Inscription on the Past from Present Inquiries
Historiography of Nineteenth Century Chinese Immigrant Public Women
"Whenever women continue to serve as boundary markers between
different national, ethnic and religious collectives, their emergence as
full fledged citizens will be jeopardized."Deniz Kandiyoti, "Identity and Its Discontents : Women and the Nation"
"There has been no single historical canon or permanent story, but
an evolving argument rewritten by each generation."Benjamin J. Barber, An Aristocracy of Everyone
Chinese immigrant women arrived in America’s West in the mid nineteenth century. Their arrival marked the beginning of Chinese American women in the United States of America [1]. They left very few documents of their own. They were assumed to have followed the Chinese men to the West after the gold rush to serve the men. A majoritity of them were called “One Hundred Men’s Wives” or prostitutes [2]. In the Western construction and conceptualization of Chinese women of this particular time, they have been portrayed as victims of patriarchy and the capitalist system.
Their histories up until the emergence of Women's Studies in the 1970s were mostly written by the missionaries who worked in China, Mission Home workers in the US who rescued them and journalists who sensationalized them. Since they did not leave much in the way of primary sources, it is very difficult to write their histories. Their experience poses a great challenge for any one who wishes to conduct research on them. Among the issues involved in their history, one of the major areas of contestation lies in the Mission Home education which claimed to educate a great number of Chinese immigrant women during this period [3].
Traditionally, up until 1970s, the consensus about the history of the Mission Home Educated Chinese immigrant women was that a majority of them were prostitutes because Chinese custom did not allow women to follow their husbands to the United States of America. Only indecent, poor or kidnapped women such as prostitutes came to the “Gold Montain”. The pre-1970 consensus holds that during the Progressive Era when the Wild West began to make its transition to a more family oriented community, the Chinese women were rescued by the Christian Mission Homes and were reformed/educated to be good Victorian Christian women. Then under the miscengenation law, they were married to reputable Chinese merchants, and according to the pre-1970 view that was the origin of Chinese American Family in the United States. Chinese American communities contested many facts involved in this type of discourse. For instance, they considered the numbers of women rescued to be heavily exagerated. They were also very dubious about the Westernized education received by this group of women. Furthermore, they asked how the Chinese American Communities dealt with this shameful origin of their female ancestors? Nonetheless, Mission Home education had a long-lasting impact on the education of Chinese women and Chinese American families during the exclusion era.
In the past three decades, the history of Chinese immigrant women in the 19th Century has been retold and reinterpreted with rather creative ways of doing history. By analyzing the shifting of perspectives and innovative ways of using existing documents in viewing and interpreting the experience of Chinese immigrant women in the Nineteenth century, the article intends to uncover some of the hidden ideology and long muffled issues to further discuss the re/construction of the origin of Chinese American women and their education.
Women as Stigmatized Chinese Self-consciousness: East Meets West
The image of women as victims of Chinese tradition is a stereotype in which both Western scholars and Chinese May Fourth (1917-24) Western-educated intellectuals were complicit. During the May Fourth discourse, "women" became a figure for the struggle between tradition and modernity. "Women became the 'stand-ins' for China's traumatized self-consciousness" (Chow, 1991, p. 170). The result was to link the female body with the health and the strength of the nation by advocating the abolition of foot binding and other "traditional" social practices such as polygamy.
Influenced heavily by missionary reports and the wish to "modernize" China as the "White man's burden," and because many Chinese immigrant women were brought to the United States of America to be "hundred men's wives", the working class woman's image, especially that of the prostitute, dominated the American West. Gradually, women of the footbinding merchant wife's class were also viewed as slaves of male control and abuse (Pascoe, 1990; Yung, 1995).
Chinese prostitutes were associated with heathen practices, female infanticide, and viewed as the victims of the powerful and abusive patriarchy. The discourse on Chinese prostitutes in the American West is reflected in the American Protestant’s early writings on women of China. Given the interest in "civilizing" the Chinese, it is not surprising that missionary reports on "women's status" in China emphasized their victimization and weakness. This discourse paved the way to justify intervention. Missionary views were also skewed by the fact that missionaries tended to work among the poor. Reports of Chinese women's subordination were thus used to validate Western ideas about China's perceived cultural backwardness, which in turn justified the imperialist agenda. Footbinding, in particular, was denounced as a symbol of Chinese barbarity and an indication of the urgency of missionary interventions in China but prostitutes become the dominant symbol in the American West after the Page Act, whereby all Chinese women who applied to enter the United States of America were suspected being prostitutes (Peffer, 1986).
Chinese Prostitutes and the Progressive Era
The Chinese prostitutes arrived in the United States during the Progressive Era. The medical-legal and moral discourse of the time soon prohibited their bodies as a site for pleasure. Instead they were incorporated into two generally constructed master images of the prostitute, both profane: one a ruined, destroyed, victimized body; the other, a destroying body, a disease that spreads and rots the body politic (Bell, 1994; Connelly, 1980; Rosen, 1982). With the rapid development of industrialization and urbanization, the prostitutes became a political subject to be controlled during this era. Chinese prostitutes were marked as the evil of the Chinese community and as "the foul, contagious disease," "a particular phase of the Chinese question", with their potential of "infusing a poison into Anglo-Saxon Blood" (Sawtelle, 1878). They were the first group from a different shore to be targeted by the first gender specified immigration law, the Page Act, because they were Chinese immigrants and because they were women (Peffer, 1986; 1999). Other than the moral high ground generally used in the discourse and legal action against Chinese women in the Progressive Era, the control of Chinese women also met the purpose of controling the growth of the Chinese population in the United States.
The inforcement of extremely restrictive immigration policy such as Chinese Exclusion Act and anti-Chinese sentiments was very effective in reducing Chinese population in the United States of America. By the time the distinguished Chicago sociologist Robert Park (1925) proclaimed in his now classic essay "The City" to examine the development of "moral regions" in the process of urbanization, he would have found that the Chinese moral regions in the previous periods from 1850-1900 had been moved several times through city zoning ordinance and finally disappeared and that, furthermore, there was only a small number of Chinese women left to be studied. In 1908, Donaldina Cameron in San Francisco had only one or two slave girls to rescue, and in one case, when Cameron went into a brothel with policemen to rescue the Chinese prostitutes, the Chinese on the promise did not even resist; she just took the women she found because the owners of this slave-girl were so intimidated by her (Martin, 1977, p. 114). Even though later on Japanese scholar using glabol traffiking of women as frame work to examine the population of the Mission Home Resuced women and found that the 1909 Mission Home records showed that the rescued were about one-third Japanese (Ichioka, 1977). Nevertheless, the Chinese prostitutes dominated the discourse and media attention at the time, and Cameron blamed the Chinese Secret Society’s total control of the trade for stopping her from rescuing more prostitutes (Martin, 1977, p. 97). In general, San Francisco saw the Chinese bachelor society in its quick formation from the period of forbidden Chinese women (Page Act, 1875) and followed by forbidden Chinese family (bachelor society) and forbidden workers (Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882). Chinese men did come and worked and left as they were designated to by their importers and social engineering through immigration policy, mostly without their women (Peffer, 1986).
The Contestation Initiated in the 1970s
As a partial result of such discourse, Asian American women's history was dominated by prostitute discourse; for instance, Yuji Ichioka's (1977) article “Ameyuki-san: Japanese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America" appeared in Amerasia Journal. Her approach was to establish a broader international even global perspective on Japanese women who were transported to China, Southeastern Asia and Americas as prostitutes. Her article was followed by studies on picture brides, war-brides, mail order brides, and camp-town women in the same issue of the journal. Trafficking Asian women as sex workers dominated the discourse on Asian American women and reinforced the strong association with the exoticized image of them.
Gradually this prostitute beginning would be contested by the Asian American communities with a new wave of immigrants who arrived after 1965 with more professional status and with Asian American communities establishing their own research agenda as a way of talking back to the previous research done on this group of women. Yet the fascination with the fate of these women in the nineteenth century keeps attracting new scholars to devote their energy to find out more about them.
How They were Studied: A Retrospective
Following the image of the coolie trade for Chinese male workers in the Americas, Chinese women's arrival soon routed them into the image of slaves, kidnapped prostitutes. Missionary reports on the Chinese women's status in China offered the interpretation of these women's inhuman social conditions. After their arrival, they were targeted by the anti-Chinese movement in the American West as a tool to attack and contain Chinese population. The construction of Western Christian workers as the vanguard to save the Chinese prostitutes is crystallized in the career of Donaldina Cameron. Since the year of Cameron's retirement, here have been two full-length books on her (Martin 1977; Wilson 1931). This is Cameron's mission statement:
They are the first Christianized and educated women to enter the Chinese communities in these places, so there are great opportunities for them to scatter the good seed they carry with them from the Home ... In their lives are the words fulfilled, 'I will sow them among the heathen and they shall remember me in far mountains. (Martin, 1977, p. 115)
The imperialistic ideology of the Christian mission was very clear; the containment of the Chinese women here in the American West became a part of the mission to save the Chinese race through Christianity. According to the formation of contained or ideologically converted Chinese women in Amerrica, they would be agents to change and contain China. The Chinese women here also served the purpose of submitting to the white women's power and boosting the White women's sense of superiority. All the literature of the mission home described Chinese women as "hidden away" or "heavily guarded" regardless of whether they were wives or prostitutes. It is interesting to note that they were guarded and hidden away not from the White men but from the White Christian women. As the mission home women assumed their duty to rescue their unfortunate Asian "sisters," the White men were released from the yoke of the traditionally male-controlled trade; Chinese men took the total blame for the women they brought into this country. As Judy Yung points out, "their [mission home workers] work had a damaging effect on the Chinese community and on the moral psyche of the rescued women ... and helped to perpetrate negative stereotypes of the Chinese." (Yung, 1995, p. 55)
This othering process which saw all Chinese women of this period in the de jure way as all potential prostitutes and the de facto way as all slaves continued until the first feminist rebuttal written by Lucie Cheng Hirata, "Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America" published in Signs in 1979. As the title indicates, Cheng's research attempts to change the general assumption that all Chinese prostitutes were slaves. The word "prostitute" was used instead of a euphemistic term like "public women" to indicate the feminist view of prostitution as a profession.
The publication of Lucie Cheng's research[4] can be traced to the emergence of Chinese women as a subject of Western scholarly inquiry with the movement of the women's studies in the 1970s. As stated by the general editor of Signs in its 1976 special issue on Chinese women, "If there is a subject that seems of the utmost pertinence to those concerned with women, culture, and society, that subject is China" (Stimpson, 1976, p. vi). The statement intended to treat material on Chinese women (along with that on Soviet and third world women) as data for the formation of general theories on patriarchy or women's liberation in the first line of women's studies projects (Teng, 1996). Lucie Cheng's article immediately created the first critique of such a project. It points at and blames the patriarchy and male domination in a cross-national context, not only attacking the patriarchy (east and west) but also challenging the racial injustice in the immigration practice at the turn of the century and painting a gloomy picture of the long-praised mission home rescue. Her article was also influenced by the emergent Asian American point of view symbolized by Amerasia Journal which published Ichioka's article on Japanese prostitutes of the same period with a focus on the trannational trafficking of Japanese women in China, South Eastern Asia, and America.
Cheng emphasizes the view that prostitutes are sex workers and analyzes the political economy of this group of women under the context of the expansion of American capitalism and imperialism. She opens her article by indicating the political economy of these women in the Chinese, American, and Chinese-American contexts:
In societies undergoing rapid industrialization, prostitution serves a double economic function. It helps to maintain the labor force of single young men which is in the interest of the capitalists who would otherwise have to pay higher wages to laborers with families to support. In addition, prostitution enables entrepreneurs to extract large profits from the work of women under their control and thus accumulate considerable capital for other investments. Further, in multiracial areas, prostitutes of minority or colonized groups can also provide cheap labor themselves. (Cheng, 1979, p. 223)
In a revision of her article, Lucie Cheng obviously sensed the high percentage of Chinese women who were in the prostitution trade and changed her title to "Chinese Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century" in Women of America: A History, (Berkin & Norton, 1979). Women in this area were the majority of Chinese immigrant women in the United States during the Progressive Era. Since her investigation was focused on San Francisco and its nearby areas, she sensitively changed the location from America to California. The change of title indicates the sensitivity developed among Chinese American scholars and their attempt to see the community as non-monolithic with various regional differences.
The manual census data of 1870 analyzed by Cheng revealed that 71% of Chinese immigrant women were prostitutes, though she speculated that the misconception and miscommunication of the census takers might have contributed to such a high percentage. The fact shocked the community of scholars[5].
Cheng's biggest achievement in the article is to discover a brief period of free competition where Chinese women had the opportunity to be a free agent and enterpurenure before the trade became totally controlled by males and the life story of the no-name heroine in this initial brief period whom Cheng depicts as
a twenty-year-old prostitute from Hong Kong who landed in San Francisco late in 1848. A free agent serving a predominantly non-Chinese clientele during a period of affluence, she accumulated enough money to buy a brothel within two years and retired the widow of a wealthy Chinese man. (1979, p. 8)
This is the beginning of a reconstruction and reclaiming project to recover the history of this group of women. Cheng also begins to protest the numbers of women rescued by the Mission Home. She mentions this in the last two paragraphs of her article, protesting Cameron's claim in 1898 that she rescued 3,000 Chinese women. Cheng argues that the number according to her estimate and the mission home records was only 600 Chinese women (Judy Yung estimates in her 1995 book that it was about 1,500 using Pascoe’s collection). In Lucie Cheng's article, the slave girl and the prostitute were not distinguished, later Judy Yung would make a clear distinction between the two. Even though Cheng suspected that some young girls in the brothels were slave/servants and not prostitutes, she did not make any distinction between these two groups of women. Lucie Cheng also began to discuss the issue related to their clients. Using court cases, police records, and public documents, she concluded that the prostitutes in the lowest end served mixed ethnic, working class groups, and most of the high-class prostitutes served only Chinese. She is the first to notice that a high percentage of children of American-born Chinese were born in the brothels.
In 1983, Laurene Wu McClain furthered the thesis proposed by Lucie Cheng's article and elaborated on the criticism of Cameron in her article "Donaldina Cameron: A Reappraisal." McClain examined the Mission Home Rescue movement and concluded that it was out of pace with the late nineteenth century Social Gospel movement, which saw the poverty and hardship experienced by the working class in the process of industrialization in the urban areas and promoted such structural reforms as factory inspection, child labor laws, and regulation of big business. This trend gradually influenced the foreign missions as well. They spoke less of the conversion of heathens and more of improving social conditions. The movement did not have any effect in changing the ideology of the mission home women who saw prostitutes as a moral and not a social problem. This is the first attempt to critically review Cameron and the Mission Home women's position in the larger context of Christian social movements. Obviously, her conclusion is that the Mission Home women were lagging behind in the progressive thought and activity of their time.
Following these two critiques of Mission Home rescues, Peggy Pascoe (1989) focuses on the marriages of Mission Home educated women from 1874 to 1919 and interprets the success of this kind of marriage as the result of two gender systems in conflict, namely, the Victorian American gender system exemplified by the Christian women's clubs and societies organized to save the Chinese prostitutes from brothels and to educate them in the Mission Home, and the Chinese "traditional system," Confucian patriarchy, as exemplified by its victims-- the Chinese prostitutes. Pascoe depicts the rescued Chinese women as their own agents who understood the conflict of the two gender systems and used the knowledge to their advantage. They volunteered to be rescued and educated by the Mission Home so they could live as respected wives of the Chinese American middle-class men.
Pascoe depicts this group of Chinese prostitutes with feminist elan, portraying them as capable free agents who were able to see through the pretense of the Victorian women who rescued them from Chinese male oppression. The Chinese prostitutes took advantage of the racial conflict situation, since women were a rarity at this time thanks to the Page Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act. There were more than enough Chinese men who wanted to marry these women. In her article, the story goes like this: A Chinese prostitute would spot a decent Chinese male customer with whom she then developed a mutual admiration with the intention to marry. Because the price of redeeming her was enormous, the prostitute would leak the information of her whereabouts to the mission home women, who would contact the local police to raid the brothel and rescue her. After being carefully guarded and defended in court to gain her freedom/confinement, while at the same time having Cameron take custody of her and becoming an inmate of the Mission Home, she would be educated in the Western style and learn Victorian/Christian values. After receiving the proper education and reform, the Chinese woman would become an eligible woman to be married off by the Mission Home to her Chinese suitor. At this time, she would inform the man she loved tthat he could come to propose to her, and the Mission Home would act as the woman's adopted American parents to bargain for better treatment before marriage. After the wedding, if the husband did something that was considered not moral, such as being unfaithful or abusive, the wife would return to the mission for help and use the White parents' power to regulate her husband's behavior. Through the Mission Home, the middle class Chinese American men got their Western educated and reformed wives, and the Chinese prostitutes became the respected wives of the Chinese American middle class. First, the author assumes to romanticize the vitorian love concept and love as the foundation of marriage for the Chinese women in the West who were receiving a prison type of education in the Mission Home. Second, the comic dramatization of rescue and the claim of agency of the Chinese women on their own fate were rather interestingly full of feminist excitement, but the reality might be very different looking from the Chinese immigrant, illiterate, poor women’s point of view. Furthermore, the fluidity of identity of this group of women deserves our attention. In Lucie Cheng's article, they were Chinese women and Chinese prostitutes. Pascoe names them differently. They became Chinese American women. Furthermore, they were wives of middle-class Chinese American men. It seems to imply that Westernization was a way for Chinese women to become Chinese-American women, that through Mission Home’s "prison education" or “reform education” or “western education” and Christianization, they were entitled to be American. Pascoe's approach is one of the best examples of the underlying forces of ideology speaking: the ability to determine who deserves the entitlement of nationality and citizenship.
After much criticism from Chinese American communities, Pascoe revised her thesis of gender systems in conflict in her book Relations of Rescue (1990) to review the experience of the Mission-Home-rescued Chinese immigrant women in a larger movement of Protestant missionary women to establish female moral authority in the West at the turn of the century. Under such a movement, no single group of minority women escaped the fate of being rescued. Shifting her gender system in the conflict thesis to explain the processes of the justification for the Mission Home women's need for the rescue mission, she painted an image of Chinese women that evolved in the literature of missionary reports combined with the reports of home visits by Mission Home women and their attempted briberies to have Chinese send their girls to school. The image of bound feet and carefully guarded wives of the merchant class and their slave girls gradually transformed and reconfirmed the Protestant's view that Chinese women needed to be liberated and emancipated. They concluded that Chinese were not only buying and selling girls and prostitutes but also wives.
Pascoe shifts her focus from the gender systems in conflict to the power relationship between the rescuing and the rescued. She elaborates on the matron's relationship with the inmates and the cultivation of native helpers and demonstrated the limitation of the rescue from the greater societal racial discrimination that offered very few alternatives or job opportunities for the rescued women. She also critiques the Mission Home’s industrial vocational education that was doomed under the broader racial, social, and cultural ideology. After all, the gender system functioned in a much wider scope than the Mission Home, and the matrons themselves were also the victims of this genderized society, as symbolized by the life of Donaldina Cameron.
Pascoe gives a much clearer picture of the Mission Home inmates in this later work. Most of Chinese women rescured by the Mission Home were slave girls and so-called U.S. borderers: women waiting for immigration judgment using Mission Home as a way to remain in the United States. Pascoe concludes on the rescue effort of the Mission Home: "Whatever their ideological limitations, mission workers should be remembered for their insistence on battling against this exploitation of women" (1990, p. 55).
In 1994, Benson Tong applied the methodology designed by Parent-Duchatelet, namely the taxonomy of prostitutes which served as a model for the British investigation of prostitutes from the 1840s to 1880s, to his research on the Chinese prostitutes of nineteenth century America. Tong produces the Chinese prostitutes as a new historical anthropological figure using such social science procedures such as professional testimony; personal observations recorded in the newspapers and private family papers; memoires; interviews with administrative officials of the mission home and rescued prostitutes; archival research into business directories; fire maps prepared by the insurance companies; files of prisons, police, and hospitals; and the manuscript schedules of three U.S. census records on population, property deeds, and contracts. With these documents, Benson Tong reconstructs the stories of these prostitutes. He concludes that they were their own agents in some ways under an extremely difficult situation. They managed to make the best out it by struggling their way out of the trade to become the decent wives of Chinese men. "Chung Liang" (become good) in Chinese being the most traditional route for women in prostitute class in China. Benson Tong concludes that within the 10 years from the 1870s to the 1880s, many Chinese prostitutes did manage to marry and left the trade. But his interpretation is not very convincing (see reviews of the book by Chan, 1998 and Wei, 1996). For instance, in applying two sets of statistics, one cited the congressional testimony of Rev. Otis Gibson saying “80.5 percent of Chinese women engaged in sexual commerce in 1870 had either left the business or moved out of the city by the 1880s” (Tong, 1994, p. 100), while another one, from Su-cheng Chan's study[6] on the 1880 census, stated “Based on her statistics, 2 to 4 percent of the married Chinese women fell into this [prostitute] category” (Chan, 1991, p. 175)
Tong(1994) further concludes that
The difference between Chinese and non-Chinese prostitutes is accounted for by the simple fact that only affluent people could redeem indentured Chinese prostitutes. Secured in a comfortable marriage, most Chinese women who left the trade rarely had to face the bleak prospect of returning to prostitution. (p. 175)
As Cheng points out in her 1979 article, given that most prostitutes' careers lasted only four to five years and given the bleak environment they were living in, there were various factors to be considered before any such rosy conclusion can be reached. For instance, in the 1870s there were 1,428 Chinese prostitutes working in 159 brothels in San Francisco; and in 1880, there were only 435 working in 101 brothels. There were various ways to interpret the figures, based on the immigration regulation and corruption, zoning ordinances, race violence and migration to the inner states, and high death rate of women in this trade.
Benson Tong further pieced together the story of Ah Toy-- the no-name prostitute in Lucie Cheng's article who was the second Chinese woman to arrive in the United States of America in 1854 as a free agent. He uncovered many police reports and court documents about her. Devoting eight pages to her, following Lucie Cheng's initial thesis that there was a brief period when Chinese women entered the American West as free agents and not as endentured slaves, Benson Tong attributed the demise of Ah Toy to the struggle between a free-agent prostitute's fight against the controlling Chinese gang and organized trade of Chinese prostitutes which he concludes as "the hallmark of Chinese prostitutes after 1860 and would constitute the main feature that distinguished this Chinese vice from that of the Euro-American" (p. 176). But he did not explicitly elaborate his new found evidence for instance, the compounded elements of constant police raids from the police reports and tightening regulation against Chinese prostitutes, changing city ordinance and zoning regulation in San Francisco. The housing deeds showed that Ah Toy’s business was rather lucrative and that she was able to buy two houses and expanded her business within two years after her arrival. But later her prison records police files, and police reports actually show that Ah Toy's demise was not so much the result of the growing violence of the Chinese gang's control. IT was mostly due to police raids, arrest, and outside social interventioin such as the Mission Home rescues and the power struggle within the Chinese community which eventually led to the breakup of her business. She was forced to sell her houses and left for China in 1857. Immigration records show that she returned to California in early 1859. On March 20, 1859, she could not even pay a $20 fine and was remanded to the county prison. In July, she was arrested again for running a brothel. Benson Tong concludes that by "the early years of the 1860s, Ah Toy no longer played a significant role in San Francisco prostitution" (Tong, 1994, p. 13).
In a later chapter, he showed the gradual process of rezoning the red light district that forced the Chinese prostitutes to a well-defined segregated area by the summer of 1859. These zoning ordinances also marked the Chinese society's relocation into a ghetto and retreat to a semi-self-contained inner colony which coincides the same fate Ah Toy faced. Reading these two chapters together, we get a more complete picture of how the personal story of Ah Toy corresponded and collided with the Chinese ethnic community's attempt to gain control of itself by going underground in various areas which caused severe criticism and extreme racial violence against them. We might be able to draw a different conclusion from that of Benson Tong that it was racial violence beyond the Chinese community's control and not the Chinese gang violence that contributed to a greater role of Ah Toy's demise. From this point of view, Ah Toy's life story took a rather different turn, telling of a Chinese entrepreneur woman's fate in the time just before the Page Act.
Benson Tong also devoted one chapter to the Chinese history of the late Qing Dynasty to explain the reasons for trafficking of Chinese women in the United States. This reintroduction of China into the studies of Chinese Americans is a new trend in the 1990s, with more immigrants from China becoming more visible in our society as China is now open for social research. Tong's work also marks the return of Asian American Studies to a more global and transitional approach in the 1990s.
Following Benson Tong's thesis of returning this group of women to the Chinese wife's collective, Judy Yung includes them in her work to reclaim the origin of the merchant wife class: Unbound Feet--A Social History of Chinese American Women in San Francisco. Using the image of bound feet to characterize the women immigrants in the first part of the book, Judy Yung meant to reconstruct the untold stories of the merchants' wives (her great-grandmother was one) and of their doubly segregated existence in this country, but she also embraced the prostitutes since their numbers can not be ignored. Focusing her attention on a later period than that of Benson Tong's study, Judy Yung was able to interview some of the women who are/were still alive to tell their stories--a great advantage and a contribution to oral history. Yet using bound feet or unbound feet as a symbol for all immigrant women of this time is problematic, for the majority of them were not merchants' wives and therefore, there were not many bound feet to begin with. Most of them were working-class women with natural feet. The custom of footbinding did not apply to them. But Judy Yung is right that bound-feet merchant wives and natural-feet prostitutes and maids/servants were from different social classes, but in the United States they were channelled into the same category by their ethnic identity : that of "slave women" in the discourse on Chinese women for almost half a century in the United States. Judy Yung's attempt to reclaim the Chinese women's origin with the merchants' wives' history is understandable under the context of the long publicized history of sexualized and exoticized Chinese prostitutes. It is an attempt to break away from the image set up by the Page Act. Following this discourse to regain the wife class's history, George Peffer's 1999 book If They Do Not Bring Women Here also focuses on the history of wives. Judy Yung and George Peffer's claims are legitimate in light of the contested numbers of prostitutes recorded by the census takers and the works on rescued prostitutes, furthered by Pascoe's detailed work to dispel the myth on the numbers and identities of women rescued.
Judy Yung's most insightful observation of this group of Chinese public women came from her interpretation of the social classes of Chinese women as late as the 19th Century in the United States of America. In applying a theory developed by Yu-ning Li and Yu-Far Chang’s on traditional occupations or social roles available to women in China, namely wife, concubine, servant, and prostitute in interpreting the social and economic position of women in traditional Chinese society, Judy Yung brought us to examine the social classes of women in the American West during the Progressive Era in an unique and insightful direction. The book was published in Chinese in 1975 and translated into English only in 1992. Yung explains women's social classes in the United States at this particular time with her great-grandmother's immigration interview record and the little girl her grandmother claimed was her daughter. Actually, that little girl was her maid. Yung did not mention the fate of this little girl, but she shows how this group of women entered the States. Through this family history, she contests the research on the statistics of this class of women/girls by John W. Stephen's 1976 article[7]. It states that only 2% of Chinese women were listed as "young servants" in the 1870 census. Yung considers their numbers to have been more significant than their percentage showed and devotes many pages to describing their roles in the Chinese immigrant society. She concludes that their lives paralleled those of European female indentured servants, who made up almost one-third of the female population in ante-bellum America. She shines light on the heretofore ambiguous status of Mui Tsui and helps to distinguish the long-confused, misinterpreted, and interchangeable designations of "slave girls" and "prostitutes".
According to Yung, most of the servant girls (Mui Tsui) had to go out and run errands for their bound-feet mistresses. For this purpose, many of them were allowed to go to English classes offered in church. Compared to their mistresses, Mui Tsui were much younger when they came to the United States and were more socially mobile than their mistresses because there were so few young and available women. They had more encounters with the non-Chinese communities and had more opportunities to be educated if their mistresses allowed them to study. From Yung’s analysis, we can assume that the first group of Chinese American women came from this class. Later examination of the Mission Home rescue records proved this was the case. Since the wives of merchant class were able to travel back and forth, many would choose to raise their children in China like Judy Yung's great-grandmother and grandmother, so they became the first group of women who were transnationals. Because of this practice, Chinese Communities have many children who were born in the United States but were raised in China. Yung further concludes that the Feminist influence and emancipation of this group of merchant wives was not a direct result of their encounter in the hostile extremely anti-Chinese environment in the United States but the social acceptance of progressive women in China pushed by Western educated intellectuals, as Yung's family history showed.
One of the greatest achievements of Yung's Unbound Feet is the more complete life story of Ah Toy through oral interviews of witnesses and careful search of local newspapers. She was the second Chinese woman to arrive in the United States in 1855. Speaking English and having bound feet, she came to the United States from Hong Kong to "better her condition", and had a rather long career from 1848 to the 1860s. She was last seen selling clams on a beach in Santa Clara before she died. Yung also recovers Ah Toy's obituary in a local newspaper in 1928 that shows Ah Toy lived a long life (almost one hundred years old when she died). Judy Yung also identifies her picture in one of Genthe’s photographs taken in San Francisco’s old Chinatown.
Conclusion
Even though the histories of Asian American women are a "relatively undeveloped" area in Asian American studies (Chan, 1998, p. 18), the research on this group of women is rich and fruitful. In the past seventy years the same group of Chinese women was claimed by different collectives. They were extracted by the missionaries from the Chinese society during the late Qing dynasty as a target for intervention to modernize and Christianize the Chinese. Once they arrived in the American West, they were seen as slaves and a symbol of Chinese vice. Mission Home women claimed them for their own purpose of proving their moral superiority in the West. After they were rescued, they became part of the Mission Home collective and then, as they were reformed, Americanized wives of Chinese middle class men. In the 1970s their histories were reconstructed by feminist scholars using the women-centered approach initiated by Lucie Cheng. Later in Pascoe's works, they were seen as capable, while living under extreme oppression, of being their own agents who could use the conflict between Chinese and Victorian gender systems to their advantage and as minority women to boost the White Protestant women's sense of superiority. As Asian American Studies emerged as a field, these first immigrant women reentered the Chinese American community as unsubmissive women. Their overpowering presence becomes a stigmatized and contested story of the origin of Chinese American women when the wives' stories began to emerge in the 1980s. Not until 1995, through reconfiguration and reconstruction of the historical facts within Asian American and women's studies scholarship, were their numbers challenged, and consequently there was an attempt to revise the account of their origin to greater diversity and to include wives.
This process of reclaiming their histories indicates strong developmental linkages among several academic disciplines such as Chinese women's studies in the Chinese language developed in China and Taiwan, Women's studies in the West which constructed Chinese along with the Third World women's oppression as part of the data to analyze the patriarchy (Teng, 1996), Asian American studies which is a branch of Area Studies established during the Cold War Era, and more recent global/diaspora studies within Asian American Studies (Hune, 1991).
The research on them shows Asian American scholars’ and communities’ strong desire to rediscover their untold stories by looking at them through different lenses, paradigms, and theories in the social sciences. Women's studies and Asian American studies are paving a new way of interpreting history of this group of women immigrants. The inclusion of Chinese material and the returning of Asian American Studies in the 1990s to its transnational and global approach also contributed to some of the missing links about this group of women.
We also realize that, as historians, we are limited by the scarcity of documents left by these women. By reviewing their his/herstories, I found several areas that were generally ignored by the researchers. One is the discussion of the clients and another one is the possibility of biracial children born by this group of women. The picture from all researchers put together is that the higher the status of the prostitutes, the more ethnically selected their clientele were. The lower they went, the more public they were. Yet Ah Toy's life story contradicts this hypothesis. The main question here is rather simple: What did it mean that they were "public women"? Did the "public" also have a racial as well as a class boundary? If that was the case, the question becomes: When did they stop being "public" to other ethnic groups and become ethnic public women only for Chinese men? Were the biracial children mothered by the prostitutes considered by the mainstream as ethnically Chinese under the one drop rule? Were they able to cross the racial line? How were they treated by both the Chinese community and the White community? Are there documents that can explain these aspects? Why were these mixed-race children not discussed in any of the writings?
Judy Yung's 1995 work indicates that the Mui Tsui class and the prostitute class were actually the first ethnic beginnings of the Chinese American Community during the exclusion, segregation, and anti-miscegenation period. Unlike their transitional or home-bound (China) mistresses of the merchant class, the majority of these women raised their American-born children here and not in China.
Most important of all, the literature has given us the vivid adventure of Ah Toy: the rise and fall of a brave and dramatic woman, pieced together by Lucie Cheng, Benson Tong and Judy Yung. Still without a family name (it might as well be this way), she did put up a great fight against male control of her trade in the Chinese community in the American West and against racial discrimination against Chinese and Chinese American women during the anti-Chinese era. Her fate was very much linked with the development of tightening restrictions against Chinese immigrants starting from the control of women immigrants. Regardless of the odds she faced, she lived a quite colorful, adventurous, and full life. In this case, the researchers have joined together to realize and locate a social imagination project (Mill, 1954) where we find that the intersection of personal history with the predominant official stories that we are so used to. Their findings transform and change our view of history enabling us to consider the possibilities of alternatives still to be found.
The fact that the investigation of non-elite, non-mainstream, non-popular female activity reqires not only a deviation from the well-documented, and official accounts which are usually skewed by orientalism and Americanization but also a transformation of historical understanding and a revaluation of what is considered to be significant. Such an investigation demands that we become literate in what may appear, through the lens of traditional, mainstream representation, to be only condused, random, or violent incidents and our strong desire to write an alternative his/herstory. In the process of recovering the history of this group of women, Asian American historians demonstrate their social justice leadership in reclaiming and reconstructing a different origin of Chinese American Women.
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Footnotes
- According to Yung (1995), the first Chinese woman to arrive in the American West, in 1854, worked as a domestic servant to a missionary family. The second one arrived in 1855 is from Hong Kong. the famous Madame Ah Toy. [return to article]
- From 1880 to 1920, about 49,000 Chinese entered the United States and about 5 percent of them were women. According to the census data in 1860 to 1900, many women were categorized as prostitutes. [return to article]
- Mission Home claimed to save about 3000 Chinese women from the 1890 to 1900, which meant that one eighth of Chinese women in the US were rescued and reformed by Mission Home. [return to article]
- Chang later changed her name back to Lucie Cheng but her most famous piece of work has to be cited under Hirata. [return to article]
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- "A Quantitative History of Chinatown in San Francisco 1870 and 1880" in The Life Influence and the Roles of Chinese in the United States 1776-1960 published by San Francisco Historical Society of America, 1976, cited by Yung, 1995, p. 13. [return to article]