Asians and Pacific Islanders and the Civil War: National Park Service Book for Winter 2014-15

The participation of Asians and Pacific Islanders soldiers in the Civil War is not generally known. This winter, the National Park Service will publish a book to recognize these few men who fought in the Civil War on both sides of the conflict.

The Mandarin Cafe of the 1930s in Bakersfield

Gilbert Gia, a local historian of Bakersfield, California, shared nostalgic reflections about the the Mandarin Cafe, a Chinese restaurant and night club owned by Earl and Alice Wong that flourished briefly from the mid to late 1930s as seen through the eyes of Carlye Nelson, a musician who performed in the 4 man band that played for dances nightly at the Mandarin.

"Earl Q. Wong, was born in China, married Alice Mar in 1919, and 

in the early 1920s the family came to Bakersfield. In 1923 the Wongs 

bought a residential lot near today’s downtown  Bakersfield in the 

Hudnut tract near 27th and O Streets."

"Earl Wong’s son Delbert (who would go on to be the first Chinese American

to graduate from Stanford Law School, and the first Chinese American to be 

appointed to the bench in the continental United States and later serve on the 

Superior Court) recalled that by 1926 his father was “just getting started in

his Lincoln Market.”  Explaining why or how his father got into the cafe business, 

Delbert noted that "I have a vague recollection that the reason my father went into

the night club business was that he had extended credit to the previous owner, who 

was a customer of the Lincoln Market, and my father had to take over the 

Mandarin when the customer was unable to pay."

"In 1934 Earl Wong bought the Lido Café from Joseph Cinelli and 

Angelo and Julia Pierucci, changed the name to the Mandarin Café,  and 

with his wife went into the nightclub business in 1935. 

According to one of the musicians, Carlye Nelson, who played at the 
Mandarin and later performed with the Glenn Miller Band later during WWII:

“We played seven nights a week from 9 PM 'til two, pl us a Friday 

afternoon show rehearsal. Our four-piece orchestra consisted of a 

trumpet (Laurie), piano (Mike Richmond), drums (Gifford), and me on the 

sax, and I doubled on the violin. Word of what to expect in music at 

the local clubs circulated among show performers, and we had an 

excellent reputation. We were also popular with the local dancing 

customers, and although the dance floor was small, it saw a lot of 

action. The floor was painted in a spider web motif, and in the center 

of it was a glass lens that had a spotlight under it.

“The mistress of ceremonies was a more-or-less permanent girl who 

had a taste for alcohol and who could sing as well as “M.C”. Besides 

her salary, the club gave her a discount on the drinks she consumed. 

“The mandarin was a good place to work. The bartenders and cooks 

were Chinese. The cooks--who lived in the basement--were pleasant but 

would tolerate no outsiders in their kitchen. At first Mrs. Wong would 

get coffee for us, but later they put the coffee urn where we could 

reach it ourselves without bothering the cooks. If we wanted to eat at 

the club, we could get it for half price. 

The Mandarin Café and Night Club closed in 1938 but reopened in 

1939 under new ownership as Club Cathay. In later years it was the 

Nanking Café. Today a parking structure stands where dancers once spun 

under a "cobweb" ceiling. Also gone today is a word that was at one 

time commonly understood.

The complete article can be downloaded from the bottom of a page on this link.

Chinese To The South 4. Will They Stay?

       It is no surprise that the early Chinese immigrants in the middle 19th century arrived and mostly settled on the west coast and that some moved toward the Rocky mountains when Chinese were recruited to work on the building of the transcontinental railroad in the mid 1860s. What is not so easy for many to comprehend is why and how small numbers of Chinese gravitated to the Deep South, especially Mississippi and Georgia, by the 1870s.

 Southern solution for  Chinese :problem'

       One key factor was the end of slavery in 1865, which posed a serious threat to the availability of cheap labor for the South.  Many freed slaves became part of the Great Migration to the large cities of the North such as Chicago.  At the Memphis Convention of cotton plantation owners from several states in July, 1869, a proposal was made to recruit Chinese workers, especially because with the recent completion of the transcontinental railroad in May, 1869, many Chinese were no longer needed in railroad work although some did find work on smaller regional rail lines.  Chinese workers were viewed as a source of cheap labor to replace blacks in the cotton and rice fields of the South. In Augusta, Georgia, Chinese in the north were recruited to fill the need for cheap labor to help build the Augusta Canal to supply hydroelectric power for their textile mills.

New York Times, Aug. 17, 1869

           Other parts of the South also showed interest in recruiting Chinese labor.  Savannah was receiving 14 Chinese to work on rice plantations across the Savannah river in South Carolina.

May 21, 1869

1874. Chinese coming to Savannah.

      In addition, there were some objections among townspeople about bringing Chinese.  Fears that hordes of Chinese would overrun communities arose such that Augusta recruiters tried to reassure residents that there were "not more than thirty Chinamen there."

Augusta Chronicle, 1886

     Blacks, who were likely to be displaced by Chinese, showed both curiosity and hostility toward these foreigners when they first arrived in their Chinese attire, queues, and strange sounding language. An editorial in a Vicksburg, Mississippi paper reflecting on the expulsion of Chinese from California in the 1880s. observed that if negroes are duped to make an exodus to the frozen North, the South will have the Chinese to replace them.

        However, once Chinese came to the South, they did not take well to plantation work in the fields, and generally preferred to open their own businesses, mostly grocery general stores and hand laundries. However, they were not well accepted and were sometimes victimized by assaults and robberies. In 1900 whites in Rosedale, Mississippi, ordered Chinese merchants to leave the country within five days, leading the Chinese to seek a meeting with the state governor who promised to protect their rights.

Rosedale, MS. crisis with Chinese merchants. Aug. 16, 1900  

Atlanta, 1913

Augusta, Georgia Sept. 17, 1910

Connections Between the Soong Sisters, a Chinese who served in American Civil War, and Macon, GA.

        It might seem very unlikely for there to be connections between Macon, Georgia, with the Soong sisters, arguably the most influential trio of sisters in modern world history, and with a Chinese who fought for the South in the American Civil War.
        Cao Zishi, a 14-year old Chinese boy adopted by missionaries in China was brought to the American South in 1859 just before the outbreak of the Civil War. Adopting the American name of a benefactor, C. K. Marshall, he volunteered for the Confederate army although it is unclear whether at his young age he actually engaged in combat or was just part of the support personnel. In an interview in 1905, Marshall's son mentioned that Marshall had lived near Macon, Georgia. After the war, Marshall attended college in Tennessee and then returned to Shanghai as a missionary in 1869, and he founded a school that later became Suzhou University.

Excerpt from June 8, 1905 interview in Buffalo Express. Source: http://bluegrapychinese.blogspot.com

        During his stay in Shanghai, Marshall met Charlie Soong (1863-1918), another Chinese who lived in the American South for many years. He had studied theology in Wilmington, North Carolina, as well as at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. After his return to China, Charlie Soong made a fortune selling Bibles, funds that he used to help Sun Yat Sen's revolution in 1911.

        The common background of Soong and Marshall with Christian religion in the American South might have led to Soong and Marshall becoming acquainted in Shanghai.  Marshall, in fact, became a tutor for the Soong daughters teaching them rudiments of Chinese characters and some of the classics.

Charles Jones Soong

         Soong met and married Ni Kwei-tseng, a well-educated Chinese woman who was a devout Christian from a prominent family. They were ahead of the times and wanted their daughters to be educated, but China did not have colleges for women so they turned to the United States.   Due to his own positive experiences in the American South, Soong chose to send his three daughters to the American South for their schooling.   He asked W. Burke in Macon, Georgia, a former classmate at Vanderbilt who became a Methodist missionary, to accept them as his wards.

Macon Telegraph newspaper announcement regarding 3 Soong sisters in Macon, 1908

.

       The two oldest daughters enrolled at Wesleyan College for Women in Macon.  However, Macon seemed to have been a bad choice for 13-year-old May-Ling as she was not allowed to attend a white middle school in Macon because she was not white.  This actually worked out to her advantage as she received a better education from a private tutor than a public school could provide.

Macon Telegraph, 1910.

        The three Soong daughters would later have great influence in China's, and world history.  The oldest daughter, Ai-Ling married H. H. Kung, a wealthy man, and finance minister of China.  Ching-Ling, the next oldest, married the leader of the Chinese revolution, Sun Yat-Sen, and the youngest, May-Ling, married Chiang Kai-shek, the first President of the Republic of China.  

Soong sisters

    It is of note that in 1944  Charley Soong was honored in Wilmington, North Carolina, where decades earlier he converted to Christianity.

"The small granite monument reads: “Charlie Jones Soong, father of the famous Soong family of modern China, was converted to Christianity in the old Fifth Street Methodist Church, which stood on this site. He was baptized on Nov. 7, 1880, by the Rev. T. Page Ricaud, then pastor. One of his six children, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, whose Christian influence is world-wide, is the wife of China’s devout generalissimo and president. Erected in 1944.”

revised 11.17.20

Assimilation of Chinese Children in New Orleans, 1912

A reporter for the Times-Picayune newspaper in New Orleans analyzed the children of Chinese immigrants in 1912. He found, to his surprise, that their parents were raising their children to fit American fashions, language, and customs. He expressed amazement that despite coming from a culture several thousands of years old the Chinese could so quickly assimilate in one generation. Obviously, he held a strict hereditarian view and was unaware of, or rejected, the behavioristic revolution of John Watson that would come to dominate American psychology for the next 50 years or more.

                        In recognition of his misconceptions, the journalist did allow that one Chinese mother                         spoke English as well as he did, if not a bit better.

Nonetheless, he could not avoid noticing and emphasizing the "solemn black slanting eyes" of the Chinese babies gazing into his admittedly "strange ones."

It seems the reporter was having more trouble accepting the Americanized Chinese children than the latter were having in acquiring the customs of the children around them in New Orleans.

Chinese Labor Contractors

     Before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibiting the entry of Chinese laborers to the U. S., thousands of Chinese were recruited by labor contractors, both non-Chinese and Chinese, to come work on railroad construction, mines, lumber camps, and other labor-intensive work. It is difficult to underestimate the importance of their role in bringing large numbers of Chinese across the Pacific to work where they did not know the language and customs. Chinese laborers recruited by a labor contractor would be transported to distant sites across the U.S. without their need to know the language, customs, and geography of their work sites.

    Below is an ad in 1870 for Sisson, Wallace & Co.,  a general agent company dealing in Chinese goods, groceries, and all kinds of family supplies in San Francisco. It also promoted the recruitment of supplies of Chinese labor in areas of northern California and Nevada, in particular to the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR).  In 1866, it began to recruit Chinese laborers for the CPRR and was one of the largest contractors. They would hire a Chinese contractor to handle the payments to the workers and arrangements for their room and board.

    

    Another prominent non-Chinese labor contractor was Cornelius Koopmanschap, a Dutch immigrant who began recruiting over 30,000 Chinese laborers in 1861 for railroad construction. By 1870 he expanded his business to bring Chinese labor to the South to work on farms and plantations in Texas, Georgia, and Louisiana but his efforts in 1869 to bring Chinese as replacements for African Americans on cotton plantations failed by 1875.  Just before the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, he brought several thousand Chinese to work on the Southern and Northern Pacific Railroad construction.

    Chinese also served as labor contractors, and having the advantage over whites of being fluent in the Chinese language, were effective recruiters. Ah Quong in Reno, Nevada was an important recruiter who worked with white labor contractors to bring workers for the CPRR.

    In the Pacific Northwest, Chin Chun Hock was a very successful labor contractor for railroads and lumber camps, establishing the Wah Chong Company in Seattle in 1868 importing and manufacturing goods including sugar, tea, rice, cigars, opium (legal at the time), and fireworks.  In 1873, 20-year-old Chin Gee Hee, became a junior partner until 1888 when Chin Chun Hock bought his share of the business.  

      

       Chin Gee Hee then focused on being a labor contractor with his Quong Tuck Company which supplied construction workers to railways (the Great Northern Railway, the Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad and Transportation Company) and other construction projects in the Pacific northwest.

Chin Gee Hee, a Seattle labor contractor, in his office (1904).

       Chin Gee Hee returned in 1904 or 1905 to China, where he was the entrepreneur behind South China's first railway known as the Sun Ning Railway Company funded with $2.75 million he raised mainly from Chinese emigrants to other countries.
       In central California, Ah Louie (his American name) opened a store in 1874 in San Luis Obispo that had many services for Chinese immigrants.  It was a grocery and general merchandise store that also served as a bank, post office, medical herb shop, and gathering center. 

Most importantly, as a labor contractor, he was the foreman and employment agent of all the Chinese who worked on the Pacific Coast and Southern Pacific Railroads and later he was in charge of recruiting Chinese to work in the quicksilver mines near Cambria, California. His store building is preserved as California Registered Historical Landmark no 802, one of the last signs of a small Chinatown that is now virtually entirely gone.  Recently, archeologists have found Chinese artifacts on the site.

U. S. Getting 2500 "chinks" to work on Panama Canal

Chinese laborers were recruited to provide cheap labor in many parts of the world in the 19th century including Panama when railroads and the canal was built at the turn of the 20th century. A 1906 Atlanta Constitution article explained the procedures and policies for recruitment, treatment, and payment of the 2500 Chinese initially wanted to help dig the Panama Canal.

The tenor of the article is that the U.S. will be careful to be truthful in their recruitment procedures, making sure that each recruit fully understands the nature of the work, the living conditions, and what they will be paid.

However, the statement that each coolie will "be thoroughly scrubbed" suggests a condescending attitude that may indicate the men will not be accorded respectful treatment in other ways. Indeed, the preparation for their medical exam involves 100 men at a time coming into a hall "clad only in a piece of string and his paper tag."

The article describes and justifies the very low wages that will be paid on the grounds that they will make more than they would if they stayed in China. It also expressed concern about bringing too many Chinese because of their propensity to form unions, and the danger of strikes occurring which would impede the building of the canal.

Chop-Chop's Makeover: From Sidekick and Cook into Bruce Lee

         There have been changes over time in the media portrayal of Chinese, with more positive representations finally emerging.  In the past, Chinese might be portrayed like Hop Lee, a subservient houseboy who fawned over his employer on one hand, and on the other extreme, like Fu Manchu, evil incarnate, out to conquer the world.  Then by mid century they were replaced by the sagacious yet still inscrutable, detective, Charlie Chan. Next he was depicted as the brainy computer nerd by the 1960s.

             These changes involved replacing one stereotype with another; they did not involve changes within a specific character. A striking instance where a fictional character was rewritten drastically to reflect changing social attitudes was with Chop Chop, the token Chinese comic relief companion of the Blackhawk fighter squadron, a 1940s forerunner of the  "Magnificent Seven."

               Throughout the 1940s and well into the 1950s, Chop-Chop was used to provide comic relief in the Blackhawk comic  book where  artist Reed Crandall depicted him as a somewhat emasculated caricature.  Chop Chop is chubby, buck-toothed, wears a queue tied with a bow, and wears coolie looking clothes.  Speaking sing-song English, his gibberish is nonsensical or undecipherable.   An offensive racist stereotype by current standards, it was an accepted and typical of depiction of Chinese and other Asian males until beyond the middle of the 20th century.

               Primarily serving as Blackhawk's sidekick, Chop Chop flew on combat missions in the back seat of a fighter plane piloted by the squadron leader, Blackhawk, presumably because he did not have the skill to fly his own plane.  In hand to hand combat, while other members of the Blackhawk crew, all of European heritage, fought with hand guns, Chop Chop rushed into the fray armed only with a meat cleaver (after all, he was the group's cook).

         
         With changing times and more favorable attitudes toward Chinese after World War II,  Chop-Chop was "promoted" and even featured in his own comic, Chop Chop, from 1946 to 1955.

             In 1952,  he became cast as a full member of the team, and from 1955 to 1964, he was a more realistically drawn character. However, in the 1980s revival of the series, Chop-Chop was "demoted" wearing a variation of his original outfit (even clutching a meat cleaver on the cover of the first issue).

           When it was decided to portray him as proficient in martial arts, perhaps due to the popularity of Bruce Lee, Chop Chop was renamed, Liu Huang.  In the 1960s, Chop Chop (now Dr. Hands) endowed with beryllium-encased hands, could "smash through practically anything."  By the late 1970s, channeling Bruce Lee he was recast as a Chinese master of martial arts as well as the team's most skilled flier, "save for Blackhawk himself." In the 1980s he was no longer named Chop Chop, but Wu Cheng, a martial arts master.

           In the late 1960s he achieved the rank of Lieutenant, and is not only a master pilot but also a skilled mechanic.  Despite these achievements, he was still providing his skillful services as a cook. Some stereotypes may never change!

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackhawk_(DC_Comics)

Negative Media Images of Chinese

     Illustrations of "cartoons"and drawings as political and social commentary has a long history.

Chinese were targets of negative stereotyping in many images created during the late 19th century to promote anti-Chinese feelings that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that was renewed and continued until 1943.

  Popular forms of fiction such as dime novels in the early 1900s also generated negative images of Chinese, focusing on the seedy aspects of opium dens, tongs, and slave girls which in some form or another filled dozens of issues of Old and Young Brady, Secret Service Detectives.

Fast forward to the year 1941, and a new Chinese stereotype of being "smart" was suggested by this advertisement by a paper product company, the Container Corporation of America, which exclaimed, "Darned clever... those Chinese!"

The reference was not to Chinese Americans, however, but to Ts'ai Lun who invented paper back in the Han Dynasty. The corporate ad copy adhered to the stereotype of the mystical East, asserting that Ts'ai Lun's technique for paper invoked "mystic powers to raise the dead," whereas America's (corporate) magic lay in "low-cost, light-weight packages of paperboard."

Chinese Americans and Problems in U. S. Census Records

The decennial U. S. Census is an important source of information for many purposes including federal allocation of resources to states and localities as well as apportionment of seats to each state in the House of Representatives based on population size.  Information about individuals such as where they lived, what work they did, and demographic information is invaluable for genealogical and historical research.

However, getting complete and accurate census information is much more difficult than one might realize. Viewing a government video created for the 1940 census (records which were only released last year) is illuminating.  Even though the film uses a mock census interview, it shows how demanding the process was and one can imagine how many ways it could involve errors.

  Problems of getting valid information about Chinese immigrants is especially difficult. The unfamiliarity of Chinese names for census enumerators (most, if not all, from white European backgrounds) made for problems of accurate transliteration of names. The name order for Chinese being the reverse of Eurocentric names added inaccuracy. Distrust and fear of the purpose of the census, especially for the many Chinese with false or paper son names, undoubtedly led them to be absent when the census taker came. An earlier post gives more details of these problems that existed with census records of Chinese.

One illustration of other problems was the egregious error in some census data involved confusion of the codes used to distinguish Chinese (C 4) from Colored (C 2), the term used for decades for black Americans leading to an "overcount" in some cases because "Colored" was counted as "Chinese"as detailed not only for 1940, but also as early as 1910.  These are only two small examples of errors involving the count of Chinese. They are just the "tip of an iceberg" but I did not try to determine how large that iceberg might have been.