Asian-American Manhood

Early Asian Immigrants in the Nineteenth Century

Asian immigration to the United States began in the mid-nineteenth century as an almost exclusively male phenomenon. In 1849, 325 Chinese men arrived in California to take part in the California gold rush, followed by 450 more the following year. Beginning in 1851, the number of Chinese men emigrating to California began to rise dramatically, with more than 2,500 arriving that year and more than 20,000 arriving in 1852, bringing the total number of Chinese immigrants to about 25,000.

These Chinese emigrants called themselves gam saan haak (travelers to the Gold Mountain) and they thought of themselves, at least initially, as sojourners (dekaseginin) who would earn enough money working in the United States to return home rich within a few years. Largely from the province of Canton, these immigrants came from a patriarchal, Confucian culture that regarded men as naturally superior to women, who were taught to be obedient to their fathers, husbands, and (in the case of widows) sons. Women were left behind because the expense of paying their passage to the United States would have decreased the profitability of the trip, and most women from the better classes were unfit for difficult journeys because their feet had been disformed by the practice of foot binding. Chinese immigrants worked initially as miners, and in the 1860s more than ten thousand Chinese were working on the construction of the western portions of the Central Pacific Railroad. By the 1880s, male Chinese in the United States out-numbered female Chinese by almost twenty to one.

Throughout the 1850s, California's popular press presented favorable portraits of Chinese immigrants, who were welcomed as visitors who could assist in fostering California's economic growth. However, because the Chinese lived in highly concentrated enclaves such as San Francisco's Chinatown, were largely non-Christian, and were willing to accept low-paying jobs that were shunned by whites, many white Americans soon began to regard the Chinese and other Asian immigrants to the United States as a “yellow peril” that posed a threat to American democracy. Chinese men came to be regarded as less masculine than men of other races, in part because Chinese culture seemed to be the antithesis of American individualism, and in part because male Chinese dress and hairstyles differed from those of Euro-American men. Putting self-interest aside, the Chinese banded together and managed to undercut white labor by working harder and for lower wages. In both political documents and yellow-peril fictions such as P. W. Dooner's Last Days of the Republic (1880), the Chinese were depicted as insectlike automata who were inhuman in their ability to subsist on starvation wages. Popular stereotypes also portrayed “chinamen” as naturally suited only to feminized, service-oriented jobs such as washing laundry and waiting on tables, despite the early association of Chinese men with mining and work on the railroads. With the suspension of the Burlingame Treaty with China in 1881 and the passage of the first Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the Chinese became the only ethnic group that could not immigrate freely to the United States. A series of subsequent acts ensured that the Chinese would remain ineligible to emigrate to the United States until 1943, when the Chinese exclusion laws were finally repealed by Congress.

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