from contemporary California and San Francisco newspapers that were used as evidence for other 19th_{-century writers whom Coolidge used as references. See}

her appendix pp. 497-504. Coe and Takaki do not cite their sources for this information, but I assume they pulled the information from Coolidge as well.

291 Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, 79; Shah, Contagious Divides, 2001, 17; Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, 1909, 499.

292 Gold Mountain is the moniker used by 19th_{-century Chinese immigrants to describe the}

central California gold mines and later it would also stand in as a descriptor for America. Gold Mountain is Gam Saan in Cantonese and Jinshan in Mandarin.

“Chinese Persons,” and by 1880 that number had increase to 75,218. By contrast, there were 136 “Chinese Persons” in Texas in 1880.293

While some Chinese immigrants stayed in the cities as merchants, restaurant owners, cooks, clerks, and other forms of support staff for business owners, the vast majority of the incoming Chinese population, after the first couple of waves arrived in San Francisco, went directly to the countryside to labor on farms or to the mountains to prospect for gold. Each year throughout the 1850s, thousands of Chinese immigrants dispersed into Tuolumne, Mariposa, Placer, Shasta, and other counties among the Central California Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Although American sentiment toward the Chinese in the early years of their immigration into California has been interpreted by some as a “Period of Favor,” that sentiment was clearly just one strand of a complex set of ideas and feelings toward the newcomers that swayed to one side or the other depending on one’s place in California’s newly emerging economy.294 _{While the Governor of California in 1852 recommended “a}

293 University of Virginia Library, “Historical Census Browser,” 2004. The numbers from the U.S. Census during this period are certainly questionable due to disorganization of California’s state government. For example, in its first decade California saw four state capitols, and very little law enforcement at the state level. In addition, the movement among the mines in the Sierra Nevada Mountains by the Chinese and other gold-seekers made it difficult to accurately count those living in California counties.

294 Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, 1909, 13–25. Coolidge, writing over half a century later about the seeming change in sentiment thought that “In the light of the fifty years of intolerance

system of land grants to induce the further immigration and settlement of the Chinese” due in part to the favorable view of their labor,295 _{white miners hoping to remove}

competition expelled some six hundred Chinese miners from their claims along the American River in the spring of that same year.296 _{The conflicting ideas about and}

treatment of Chinese immigrants did not manifest slowly over a period of years as some might expect. Rather, while writers were praising the service, skill, and industriousness of Chinese cooks, restaurant owners, and others engaged in business as early as 1850, white miners had already begun attacking Chinese claims the year prior.297

The developing racist rage against Chinese influenced mostly by labor issue, but becoming more of a racist narrative of the Chinese as unclean, lazy, uncivilized, and a danger to American laborers’ livelihoods. The narrative manifested later in tourists “slumming” in San Francisco’s Chinatown and fears of eating the food in Chinese-owned restaurants.298 _{The peak of anti-Chinese sentiment occurred in 1901 when the American}

Federation of Labor and leader Samuel Gompers put out a pamphlet that pitted

that followed, the cordiality with which the Chinese were welcomed by the first pioneers is almost incredible.” Ibid., 25.

295 Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, 1909, 22. 296 Pfaelzer, Driven Out, 2008, 10.

297 Ibid., 8–9. Specifically, the references to white miners in Mariposa county threatening to “inflict such punishment as they deem proper” upon any Chinese prospecting claims in the area. 298 Gruen, Manifest Destinations, 187.

“American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism,” in a duel between “Meat vs. Rice.”299

In it, they repeat and rehash years of anti-Chinese writings, retell an account of a Chinese merchant murdered in San Francisco by Chinese assassins, and include racist opinions of well-known Americans with experience around the Chinese like General Douglas

MacArthur, the former military governor of the Philippines. Gompers and the AFL put the pamphlet out in support of a second extension of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Years before the pamphlet and part of the reason the AFL published it, the Chinese went to work for the Central Pacific building the first transcontinental railroad out of

California. It was the beginning of more intense anti-Chinese sentiment, especially in western states, but it also dispersed the Chinese across the United States and into some places, like Texas, where the negative sentiment was not as intense.300