54. CHAPTER LIV.
OF course there was a large Chinese population in Virginia—it
is the case with every town and city on the Pacific coast. They are
a harmless race when white men either let them alone or treat
them no worse than dogs; in fact they are almost entirely harmless
anyhow, for they seldom think of resenting the vilest insults or the
cruelest injuries. They are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from
drunkenness, and they are as industrious as the day is long. A
disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist. So long
as a Chinaman has strength to use his hands he needs no support
from anybody; white men often complain of want of work, but a
Chinaman offers no such complaint; he always manages to find
something to do. He is a great convenience to everybody—even to
the worst class of white men, for he bears the most of their sins,
suffering fines for their petty thefts, imprisonment for their
robberies, and death for their murders. Any white man can swear
a Chinaman's life away in the courts, but no Chinaman can testify
against a white man. Ours is the "land of the free"—nobody denies
that—nobody challenges it. [Maybe it is because we won't let other
people testify.] As I write, news comes that in broad daylight in
San Francisco, some boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to
death, and that although a large crowd witnessed the shameful
deed, no one interfered.
There are seventy thousand (and possibly one hundred
thousand) Chinamen on the Pacific coast. There were about
a thousand in Virginia. They were penned into a "Chinese
quarter"—a thing which they do not particularly object to, as they
are fond of herding together. Their buildings were of wood;
usually only one story high, and set thickly together along streets
scarcely wide enough for a wagon to pass through. Their quarter
was a little removed from the rest of the town. The chief
employment of Chinamen in towns is to wash clothing. They
always send a bill, like this below, pinned to the clothes. It is mere
ceremony, for it does not enlighten the customer much. Their
price for washing was $2.50 per dozen—rather cheaper than white
people could afford to wash for at that time. A very common sign
on the Chinese houses was: "See Yup, Washer and Ironer"; "Hong
Wo, Washer"; "Sam Sing & Ah Hop, Washing." The house
servants, cooks, etc., in California and Nevada, were chiefly
Chinamen. There were few white servants and no Chinawomen so
employed. Chinamen make good house servants, being quick,
obedient, patient, quick to learn and tirelessly industrious. They
do not need to be taught a thing twice, as a general thing. They are
imitative. If a Chinaman were to see his master break up a centre
table, in a passion, and kindle a fire with it, that Chinaman would
be likely to resort to the furniture for fuel forever afterward.
All Chinamen can read, write and cipher with easy
facility—pity but all our petted
voters could. In California they rent
little patches of ground and do a
deal of gardening. They will raise surprising crops of vegetables
on a sand pile. They waste nothing. What is rubbish to a
Christian, a Chinaman carefully preserves and makes useful in one
way or another. He gathers up all the old oyster and sardine cans
that white people throw away, and procures marketable tin and
solder from them by melting.
He gathers up old bones and turns them into manure. In California
he gets a living out of old mining claims that white men have
abandoned as exhausted and worthless—and then the officers come
down on him once a month with an exorbitant swindle to which
the legislature has given the broad, general name of "foreign"
mining tax, but it is usually inflicted on no foreigners but
Chinamen. This swindle has in some cases been repeated once or
twice on the same victim in the course of the same month—but the
public treasury was no additionally enriched by it, probably.
Chinamen hold their dead in great reverence—they worship
their departed ancestors, in fact. Hence, in China, a man's front
yard, back yard, or any other part of his premises, is made his
family burying ground, in order that he may visit the graves at any
and all times. Therefore that huge empire is one mighty cemetery;
it is ridged and wringled from its centre to its circumference with
graves—and inasmuch as every foot of ground must be made to do
its utmost, in China, lest the swarming population suffer for food,
the very graves are cultivated and yield a harvest, custom holding
this to be no dishonor to the dead. Since the departed are held in
such worshipful reverence, a Chinaman cannot bear that any
indignity be offered the places where they sleep. Mr. Burlingame
said that herein lay China's bitter opposition to railroads; a road
could not be built anywhere in the empire without disturbing the
graves of their ancestors or friends.
A Chinaman hardly believes he could enjoy the hereafter
except his body lay in his beloved China; also, he desires to
receive, himself, after death, that worship with which he has
honored his dead that preceded him. Therefore, if he visits a
foreign country, he makes arrangements to have his bones returned
to China in case he dies; if he hires to go to a foreign country on a
labor contract, there is always a stipulation that his body shall be
taken back to China if he dies; if the government sells a gang of
Coolies to a foreigner for the usual five-year term, it is specified in
the contract that their bodies shall be restored to China in case of
death. On the Pacific coast the Chinamen all belong to one or
another of several great companies or organizations, and these
companies keep track of their members, register their names, and
ship their bodies home when they die. The See Yup Company is
held to be the largest of these. The Ning Yeong Company is next,
and numbers eighteen thousand members on the coast. Its
headquarters are at San Francisco, where it has a costly temple,
several great officers (one of whom keeps regal state in seclusion
and cannot be approached by common humanity), and a numerous
priesthood. In it I was shown a register of its members, with the
dead and the date of their shipment to China duly marked. Every
ship that sails from San Francisco carries away a heavy freight of
Chinese corpses—or did, at least, until the legislature, with an
ingenious refinement of Christian cruelty, forbade the shipments,
as a neat underhanded way of deterring Chinese immigration. The
bill was offered, whether it passed or not. It is my impression that
it passed. There was another bill—it became a law—compelling
every incoming Chinaman to be vaccinated on the wharf and pay a
duly appointed quack (no decent doctor would defile himself with
such legalized robbery) ten dollars for it. As few importers of
Chinese would want to go to an expense like that, the law-makers
thought this would be another heavy blow to Chinese
immigration.
What the Chinese quarter of Virginia was like—or, indeed,
what the Chinese quarter of any Pacific coast town was and is
like—may be gathered from this item which I printed in
the
Enterprise while reporting for that paper:
CHINATOWN.—Accompanied by a fellow reporter, we made
a trip through our Chinese quarter the other night. The Chinese
have built their portion of the city to suit themselves; and as they
keep neither carriages nor wagons, their streets are not wide
enough, as a general thing, to admit of the passage of vehicles. At
ten o'clock at night the Chinaman may be seen in all his glory. In
every little cooped-up, dingy cavern of a hut, faint with the odor of
burning Josh-lights and with nothing to see the gloom by save the
sickly, guttering tallow candle, were two or three yellow,
long-tailed vagabonds, coiled up on a sort of short truckle-bed,
smoking opium, motionless and with their lustreless eyes turned
inward from excess of satisfaction—or rather the recent smoker
looks thus, immediately after having passed the pipe to his
neighbor—for opium-smoking is a comfortless operation, and
requires constant attention. A lamp sits on the bed, the length of
the long pipe-stem from the smoker's mouth; he puts a pellet of
opium on the end of a wire, sets it on fire, and plasters it into the
pipe much as a Christian would fill a hole with putty; then he
applies the bowl to the lamp and proceeds to smoke—and the
stewing and frying of the drug and the gurgling of the juices in the
stem would wellnigh turn the stomach of a statue. John likes it,
though; it soothes him, he takes about two dozen whiffs, and then
rolls over to dream, Heaven only knows what, for we could not
imagine by looking at the soggy creature. Possibly in his visions
he travels far away from the gross world and his regular washing,
and feast on succulent rats and birds'-nests in Paradise.
Mr. Ah Sing keeps a general grocery and provision store at No.
13 Wang street. He lavished his hospitality upon our party in the
friendliest way. He had various kinds of colored and colorless
wines and brandies, with unpronouncable names, imported from
China in little crockery jugs, and which he offered to us in dainty
little miniature wash-basins of porcelain. He offered us a mess of
birds'-nests; also, small, neat sausages, of which we could have
swallowed several yards if we had chosen to try, but we suspected
that each link contained the corpse of a mouse, and therefore
refrained. Mr. Sing had in his store a thousand articles of
merchandise, curious to behold, impossible to imagine the uses of,
and beyond our ability to describe.
His ducks, however, and his eggs, we could understand; the
former were split open and flattened out like codfish, and came
from China in that shape, and the latter were plastered over with
some kind of paste which kept them fresh and palatable through
the long voyage.
We found Mr. Hong Wo, No. 37 Chow-chow street, making up
a lottery scheme—in fact we found a dozen others occupied in the
same way in various parts of the quarter, for about every third
Chinaman runs a lottery, and the balance of the tribe "buck" at it.
"Tom," who speaks faultless English, and used to be chief and only
cook to the Territorial Enterprise, when
the
establishment kept bachelor's hall two years ago, said that
"Sometime Chinaman buy ticket one dollar hap, ketch um two tree
hundred, sometime no ketch um anything; lottery like one man
fight um seventy—may-be he whip, may-be he get whip heself,
welly good."
However, the percentage being sixty-nine against him, the chances
are, as a general thing, that "he get whip heself." We could not see
that these lotteries differed in any respect from our own, save that
the figures being Chinese, no ignorant white man might ever hope
to succeed in telling "t'other from which;" the manner of drawing
is similar to ours.
Mr. See Yup keeps a fancy store on Live Fox street. He sold
us fans of white feathers, gorgeously ornamented; perfumery that
smelled like Limburger cheese, Chinese pens, and watch-charms
made of a stone unscratchable with steel instruments, yet polished
and tinted like the inner coat of a
sea-shell.* As tokens
of his esteem, See Yup presented the party with gaudy
plumes made of gold tinsel and trimmed with peacocks'
feathers.
We ate chow-chow with chop-sticks in the celestial
restaurants; our comrade chided the moon-eyed damsels in front of
the houses for their want of feminine reserve; we received
protecting Josh-lights from our hosts and
"dickered" for a pagan God or two. Finally, we were impressed
with the genius of a Chinese book-keeper; he figured up his
accounts on a machine like a gridiron with buttons strung on its
bars; the different rows represented units, tens, hundreds and
thousands. He fingered them with incredible rapidity—in fact, he
pushed them from place to place as fast as a musical professor's
fingers travel over the keys of a piano.
They are a kindly disposed, well-meaning race, and are
respected and well treated by the upper classes, all over the Pacific
coast. No Californian gentleman or lady ever
abuses or oppresses a Chinaman, under any circumstances,
an explanation that seems to be much needed in the East. Only the
scum of the population do it—they and their children; they, and,
naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise,
for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there
as well as elsewhere in America.
[*]
A peculiar species of the
"jade-stone"—to a Chinaman peculiarly precious.