American prejudice against the Chinese during the nineteenth century interests me because of its sad place in our country’s history and because of how it showcases the American fear of foreigners. The first federal law passed by Congress that specifically prohibited the immigration of foreigners based on their race was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. During the second half of the nineteenth century Americans of all types were flocking west in search of new exciting lives and the transcontinental railroad, that was then being finished, brought more and more people and goods west. At the same time thousands of Chinese were being recruited on the streets of Canton (aka: Guangzhou) to come to America to mine gold and work for companies like the Central Pacific Railroad. To the Chinese America represented a better life than south China in the late Qing era. The Chinese name for San Francisco is 旧金山, Old Gold Mountain, which shows how the Chinese immigrants viewed this new world before their departure. However, once the Chinese got to California life was anything but golden.
-Chinese cigar factory, San Francisco
I was reminded of this bit of American history this morning while casually flipping through my father’s copy of the 1941 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Lately I have become extremely enamored of this book. It’s short passages of the English language chosen at a time far different from today are endlessly captivating and expose me to people I otherwise would never have known. The book really deserves its own blog post.
To get back to my point, today I looked up the word Chinese to see what I could find. This led me to the works of Bret Harte, an American who in the late nineteenth century had written about life in California. Miners and pioneers had been his main focus, but later in his life he had moved to Europe and settled in London and there he wrote a little poem entitled Plain Language From Truthful James, which was published in 1870. This little poem became known to the American people as The Heathen Chinee and helped fuel the violent racial prejudice against Chinese immigrants that would eventually culminate in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The poem was originally never meant to be an attack on the Chinese but rather “was written with a satirical political purpose” and was plainly a satirical attack on American racial prejudice.[1] One of the quotes I discovered from this work was:
We are ruined by Chinese cheap labour.
