Immigrant Slaves
Kevin J. Mullen
There seem to be some secret societies among this people by means of which a few of their number have occasionally been found to grossly oppress their poorer brethren. The Police have attempted to interfere and protect the injured, though seldom with much effect.
-- Annals of San Francisco (1854)
With the advent of the misery ship Manyoshi Maru [1992], San Franciscans now get a look at a time-honored if disreputable aspect of Chinese immigration to the United States. “Many of those smuggled have no choice but to work under forced labor conditions,” says on account, “because they signed contracts that make them indebted to those who provide the transportation.”
The first Chinese to arrive in Gold Rush San Francisco were welcomed as a peaceable, industrious, if somewhat quaint, addition to the polyglot boomtown population. In 1849, 325 Chinese arrived; in 1850, 450. In August of that year the “Celestials” were invited to commemorate the death of President Zachary Taylor, and their group was assigned a prominent position in the procession. In 1851, another 2,700 arrived and by 1852, when more than 18,000 landed in San Francisco, attitudes began to change.
Part of the hostility of whites toward Chinese for the rest of the century and beyond was rooted in simple racism; part was economic competition; and part can be ascribed to the means by which the early Chinese were brought here. “Nearly all the very early Chinese immigrants come to the country under a system of contract,” says historian Theodore Hittell, “by which their passage was paid and they were forced to labor for a stated term at certain rates of wages, high for China but very low for California. . . .”
It was the enforcement of this contract system which helped tong gangsters gain an unholy stranglehold on much of Chinatown, and fueled the enmity of American workingmen for having to compete with under priced “slave labor.” Females had the worst of it. The movement from China to California was and almost male proposition. Of the 18,000 who arrived in 1852, 14 were women. In later years, to staff what were then called “houses of joy” in Chinatown, tong representatives would tour the rural provinces of China to buy unwanted daughters, or kidnap them, or, if necessary, “hire” them on contracts to be repaid with wages earned in the “City of the Golden Mountain.”
Most of the “Sing Song Girls” were forced to work as out-and-out slaves. Others worked ostensibly as free agents to repay the cost of their passage. According to on of the one-sided bargains struck in 1876, a young girl named Loi Lan, “because she had become indebted to her mistress for passage, board etc., and has nothing to pay,” agreed to serves as a prostiture for 4 ½ years at no wages until she had repaid $503.”
The contract penalized sick time. This clause, wrote Herbert Asbury, was the joker in the deck: “The regular physical disturbances which every woman experiences was reckoned with as within the meaning of the agreement,” he points out, “and . . . at least one month therefore, was added to every month of service. . . so that a Chinese girl who entered a crib or parlor was at once caught in a vicious circle from which there was no escape.
White-Chinese relations reached their sorry low point in the Workingmen’s party riots of the 1870s and the exclusionary legislation of the following decades. Finally, the worst features of the slave trade were brought under control by the efforts of respectable Chinese – who risked their lives to oppose the tong warlords – aide by Protestant clergy and belatedly sympathetic public officials. For most of the twentieth century, indentured servitude was relatively insignificant.
But with the great increase in immigration following the 1965 changes in immigration law, some of the bad old practices reemerged. In the Manyoshi Maru case, the specter of contract labor again materialized. The question was whether the smuggled men and women were to be forced into a life of illegality to pay off contracts they can never escape.
Welcome to the 19th century.
San Francisco Examiner December 30,1992