Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mae Ngai is professor of history and the Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.

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"The Lucky Ones is a model of historical scholarship. Mae Ngai extracts from limited records a lively and nuanced narrative of the Tape family and vividly illuminates how conditions of inequality fester and spread through human greed and aspiration. The telling tale of the Tapes challenges commonly held myths of immigrant absorption over generations."--Madeline Y Hsu, author of Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and Southern China, 1882-1943

"Rigorously researched and well written, The Lucky Ones engages scholars as well as the general public."--Gordon H. Chang, Stanford Universit

"Mae Ngai's book is perfect! The multigenerational story of the Tape family's experience as immigrants, then as Chinese Americans, is well told and richly documented. This jazzlike tale captures the complex, contradictory improvisations of all who come to these shores in search of freedom and fulfillment. Ngai's account of the Tape family's bargains with old and new world denizens is an outstanding teaching text because she highlights the way in which 'Chinese-American' identity, at a critical point in U.S. history, exemplified and constituted 'American' citizenship and 'American' dreaming. Through Ngai's account, students are able to understand how very American the Tape family was and how similar their tale is, even in its difference, to those of other Americans."--Lucas B. Wilson, Mount Holyoke College

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The Lucky Ones

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition.......................................viiiAuthor's Note..........................................................xTape Family Tree.......................................................xivMaps...................................................................xv1. The Lucky One.......................................................32. The First Rescue....................................................143. Joseph and Mary.....................................................244. "That Chinese Girl".................................................435. Chinatown's Frontier................................................586. Suburban Squire.....................................................717. Two Marriages.......................................................838. The Chinese Village.................................................959. Blood and Fire......................................................11910. In Pursuit of Smugglers............................................13511. Modern Life........................................................15012. The Trial..........................................................16113. "Sailors Should Go Ashore".........................................17314. The New Daughter-in-Law............................................18915. Loss...............................................................20116. Service............................................................207Epilogue...............................................................223Glossary of Chinese Names..............................................231Acknowledgments........................................................233Notes..................................................................235Appendix: Documents from the Chinese Exclusion Era.....................277Index..................................................................315

Chapter One

The boy, jeu dip (zhao xia), was twelve years old when he left southern China for America. He was from Skipping Stone (fushi) Village in Xinning County, Guangdong Province. The boy's ancestors were one of thirty-three clans that migrated to Xinning in the thirteenth century, during the southern Song dynasty. Because the founder of the Song dynasty was named Zhao, people in Guangdong with that surname often claimed royal lineage. But in the nineteenth century, there were mostly poor farmers in Xinning, not princes.

Xinning is the old name for Taishan, one of the Siyi (four counties) in southwestern Guangdong from which ninety percent of Chinese immigrants in California came in the nineteenth century. A great chain migration of sons and husbands poured from the Siyi, one of the least prosperous regions of Guangdong. Siyi's hilly terrain and rocky soil, its cycles of drought and flood, and its relative isolation from the market impoverished its farmers. Instability from British economic penetration in the wake of the Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860) and political violence caused by secret brotherhood societies made conditions worse. Xinning produced only enough rice to feed its people for half the year. Farmers supplemented rice production by growing sweet potatoes and peanuts on the hillsides. Many Siyi men made seasonal migrations to more prosperous counties near Guangzhou (Canton) to labor as peddlers, hired hands, or factory workers. Increasingly, they sought work across the ocean that would sustain their families. Perhaps, if they were lucky, California gold would make them rich.

At twelve, Jeu Dip was young to be emigrating on his own. Most boys of that age traveled with a father, uncle, or cousin or had one of those waiting in California, but we have no evidence that Jeu Dip emigrated as part of a family strategy. He may have been orphaned or fled a cruel father, or perhaps he simply escaped from a cruel life. We do know that he never looked back.

When he left Xinning in 1864, Jeu Dip traveled what was by then already a well-trodden route from rural Guangdong to California—Jinshan, "the gold mountain." He first made his way to Guangzhou, where the Pearl River flows into the South China Sea. Guangzhou is not far from Xinning as the crow flies, about eighty miles, but a mountainous terrain stands between Xinning and the Pearl River delta. In the early twentieth century, an enterprising emigrant named Chen Yixi would return from Seattle and build a railroad from Xinning to Jiangmen, at the edge of the delta. But before that, those with funds traveled by sedan chair, carried by coolies; those without money walked. Jeu Dip probably walked, at least as far as Jiangmen. If he had any money at all, he'd have taken a small boat when he could, a sampan, along the little rivers that thread the delta, as he made his way to Guangzhou.

There he found an emigration agent willing to loan him money for a ticket to cross the ocean, the debt to be repaid in California. The credit ticket was the common method of financing passage to California, Australia, and Hawaii (the destinations of choice for voluntary emigrants), but it is unclear how a twelve-year-old obtained such a loan without family collateral. Emigrants of lesser means had to sign indentures to get passage for work on plantations in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). The poorest rubes were lured or simply kidnapped by coolie traders and sent off in old slaving ships to harvest sugar in Cuba and guano in Peru. But Jeu Dip was a wily kid, smart and ambitious. And lucky, too—a blessing for any emigrant, but one especially appreciated by the Chinese, who understood the currency of luck in a fateful world.

Jeu Dip traveled by riverboat from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, which under British rule had grown to be the busiest entrepôt in East Asia. Rice, silk, tin, opium, and coolies flowed through Hong Kong to and from China, Southeast Asia, Europe, Australasia, and the Americas. The U.S.-China trade initially ran mostly to New York, by way of the Indian Ocean and the Cape of Good Hope. But in the early nineteenth century, Yankee merchants also ran a transpacific route that traded in sandalwood from Hawaii and sea otter pelts from the Pacific Northwest (the latter being the source of John Jacob Astor's fortune, before he went into Manhattan real estate).

The transpacific China trade, after eventually suffering from the depletion of sandalwood and pelts, was rejuvenated when the gold rush opened California to hundreds of thousands of people in 1848. Jeu Dip's crossing in 1864 was via the route between Hong Kong and San Francisco that had opened that year. Beginning in the early 1850s, Chinese began coming to California in large numbers, traveling in merchant sailing ships carrying the stuff of the China trade: silk, tea, rice, sugar, curios, herbs. Ships did not sail on schedule, but left only when there was enough cargo and passengers to make the transoceanic journey profitable to the shipper. Like other hopeful emigrants, Jeu Dip had to wait around—perhaps he picked up odd jobs for cash while he did—either in Guangzhou or in Hong Kong, until a ship was ready to sail.

In San Francisco, the Daily Alta California carried a column, "Shipping Intelligence," which listed the items of cargo and the number of passengers on each arriving vessel. It gave the names of European and American...