A guest post by commenter Jefe:
Asians first arrived in post-Colombian North America aboard the Manila Galleons in the 1580s. Some worked on the Spanish Treasure Fleet from Veracruz which plied the waters of the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico on the way to Spain.
Starting in 1763, Filipinos sometimes deserted the ships in the Gulf of Mexico to escape the brutalities meted out by the Spanish. These Manilamen (also called “Tagalas”) formed communities in the Louisiana Bayou, building their houses on stilts and kept themselves apart from the rest of Louisiana society. Very few women joined these ships, so the men formed families with Cajun, Native American or Creole women. Saint Malo, one of their fishing villages, was continuously occupied until a hurricane wiped it out in 1915.
In the early 1800s a trickling of Asians entered the South. These included the Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng Bunker (pictured), ethnic Chinese from Thailand, who entered the US in 1829. In 1839, they each married white women and settled in North Carolina and became naturalized citizens (requiring their classification as “white”). They even owned black slaves, and their sons fought on the Confederate side of the Civil War.
In the middle 1800s Chinese-American immigration exploded. Over 300,000 entered California between the California Gold Rush (1848) and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882).
In the late 1860s they started coming South after:
- the Civil War freed the slaves (1865),
- the Burlingame Treaty (1868) expanded Chinese immigration, and
- the completion of the Transpacific Railroad (1869) was followed by increasing racial violence in the West.
- the completion of the Suez Canal (1869) facilitated trans-Atlantic travel from Asia.
Southern plantation owners, hearing of how effective Chinese labour was in building the railroads in the West and working on plantations in the Caribbean, devised schemes to lure Chinese to come to the South to replace black slaves. They believed non-citizens who could not vote could be controlled more easily than freed slaves. They even sent delegations to China to recruit labour.
By the 1870s, thousands of Chinese were working on plantations in Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana, in the port city of New Orleans, and even in the cotton fields of South Carolina and Georgia.
Governor Powell Clayton of Arkansas observed:
Undoubtedly the underlying motive for this effort to bring in Chinese laborers was to punish the negro for having abandoned the control of his old master, and to regulate the conditions of employment and the scale of wages to be paid him.
However, the Burlingame treaty required employers to engage the Chinese with labour contracts, which they soon learned the white plantation owners had no intention to honour. They were treated as nothing more than slaves. They went on strike. When that did not work, they fled the plantations. The Chinese Exclusion Act then abruptly halted Southerners’ ability to recruit additional Chinese labour after 1882.
By the late 1880s, few if any Chinese were still working on southern plantations. Whites viewed the labour importation scheme as a complete failure.
Some Chinese left the South, particularly to cities in the East and Midwest, but some remained and went onto other occupations, such as grocers to black sharecroppers.
Sources: “Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture” (1994) by Gary Y. Okihiro and “Mississippi Chinese” (1971) by James Loewen.
See also:
- John Jung, Chinese-American historian who grew up in Macon, Georgia – He has pages and pages of content about Chinese who settled in the South.
- “Chinese in the Post-Civil War South: A People Without History” (1984) by Lucy M. Cohen (Amazon page)
- Manila galleons
- Chinese Exclusion Act
- Transpacific slave trade
- coolie
- Asian Americans
- What I was not taught about American history
So true. My family line descends from Mississippi and I have a Chinese ancestor who married a great great grandmother who was African and Cherokee.
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Small consolation that the bones of many Chinese laborers were shipped back to China after being exhumed. The belief of the day was that if you remained in Chinese soil, your spirit was doomed to wander the earth until said time as the remains were returned. I think benevolent associations of relatively prosperous Chinese were formed to insure delivery. Some justice was had, even if it was posthumous.
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I meant NON – Chinese soil. Sorry.
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[…] Governor Powell Clayton of Arkansas observed:Undoubtedly the underlying motive for this effort to bring in Chinese laborers was to punish the negro for having abandoned the control of his old master, and to regulate the conditions of employment and the scale of wages to be paid him." […]
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[…] See on abagond.wordpress.com […]
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U.S. business leaders always want the lowest cost labor.
When U.S. unions demanded a living wage with reasonable benefits, instead of complying, businesses moved their manufacturing out of the U.S.
Money and manufacturing easily cross borders. However, (im)migration laws make it difficult for people to cross borders.
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I can recall my dad, being from Osyka, Mississippi, speaking on this type of U.S. Southern history in fragments. I’m truly thankful to have a better understanding of the ‘Settlement of Asians in the Deep South’. Thanks Abagond.
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Thank you, Jefe, for adding a few more fragments to the many missing parts that is the history of the Americas, especially as it affects “coolies”.
Well, at least my understanding of that history! 😀
Re: the 2 cartoons at the top. Where are they from?
Paintings and drawings of racialized people speaks volumes about their non-human-ness in the eyes of the artist/intended audience.
The supposedly Chinese man were not seen as men in those depictions…
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@ Bulanik,
I found the top cartoon in many of the books and blogs on the subject, but I suspect it originally appeared in a periodical of the period. Will see if I can find out.
The drawing on the left is that of a white man holding a black person by the hair. The 2nd was a Chinese. The idea was that whites wanted to punish blacks by bringing in Chinese.
The 2nd drawing is on the cover of the Lucy Cohen book. Her book has dozens of photographs of the period – including many of the black – Chinese families in Louisiana.
There were many other articles and editorials in newspapers from 1860s-1880s about the Chinese coming to the Deep South, but of course we cannot fit them all in a 500-word post. Some of them reference that they got their idea from the coolies being brought to Caribbean plantations too, and how their labour was superior to blacks.
There were also records of meetings in Memphis, Tennessee around 1870 organizing delegations to go to China to recruit labour.
However, I don’t know if anyone got one of the main points of this post (for me). Even though Asians arrived in small numbers in the South prior to the Civil War, the late 1860s was the first time I could find evidence of thousands of Chinese coming face to face with US blacks in the same area. And they were specifically brought to help whites control blacks. Whites have been pushing black v. Asian stereotypes ever since at least the 1860s. It did not start with the Model Minority Stereotype in the late 20th century.
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Jefe, are you sure the first drawing (the one the left) depicts a Black person being held by the hair? If you’ll notice, his hair is actually styled in the form of a “queue”, and he is also dressed in a similar fashion (even down to his footwear) as the Chinese man depicted in the section drawing. My thought is that both drawings, in fact, depict the self same Chinese person.
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Yeah, on 2nd thought, I think you are right, as he appears to be wearing a Ching (Qing) dynasty queue.
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Jefe! How could you miss the clothing, footwear, etc., too! 😛
But seriously: thank you for indicating where the drawing is from, and, also this point: “the late 1860s was the first time I could find evidence of thousands of Chinese coming face to face with US blacks in the same area. And they were specifically brought to help whites control blacks. Whites have been pushing black v. Asian stereotypes ever since at least the 1860s”, was not lost.
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@Bulanik, Sorry, I think I read a caption with the Cartoon before that mentioned that Chinese labourers to imported to punish blacks.
Many people wanted to learn more about Asian v. Black relations, I found that whites pitted Asians vs. Blacks in the 1860s-70s, 1920s,1940s,1960s,1970s,1980s. It seems like a long running theme.
The Model Minority Stereotype is just part of a series of stuff spanning 150 years.
In the late 1860s-1870s, it was to “punish” and “control” the “Negro”. But all cases in the 20th century seemed to be with the intention to punish and control blacks also.
The newspaper account of a group of Chinese arriving in Savannah, GA in the 1870s said that the whites purposely showed them in front of the blacks telling them to go ahead and leave if they don’t like it there. They will simply replace them with cheaper Chinese coolie labour. Of course it didn’t work out, so by the 1880s, they found other ways to “punish” and “control”.
It looks like they entered the US through New Orleans or Savannah, with the majority entering through the former. These seem to be more connected with the ones who came to the Caribbean as some of them stopped in the Caribbean before coming to the SE USA.
If you read the articles in 1966, the purpose seems to punish and control blacks too for protesting and making demands (and to keep Asians and Blacks for joining forces on civil rights). Again in the 1970s to delay affirmative action. Again in the mid-1980s to vilify blacks to characterize them as welfare queens and criminal thugs. In the late 80s-1990s, they promoted the whiz kids who were children of post-1965 brain drain immigrants.
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@ Jefe
If it’s since the 1860s, then it’s pretty old.
Being that old then, it’s become an almost-invisible fibre of US labour and racial history. I’ve looked at that cartoon for a little while; it’s violence is not only the grotesqueness of what a “Chinaman” supposedly is, but the coercion of a Chinaman — is also the joke. (I believe the Irish were drawn in a similar fashion, as subhuman, and laughable, during a time the Great Famine, for instance.)
It also reveals a layer of what it is to be truly American that speaks of not only a fight for inclusion in that category of nationhood, but the intimidation that was necessary to normalise it for black and Asian populations.
This “pushing” doesn’t need crude racial stereotypes anymore.
That’s already in place; stereotypes have been doing their jobs just fine for ages…
Over time it’s becomes far more subtle, a part of the cultural fabric: one would hardly guess because there are no joins, and no seams in the smooth fabric. We see it here regularly on this blog.
Clearly: there’s a line to be followed. Cross it, and be ridiculed. If that fails, the charge of “anti-American” should be intimidating enough to restore order. Racial stereotyping plays a key part in this long process of acculturation, because on the one hand, there are Asian Americans who are not seen as ever being truly American, and black Americans who have no other “home” other than America. Common perceptions.
It’s well-known that Americans of East Asian descent have a history of not only being the Perpetual Foreigner, but also of being on the receiving end of “unwarranted accusations and unsupported persecutions” for not being American enough.
Compared to the historical over-representation of blacks in the US military, the contrast is sharp. On the face of it, that undertaking may be at least perceived as the ultimate gesture of loyalty to nation — and the stereotype is apparent without any reference to it, its trajectory nor its manifestation.
(I’m aware that loyalty to nation is not and has not been, the only factor in that history of over-representation in the military.)
From where I’m standing the history and occurrence of any kind of persecution of Chinese Americans is pretty sparse. That history is not broadcast abroad, not much, and if it has been, then I must have missed it.
But — from what I have gathered about, for starters, the McCarran or Trading with the Enemy Acts, the “Chinese confession program”, and even portrayals of anti-American perfidy like the brainwashing Dr. Yen Lo (from the original Manchurian Candidate), the ideas behind those measures served to:
1)demonize them because they were Chinese, and also,
2)intimidate the American people, keeping everyone, generally, in check, and truly assimilated.
http://www.lgjf.org/2011/10/untold-stories-of-mccarthyism-chinese-americans-and-the-red-scare/
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McCarthyism and its persecution effects on the Chinese-Americans probably deserves its own separate series of posts. It was particularly brutal on Chinese-Americans, yet no one ever mentioned it afterwards. The thing is, due to the Chinese Exclusion Act and the very limited quota after the Magnuson Act (1943), some 60-70% of Chinese-Americans in 1960 were native born Americans (You probably have to wait until about 1980 before immigrant numbers started to catch up with the number of native born). How McCarthy was able to issue the propaganda that most of them are probably some kind of communist spy and siphoning funds to Communist China is beyond me. It was a witch hunt intimidation.
Getting back to the original point, yes, the Asian vs. Black rift created by and promoted by whites in the USA is quite old. Already can find it going back 150 years. I hope that Asian-Americans and black Americans can both learn from this and understand what has been going on.
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Jefe, I had responded to you on another thread when you mentioned that the Chinese had shops in the deep South as well:
the Caribbean and the US had similarities when it came to Chinese coolie labour but differences in the outcomes when it comes to assimilation
you mentioned that some of the Chinese who had stores that serviced black people are part of the African American community today.
whereas, the Afro-Chinese in the Caribbean are part of the Chinese community in the Caribbean
my query to you was about “why the Afro-Chinese in the South got swallowed up by the black community and were not considered a part of the Chinese community?”
Can you shed some light on how come they became part of the African American community and not part of the Chinese-American community?
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@ Jefe
I understand Linda’s excellent question, and wonder what the possible answers could be, from what you have said, I have to ask:
how cohesive could a Chinese community have been at time when it only consisted of Chinese men? From what I understand so far, US legislation barred Chinese women from entering the US.
And later, whilst I was checking info on the exclusion of Chinese women from US shores, I saw information on the the Page Act of 1875.
This Act was created to keep out female “undesirables” — aka –Chinese women were all no more than prostitutes. According to that legislation.
Chinese women were dangerous to The White Family BECAUSE white men could not resist their seductive powers!
They also carried disease, another “official” reason given in the rationale of this legistion.
*
The effect of this meant that without women, there would be no Chinese families.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_Act_of_1875
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Jefe, does the “settlement” of East Asians in the deep south more precisely describe how the all-male Chinese workforce was deployed in the Deep South?
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@Bulanik,
I will answer your last question first.
I think “settlement” has nothing to do with the gender of the workforce. It has to do with whether or not one settles permanently.
If, say, they came to work on 5 year contracts and then left, then they did not settle. If they set up households, stayed for many more years or even decades and participated in some kind of community, then I would say they have settled.
Of course, most of them came to the Deep South with no intention to settle permanently. But, only a few actually went back to China.
The US government did not permit those born in China or who were not born as US citizens to become naturalized citizens. If they could have naturalized, I would definitely call it settled.
There has been some continuous occupation in communities by ethnic Chinese in the South for 145 years. I would say they settled there.
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@Linda,
I think it is not nearly as black and white as you propose. I am sure there are many Jamaicans with some Chinese ancestry that no longer identify with the Chinese community and some Chinese-Americans with some African ancestry (albeit very few – there is a reason for that).
I have sent Abagond 2 other draft posts and have drafted even one more after that (that I am still trying to edit) that might answer some of your questions. However, I am not quite as familiar with what happened in Jamaica, but I can only make some speculation. But, I think it would take at least 10 posts to answer.
On the surface, it looks like there were many similarities between the 2 situations, but I suspect that there are many more differences than similarities. First of all, the origins of the Chinese in Jamaica and the USA are different. In the mainland USA (Hawaii is a bit different), maybe 90% came from the Sze Yap region, which is west of the Pearl River and speak Sze Yap dialects. The Chinese in Jamaica mostly came from the region east of the Pearl River and speak mostly Hakka dialects. Only a small number of Sze Yap people went to Jamaica. Very few Hakka went to the USA (except some did go to Hawaii). I
Similarities:
– British (or Anglo-Americans) imported Africans to work on plantations.
– importation of African slaves was halted in the early 19th century (although a vigourous internal slave trade continued in the USA until the Civil War)
– Asians were imported to supplement (in Jamaica) or replace (in the USA) labour provided to by black slaves
– 19th century Asian labour imports were almost entirely male
– some Chinese later became merchants / shopkeepers serving black customers.
– some Chinese men married or formed common law relationships with Black women and had children.
but the differences are much more huge.
1. Area and overall population.
Jamaica is an island, its own colony, later a Federation in the British West Indies, then a soverign country. It is relatively a small place with a low population.
The USA is huge. Even across the South, the Chinese population was scattered over a larger area (from South Carolina all the way over to Arkansas and Louisiana).
When the Chinese in Jamaica left the plantations, they generally stayed in Jamaica. When the Chinese in the South left the plantations, over half left the South altogether (but a significant minority did stay).
2. Overall Chinese population
The US had maybe 350,000 Chinese enter the USA between 1848 and 1882. Jamaica maybe had 1-2% of that during that time period (in Jamaica, more arrived between 1884 and 1910). But the Southern USA also had a relatively small number (maybe comparable to Jamaica) arrive to the USA south before 1882, but over a much much larger area.
3. Black population
Only the Mississippi Delta region had upwards of 80-90% black population during and after reconstruction. Of course, this was the region that many of the Chinese labourers were brought.
4. Destination after fleeing the plantations.
Many of the Chinese left the South, e.g., to Chinatowns in the North. The Chinese population in the USA plummetted by more than 60% between 1880-2000, but it was in the Western states. The chinatowns in the East and Midwest actually grew very quickly at that time (as Chinese were fleeing the West, and to a lesser extent the South). The Chinese who left the plantations in Jamaica stayed nearby (of course, some of the Chinese who left the plantations in the USA stayed nearby – there has been continuous occupation of ethnic Chinese in New Orleans,in Augusta, GA, and across the towns in the Mississippi Delta).
Now, getting to the real reason why we had different outcomes
* Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
* Jim Crow laws (1890 – 1967)
Jamaica’s Chinese population actually increased dramatically between 1884 and 1910. In the USA, it plummetted. before 1884, many Chinese in Jamaica took black wives, but more Chinese women came after 1884 and could form families. Chinese men who had had children with black women could bring them to participate into the Chinese community. I have heard of cases where Chinese men sent their mixed black Chinese kids back to China to get educated (and maybe even marry and bring back a Chinese wife). Jamaica is small and formed a thriving relatively closer knit Chinese community by the early 20th century.
Chinese in the USA could not bring wives over in the first 25 years after the exclusion act. Most in the Deep South (as in other parts of the USA) remained bachelors, but some did marry, usually blacks. In the beginning, their children probably could have some interaction with the Chinese community (whatever there may have been – it would have been much more scattered compared to Jamaica). But the Jim Crow laws required that their children be classified as colored and go to colored schools, etc. After the SF Earthquake (1906), a loophole in the Immmigration law allowed Chinese to bring over Paper sons and daughters. They could find ways to bring over a limited number of women to marry the aging bachelors and also bring their sons that they left behind in China. A larger community could finally develop that included children. As the community grew, they then had to meet the challenge of Jim Crow.
At first they were refused entry to the white schools. Soong Mei-ling, who later married Chiang Kai-shek, came to Macon Georgia in 1910 and was refused to attend the white schools. The supreme court ruled in 1927 (Lum v. Rice) that Mississippi could classify Chinese as colored and require them to attend the colored schools. Soong Mei Ling got a private tutor in Georgia, but in Mississippi, they set up separate schools for Chinese. Then they campaigned over a period of 25 years to have white people let them in to white places (hospitals, schools, churches, etc.) and by the early 50s, most of the separate Chinese schools and church missions had closed and Chinese were largely allowed to use the white facilities (except for dating and marriage and sometimes housing). But the whites had one requirement – not to let in any of the Chinese who had married or formed families with blacks. The whites wanted to ensure that they did not let one single Chinese in who might have any drop of black blood. The whites required that the Chinese cut those off by the 1930s.
But basically that is true even for all children mixed with black during Jim Crow – they had to be merged into the black community.
Loewen in his research met one woman in Mississippi that was 3/4 Chinese 1/4 black who was using the white facilities. She lived in a working class neighborhood where the people knew her, so they made an exception in her case. He found out that if anyone challenged a white person for letting her use the white facilities, they would simply claim that they did not know she was part black.
During the great migration (1940-1970), most of the towns in the South lost half their black population. For example, a town of 30,000 with 20,000 blacks became a town of 20,000 with 10,000 blacks. The clientele the Chinese depended on disappeared, so they also packed up and left, either to larger cities in the South (New Orleans, Houston, Memphis, Atlanta) or away from the South altogether. There is no longer any real Chinese community left in those small Southern towns.
Post-1965, the immigration laws were finally changed, but those new immigrants did not go to the Mississippi delta or to the Savannah River area. They went straight to East Coast / West Coast metro areas or to university towns.
The mixed Chinese-black families that still existed 100-130 years ago have now passed through an additional 3-5 generations. Cut off from the Chinese community, they have largely merged into the African-American community.
That is the short story. To give the whole story credit, I think would need 3-4 posts at least.
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Great post Jefe. Very informative.
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@Bulanik
For men who came in the 19th century (say, to work on the railroad, or even to the plantations), many got married BEFORE going to the USA. They did this to force the male to have an obligation back in china (e.g., to send money to, to come back for, etc.). Or some of them came to the USA to work first, go back to China to get a wife and make her pregnant, then come back to the USA without her. Some men who came before 1882 may have come as a young man (say age 20).
Of course *some* women came in the 19th century, and there were already American born chinese by the 1860s-1870s.
When 1882 came, it cut off the possibility of men bringing over their wives or to go get wives (for those who had not yet married). By 1906, most were well into middle-age, or even getting old. But since the records in SF burned down in the earthquake in 1906, at least 10,000 chinese men claimed their birth record was burned in the earthquake fires. US v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) made them instant citizens – citizens who could travel to China and father sons and daughters, whether real or imaginary. Then they could bring them back to the USA as children of US citizens. Those men who were young in 1882 who were now in their late 40s RUSHED to bring over a new wife (who was a fake daughter of a US citizen) or their sons that they left behind (who were now young men). They would do this even if they got married before as their first wife would be too old to bear children. Those older just lived as an old bachelor, cut off from their families. But the new arrivals around 1910-1943 brought new life into the community. After WWII, the USA let the men go to china to get a wife, so the population actually started to grow after the end of WWII (after over 6 decades of decline).
My father’s female cousin was born in New York city in 1924 to a paper daughter mother and a father who had been cut off from his family for 25 years. She told me that some of the Chinese men had previously married white women in New York and their children were generally welcomed into the chinese community. I guess it depended on how entrenched the relevant Chinese man was in the chinese-American community. The men knew that there were not many Chinese women available.
But pre-1965, and esp. pre-1943, most Chinese-white and Chinese-black marriage was with Chinese husbands. There simply were not enough Chinese women around to marry out. I am sure that post 1980s, with the situation reversed (Asian women marrying white men), people could hardly imagine that that was the norm just a couple decades earlier. pre-1970s, most Asian women / white male marriages were war bride marriages.
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@Linda,
It is the similar reasoning why mulattoes and quadroons got “swallowed up” into the black community and not into the white community. Jim Crow forced whites to disown them. The only ones that could “crawl back” to the white community were the ones that could pass.
Most of the mixing of European and Asian ancestry throughout the black population occurred AFTER the civil war or even after Jim Crow. For European ancestry, it was because mulattoes and quadroons were marrying each other or marrying darker blacks, spreading European ancestry more thoroughly into the African-American population. Afro-asian people could legally marry either blacks or Asians, but Jim Crow pressures forced Asians to cut them off also, meaning the mixed Afro-Asians would get cut out of the Asian community. The example I gave above would be an exception – one that could pass, at least in the eyes of whites.
That is what Jim Crow did.
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@ Jefe, what you say is so fascinating: thank you very much. 😀
Many questions pop up from your comments, but I’ll just try to keep it to a couple for now!
From what you say, the prevailing social conditions — and legal restraints — you describe in this period, it stands to reason that some of the men that settled had to turn to cooking and laundries as a means of income / survival.
Something like cooking, for instance, would have been the domain of women back in China, but with the stringently limited opportunities left open to many Chinese men in the US at this time, there was more of a livelihood to be made from serving white people. I suppose those conditions were the driving forces behind what became Chinese restaurants and laundries? When I think of Chinese cuisine, it is so different from Chinese food invented in the US for the American palate, and market.
I wonder too, about the how many Chinese navigated the racial world of the Deep South during this time. Where did they fit in?
How did they define themselves in a binary world of White and Coloured.
Yes, they were classed as “Coloured”, yet I doubt whether blacks (or whites) perceived the Chinese as equivalent to blacks.
At that stage the Chinese were linguistically and culturally outsiders, and not seen as American — not the the way that blacks were seen as American, and saw themselves as such. That’s a very persistent perception, as the Perpetual Foreigner hasn’t exactly gone away.
My Chinese ancestry is more remote than Linda’s, but from what I’ve heard, even though a Chinese-Jamaican merchant (for instance) might rely on the custom of the local black population, Chinese generally sought to insulate themselves from problems of race by focussing on business advancement instead. In Jamaica, some of the men would marry black women, but some married other Asians (Indians). Others though “imported” their wives from China.
In the US, though, if the Chinese associated and identified with white society, then that would carry the reward of better status, wouldn’t it? Perhaps that’s why “honourary white” has been associated with not-white and not-Coloured Coloureds, such as the Chinese. Was that so?
The Deep South racial world meant everyone had to bend to white authority.
I am under the impression that in this setting, the Chinese were more “scattered” than other ethncities of the Deep South. More isolated. Were they, as a racial group, more often regard as inconsequential.
For the Chinese in these situation, I wonder whether how they saw themselves?
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“jefe,
I think it is not nearly as black and white as you propose. I am sure there are many Jamaicans with some Chinese ancestry that no longer identify with the Chinese community”
Linda says,
Jefe, Very insightful and thorough historical information… Thank you.
I did not realize that the American south’s Apartheid and racial hatred of black people was so insiduous..
As a Jamaican, I can tell you that Chinese-Jamaicans, mixed or not mixed, all identify as Jamaicans first, then Chinese or whatever mix of race/ethnicity but most people with Chinese ancestry do acknowledge it and depending on the family, still identify with their Chinese heritage, even if it’s simple things, such as how they cook their food to adding gooseberry to their rum punch.
My mother, is multi-racial (black, white, and Chinese), looks “Chinese” like Tess-Anne Chin and identifies as Jamaican-Chinese. Naomi Campbell and Tyson Beckford, as dark-skinned as they are, still acknowledge their Chinese ancestry.
The Jamaican-Chinese community is probably not as homogenous like the Chinese community in America… mixed-race Chinese are considered part of the Jamaican-Chinese community
article From the Jamaican Observer
“PROFESSOR Anthony Chen’s address at the reopening of the Chinese Cultural Association (CCA) Sunday before last received a good deal of coverage because of his comments on the proposed Goat Islands development.
Prof Chen reminded us of the significance of Chinese ancestry in Jamaica. He said that, although official figures may number Jamaicans of Chinese ancestry in mere thousands, there are many tens of thousands of Jamaicans who are mixed race.
“At CBA last year I recall meeting Paula Madison, the owner of the Africa Channel, who is of mixed Chinese ancestry,” he said. “She travelled to China to discover her Chinese roots and was warmly and enthusiastically welcomed to her village, to the extent that she was invited to visit again the following year for a family celebration.”
This reminded me of a story from my friend Gloria Palomino who said when she visited a village in Guangdong, and some residents found out she was from Jamaica, out came dozens of African-looking folks who spoke Hakka.
It turned out that they were of mixed Jamaican parentage, born here and sent to China to study the culture. But there were no funds to take them back home to Jamaica, so there they remain to this day, hungry for news of the homeland to which they were never able to return.”
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/-Out-of-Many-One–strong_16215330
Article about Paula Madison filmed her search for her Chinese grandfathers family
http://mije.org/richardprince/abc-news-moves-diversifying-decision-makers-ii#madison
My family has also stayed in touch with our Chinese relatives (Hakka), who lived in Hong Kong (most of them left for Canada and UK prior to re-unification)
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Paula Madison’s, a black women born in Harlem to Jamaican parents — her family owns the Africa Channel, she was also Vice President of the General Electric Company (GE)
So, even though she is a black women who is “Afro Jamaican” — her mother was a Chinese-Jamaican who was very aware of her Chinese heritage
Anyway, here is a video of Paula’s trip
http://findingsamuellowe.com/video/
and an excerpt about her and her family
“ Three successful black siblings from Harlem discover their heritage by searching for clues about their long-lost Chinese grandfather, Samuel Lowe.
Retired NBC Universal executive Paula Williams Madison and her brothers, Elrick and Howard Williams, were raised in Harlem by their Chinese Jamaican mother, Nell Vera Lowe. Nell encouraged them to realize the rags-to-riches American dream, resulting in their growth from welfare recipients to wealthy entrepreneurs. In order to fulfill a promise to their mother to connect to her estranged father’s people, they embark on journey to uncover their ancestral roots.
The three travel to the Toronto Hakka Chinese Conference where they connect to members of the Chinese Jamaican community. As the mystery of their grandfather’s life unfolds, the trio travels to Jamaica, learning that their grandfather had a life there similar to their own, starting with humble beginnings in Mocho, Clarendon Parish, and ending with successful business ownership in the affluent St. Ann’s Bay. But in 1933, he left Jamaica, returning to China for good.
Taking family tree research to an epic proportion, the siblings and 16 of their family members travel to two Chinese cities, ShenZhen and GuangZhou. Together, they visit their family’s ancestral village, finding documented lineage that dates their family back 3,000 years to 1006 BC. The trip culminates in an emotional and unforgettable family reunion with 300 of their grandfather’s Chinese descendants.
At its heart, this is a story about familial love and devotion that transcends race, space and time.”
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Prior to Jamaican independence in 1962, the Jamaican Chinese did keep themselves apart and were more insular.
They quickly established themselves into the middle-class and became a prominent group in business, (and Jamaica being a British colony, was/is very class-oriented) and like the Chinese in USA, the Chinese in Jamaica aspired to be a part of the white society.
The Chinese Benevolent Society (started 1890) used to have their own beauty pagaents “Ms Chinese Jamaica” and of course the contestants were all full to mixed-Chinese descent. They were accused by the Jamaican media for being “unpatriotic” and “un-Jamaican”, because they were seen as being divisive for excluding black people, so they disbanded the pageants.
The Jamaican Chinese girls back then did not participate in the national Miss Jamaica contests
the first one was model Patsy Yuen and she won Miss Jamaica World in 1973 and when she went to the Miss World contest (placed 3rd)–she caused a controversy by not identifying herself as “Chinese” but as Jamaican and saying she preferred “Ackee and Saltfish”.
here is an old Jet photo of her: (it’s tough to get a good photo of her)
http://books.google.com/books?id=MUMDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=Patsy+Yuen,jamaica&source=bl&ots=lKRvDLR7LX&sig=SIffi4N7UyWcK3ZP72Bm6cR_0d0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=U4CKU8flMo7msAS5poHgCQ&ved=0CGkQ6AEwDg#v=onepage&q=Patsy%20Yuen%2Cjamaica&f=false
As I said, the Jamaican Chinese community is inclusive and mixed-race Chinese Jamaicans are members of Chinese Benevolent Society and are considered part of Jamaica’s “Chinese” community.
2 years ago when Jamaica celebrated our 50th year Independence, at the Grand Gala, the Chinese Benevolent Society performed the Dragon dance:
http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20120812/out/out1.html
can’t find a decent U-tube video of the Gala but I was there and it was fabulous 🙂
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@Bulanik,
Restaurants and laundries were among the few occupations that was permitted to them, yes. In the South, operating stores serving blacks would have been permitted as it was a job white people were not interested in.
It could be serving white people (in the North and West), or it could be serving black people (in the Deep South, or later, in black neighborhoods in the North) or serving other Chinese or Asians (in those cities with large Chinatowns).
I don’t think they ever really did per se (at least pre-1965). They did what they had to do to get access to white facilities. They knew that whites did not exactly think of them as white. the main objective was to make them think that they were not black (at least in the South).
Now, today is a different story (maybe since post-70s). More and more Asian-Americans seem to want to or try to identify with white society. But it will never really happen as long as whites push the Perpetual Foreigner stereotypes.
Let’s hold off on the other questions to see if something can be posted later about navigating Jim Crow.
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I finally got around to reading this post. It was greatly informative.
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@Linda
OH REALLY 😮 Indeed it was. And it affected everybody.
And it is interesting to learn the impacts it had on people from “3rd races”, those that did not neatly fit into the black-white bifurcation.
To tell the truth, from what I hear, I think racial hatred of blacks is still very strong today. The only difference is that white people are not allowed to say so in public.
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@Linda,
Yes, I have heard about this from other people and read about it. Part-African and part-European and part-Mestizo mixed Chinese sent back to China by their Chinese fathers to get education. Many remained in China for various reasons including the ones you mention.
If you add to this the “foreign enclaves” of Macau and Hong Kong and the foreign concessions of Guangzhou, which brought people from many places to the South China coast, the local “Chinese” population has a wide variety of mixture into it already. I read the story of a Guangdong woman who immigrated to the US who stated that although she was a 1st generation immigrant, her great-grandmother was a white American woman.
Some of the Chinese-Americans who fled to Cuba got stuck there too due to the US-Cuba embargo. A friend of mine went there and found people starving for news of relatives left behind in the US. Cuban-Chinese who fled Cuba in the 60s-70s also got cutoff from their relatives there.
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@ Jefe
You said, regarding whether the Chinese associated and identified with white society,
Well, of course not.
What is becoming clearer in these narratives/explorations of the Chinese settlement in the US is the uneven and cyclical nature of the history — something that’s no different from the story of other ethnicities.
But, there’s a problem with that. An unhelpful, damaging problem.
If the prevailing impression of an ethnic group is it starts out poor and through determination/hard work, rises, then it’s as if their history is a story of linear progression upwards. It simply sleeps in nicely into the Bootstrap Myth and Model Minority stereotypes.
I think I’m slowly getting a sense of that very buneven historical cycle by these posts.
They show *and need to continue to show), that the history of the Chinese (and other East Asians) in the US was one of wild swings of “tolerance” following hot on the heels of xenophobia, cycles of acceptances and abuse, one day esteemed as honourary white only to be followed by loathing and even killing on the next.
What I want are reminders and nods to the timeline and context of the histories — I don’t mean to say timelines have been excluded, no — but I find myself searching for contexts in my head to round out what point of history we are it in these posts (which are pretty great, btw).
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*slips
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@Bulanik,
I am not sure if you have a question in there somewhere.
In this post I was only looking at Chinese who settled in the Deep South during the post-Civil War Reconstruction. That is only a small fraction of the Chinese who came to the USA in the 19th century and I highlighted mostly re: its impact on white-black relations in the Reconstruction period.
I need to read Peter Kwong’s “Chinese America: The Untold Story of America’s Oldest New Community”, but I think that it might address some of your queries.
Chinese came to the USA in the mid-19th century, about the same time as many Irish- and German-Americans, before most of the immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Scandanavia. By that measure they are one of the older immigrant groups in the USA. However, about 2/3 of Chinese-Americans are immigrants, making it one of the USA’s newest immigrant groups. It is probably the only “ethnic” group in the USA with this kind of dispersal in immigrant experience. Many of the post-1965 immigrants have a very different social and linguistic and cultural background from the ones who came before, causing a very abrupt change in the society and community.
The only thing in which we can try to measure on a linear basis is how the political treatment and stereotypes have evolved in US society. And whites using Asians as a “3rd race” juxtaposed between white and black does have a history dating back to the 1860s.
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Jefe wrote:
“For European ancestry, it was because mulattoes and quadroons were marrying each other or marrying darker blacks, spreading European ancestry more thoroughly into the African-American population.”
_ _ _
Yep. This is exactly how European genetics / ancestry became so widespread amongst Black Americans: procreation between mixed-raced “Blacks” (who at one point were decribed according to skin tone, i.e., ‘yellow’, ‘red’ or ‘brown’) and “monoracial” Blacks being so commonplace to where nearly all American Blacks today, and without regards to skin tone or facial characteristics, are part European in descent.
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Lots of informative comments here. My thanks to all.
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@ Jefe
No, there was no question in there this time. 😛
Your post, though short, is loaded with a treasure of knowledge.
Sometimes my thoughts include suggestions or an idea or I might share a connection that springs to mind.
Sometimes, to have a clearer understanding of US history being told, I search for something to hang onto for context.
Put it this way: you probably know a good deal about Western European history, but, if I were telling you about the “Inde” (the name given to South Asians and Native Americans) entering and settling in England during the Reformation (1500-1700) — you might possibly wonder if you have the historical context quite right when you are reading that info.
I think about what is said, searching and sifting for answers.
That said, I think I am pretty excited by this telling of Asian American history; it’s a complex roller-coaster.
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@ Linda
Thank you for those great posts. I loved watching the Williams/Lowe family journey and their reunion. Your information is an eye-opener!
Paula Williams Madison is a black woman in the US, not a Chinese woman, or mixed-race woman, because those are the rules. As Jefe explained, Jim Crow was rigid about the children of Chinese men and black women, what they could call themselves, what was their racial milieu. That impact lives on.
Ms Williams Madison, though, if she had been brought up in Jamaica, would’ve have been part of the Chinese-Jamaican community.
Yet, in Jamaica, from the information given, the dominant Afro-culture has and does(?) not approve of Asians — whether Chinese or Indians — if they are “too-exclusive” or don’t appear inclusive enough, or don’t appear to mix enough, with black people.
I don’t mean to say that this particular tension isn’t traversed and balanced well by multi-racial people in Jamaica. What I am interested to know is your opinion about how Asian Jamaicans handle that tension collectively, and perhaps individually. Basically, how Asian communities keep true to their heritage(s) whilst also “pleasing” the majority.
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@Bulanik, Linda,
You can imagine my shock when I read Abagond’s post
I knew for a fact that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of black Americans are part Asian. I have no idea where he surmised that the Asian ancestry in the black population is not actually from Asia, esp. given his West Indian Origin.
The story in Linda’s link is interesting. Paula Williams Madison’s grandfather wanted to take his Jamaican born daughter back to China with him. His grandmother wouldn’t allow it and hid her mother. One of my friends in HK is of Hakka origin and the ancestral village was in Bao’an (now part of Shenzhen). He told me that his grandfather’s brothers went to Jamaica and settled there, marrying black wives. One of them came back to China and brought back his Afro-Chinese Jamaican son with him. I read that some of the Chinese in Mississippi who had Afro-Chinese sons also sent them back to China also for education. In their father’s mind, the children, esp. the sons, are still Chinese.
Last year I wrote a comment about story that I wanted to write one day:
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@ Jefe
I do know people who are part Asian, part black, but all of them have roots in the Caribbean. There are Black/Asian marriages in the US but only 0.003% of Black men, for example, are married to Asian women. Thus the 2.8% seems way too high to me.
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I have a feeling that in colonial, “tripartite racial systems” as opposed to binary racial systems like in the historic U.S., South and East Asians are pitted not specifically against black people but to “race replace” the “mulatto” group. From what I’ve read, the situations in South Africa, Guyana, Kenya and Trinidad were similar.
Colonists used this method in Asia and Africa to sandwich external Asian groups, in particular Indians and Chinese, between themselves and the “native” majority such as Malay people in Asia, and inserting anti-Semitic memes from European history. Note that stereotypes like cruelty to women and animals, applied to Indians and Chinese, often echo the “Blood Libel” stereotype that Jews ate children.
I haven’t been to these countries but it’s really interesting that in South Africa, Japanese people were classified as white (due to trade with Japan) while Chinese were classified as colored (“mulatto”) and Indians as a separate Asian category. My friend who grew up in Venezuela said that Chinese people there are viewed as “Jews” and unattractive.
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Jefe, agreed, absolutely.
Imo and experience, this was particularly marked among the Chinese fathers, who would see to it their children’s needs were not only met, but sustained.
On a few occasions being around African Americans, I have been struck by the resemblance of one or 2 to mixed-race Sino-Caribbean people that I know. They look different (I don’t know how, but I can see it, I can’t explain) to black people who are mixed with Native Americans. I used to wonder if they had Chinese ancestry, but was confused or too ignorant about the history of Chinese people in the US to make sense of it or ask the right questions…
Btw, Indian (Asian) fathers, generally speaking, were not as diligent as the Chinese. That said, however the ones that were diligent in their paternal duties were / are also highly insistent on their children being recognised as Indian and Asian, first and foremost.
And certainly WITHIN their own side of the family, regardless of what label public society wanted to classify their children as.
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@Kiwi,
I think your timing might be a bit off. There are actually very few Chinese-Americans who are purely descendant of the 19th century Chinese immigrants, and many of them are now modern day white or black people.
Now, many are descendant of a 19th century immigrant, or related somehow, but their ancestor actually entered in the 20th century.
I think the “old school” should be pre-1965. It is more like this:
For Chinese:
1848-1882: Hundreds of thousands of Chinese enter the USA, 90% male. 90% from Sze Yap region of Guangdong (west of Pearl River)
(entered Hawaii about the same time, but a larger proportion of Hakka and other non-sze yap Cantonese in Hawaii) – Only very small number of American Born Chinese born at this time.
1882-1906/7: Pure Exclusion – only a few merchants entered. Many flee the western states, so chinatowns in the East and Midwest actually grow, but with aging bachelors.
1907 – 1943: Paper son and daughter immigrants trickle in
1943 – 1965: Paper son continues, but Chinese-American males are permitted to go back to China to get a wife (or otherwise get one) – Did you see the movie “Eat a Bowl of Tea”?
1949 – 1965: First small wave of Chinese from Taiwan or escaping Mainland China were allowed to come to USA to study. Other chinese come under a very strict quota and mostly for family reunification.
1965: Immigration reform – huge change in nature of immigrants coming over, including many university and graduate students.
1970s – 80s: large number of ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia come
1970s-1990s – New economic migrants (non-brain drain) come from provinces outside Guangdong (e.g., Fujian)
post 1980s: children of brain drain immigrants expand in large numbers.
For Japanese:
1880s – early 1920s: Japanese labour imported instead of Chinese
(Entered Hawaii about the same time)
1924: Japanese immigration halted due to Immigration law
1942-1945: Internment
post 1945: Scattered around the USA. Many decided not to settle back in West Coast.
form VERY small proportion of post-1965 brain drain.
For Filipinos.
– First Asian-Americans dating back to 16th century
– trickle in from the Manila Galleons or through Mexico until the Spanish-American war
– 1906-1934 : a couple hundred thousand Filipinos enter during the US colonial period in the Philippines, when they face few restrictions as overseas American nationals.
– 1934: Philippine Independence Act pretty much halted Immigration and promoted a program of repatriation.
1934 – 1946: some entered the US by joining the navy
1946: Filipinos in the US allowed to apply for US citizenship and bring over Filipina war brides.
1965: immigration reform
Some Filipinos come for family reunification, some for economic or personal reasons, but some are also brain drain – also a mixed bag.
I think 1965 is the key turning point. I don’t think that the ones who arrived before 1965 had more ethnically in common (in fact, Chinese-Americans in WWII wore signs saying that there were not Japanese), but they do have a history going back several generations that includes experiencing the more overt pre-civil rights racism of the earlier 20th century.
Pre-1965 immigrants had direct experience with racism – genocide and ethnic cleansing and slavery (Chinese), Internment experience (Japanese), Riots and race-based violence, prohibition of property ownership, housing and employment discrimination, immigration and naturalization exclusion, Jim Crow (all Asian groups). Even children born after 1965 will have experienced some of it in their youth, or hear it from their parents.
I even classify Vincent Chin who was lynched in 1982 as being part of the pre-1965 cohort.
Post 1965, the brain drain and refugee groups entered the USA under very different circumstances. They face a completely different set of issues. Nobody would have discussed a bamboo ceiling, or quotas against Asian Americans entering university 40 years ago. They would have discussed how some institutions simply refused to let them in in the first place. In 1970, the USA did not have large number of Asian-American women marrying white men. The majority were war brides, or wives of military men (e.g., Tiger Woods’s parents generation).
But, you say you cannot relate to the Chinese-American experience that goes back 165 years. I suppose for you Chinese-American history just started in the 1980s. What is the relevance for you then, of learning about Asian American history before 1980? Or do you think it is irrelevant to you? Surely you must find it meaningful to you at least as much as studying white/black/native/Mexican American history.
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@ Miss Minnie
I wonder if this is really so in a few of the places you mention.
As for South Africa, there is a long history of the so-called Cape Coloured, and they (as “Coloureds”) never went away even when the Indians and Chinese arrived in the mid 19th and late 19th century, respectively.
Trinidad has roughly the same amount of people of Asian- as it does of African- descent. Guyana has more Asians than people of African-descent, afaik.
in both the latter cases, the Africans were freighted as slaves to these places first to work as slaves. When slavery was outlawed, Asian slaves (mostly Indians in this case) replaced them as “coolies”.
I do not believe the intention behind this was to use them to fill the void of “mulattoes” as such because they worked and were treated no differently from the Africans. They functioned as slaves, and the existing binary had to be stretched to include them.
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@Abagond
then I suspect you have not learned that much about the history of Asian / black relations in the USA. Much of the Asian ancestry present in the modern day black population is not due to current day black / Asian intermarriage. Surely you know that Asians could not marry whites at any high rate prior to 1967 – more had children with blacks (than with whites) who would have been labelled colored. The book reference I listed above was about a women tracing her family in New Orleans and found that the majority of the Chinese who settled in the South “melted” into black after a couple generations.
Many Asian Indians were labelled black.
Maybe 10-20% of the military men who brought back Asian war brides were black.
Blacks from other countries (e.g., West Indies) are often part Asian.
If the racial mixing was early enough, then it does not take long for it to multiply. Chang and Eng bunker have over 1500 descendants attend their annual gathering – meaning that they have thousands of descendants already. If one single Chinese man had 5 Afro-Asian children 1870-1880, he could have over 1000 descendants today. Imagine how many descendants thousands of 19th century men would have today.
The 2.8% did not seem high to me at all – I would have expected something in the 2-3% range (which really is not THAT high). Even if it did seem high to you, I don’t know why you automatically assumed it was wrong. It should at least merit further investigation.
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True.
The silence and invisibility on that sometimes takes me aback.
Mention these people are Asian and they can’t be…
Mention they are Indian and they aren’t…
In fact, Jefe’s whole post about the invisibility of Asian and black intermarriage and offspring is often looked over by the habit of binary blanketing.
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@Bulanik,
I don’t know. Maybe not. It is because of your other statement.
Her maternal grandfather wanted to bring Ms. Madison’s mother back to China. Her maternal grandmother would not let her. He then left and took his other children with him. With his departure, her maternal grandmother would no longer have that close tie to the Jamaican Chinese community (unless her in-laws stayed and she was very close with them).
Had her grandfather stayed in Jamaica, or if her mother had been brought back to China, even for a short while (and say spent her early years educated in Hakka or Cantonese before returning to Jamaica), then, yes, she probably would have been part of the Chinese-Jamaican community.
But, I think there is nothing stopping her from developing a relationship with the Chinese-American community if she wants. I see no problem with someone being active in both African-American and Chinese-American communities at the same time, esp. if they feel that that represents what they are.
As it is, she is fortunate to have aunts and uncles still alive in China (who may have been born in Jamaica and know about her mother). She was able to connect with them instantly and deeply and get their names inscribed on the Family tree plaque in the home village (which, thanks for reminding, is something that I need to do :P)
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@ Jefe
Not always: sometimes other, unrelated Chinese men were known to see to the care and education of part-Chinese children in a locality.
My grandmother used to often point out that the Chinese men in her district, whilst growing up, would ask the mothers of the children who looked (part)Chinese if their child’s father was Chinese. Some of the men even went to the lengths of ensuring those children had school books, shoes, etc., even though the children in question had no known family tie to them.
If no family tie existed, one was still forged.
Other older relatives have told isolated but similar anecdotes.
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The film doesn’t tell us whether Ms William Madison had developed any kind of relationships with the Chinese-American community before.
I don’t think she did, but I don’t know: she described herself as “black” and didn’t make any reference to China apart from through her mother.
Perhaps after China and knowing her Chinese family, things would be different, as you say.
I have no doubt that there are numbers of people of mixed black and Chinese heritage like Ms William Madison who straddle both communities in the US
As much as I’ve hope to find them, I’ve not heard any of these narratives yet.
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Fantastic post
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@Kiwi,
What I have researched is that the vast majority of the “old school” Chinese-Americans (estimated over 1 million) are connected to the “Paper Son” phenomenon, which was the main method to enter the USA between 1906 to 1943, and somewhat continuing until 1965. There were few women in the 19th century, and comparatively little chance to form families in the 19th century. Even the few that did and had children would have had limited chance to form families of their own, esp. before 1907-1910.
Anna May Wong, the Hollywood actress born in 1905, would have been one of the very few ABC purely descendant from 19th century immigrants.
There are probably more black and white Americans descendant from 19th century immigrants than Chinese-Americans.
What is more likely is that the so-called old school Chinese-Americans you refer to have some connection to the 19th century immigrants, but came during the Paper Son and Daughter era, creating a multi-generational immigration experience. For example, a young man or boy entering the USA in 1938 could have been a grandson or great-grandson or great nephew of one of the 19th century immigrants, and would have secured a wife separately. Most of the ones I have spoken to, including the ones in San Francisco, have this kind of experience.
There are some cases where a 19th century male immigrant may have secured a wife or bring his family over in the 20th century as paper son and daughter. There are some descendants in the USA from those people.
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@Kiwi
Yes, I do believe this is a growing trend, which does testify that Asian-American is racialized phenomenon in the USA much more than in other countries.
This started happening in Hawaii since the 19th century, but has really sped up in the mainland USA post 1980s, and may include Hapa (part-white, part black or part Latino) Americans in the mix. My cousin’s son (who is Chinese / Irish American) married a Pakistani-American and have a son. My godmother’s nephew (Filipino/White American) married a Vietnamese-American. My HK-born Chinese American university schoolmate married a Japanese-American Sansei and had 2 sons. When I was young, I knew a Japanese/White war bride son who married a Chinese-American. One of my Chinese colleagues in the USA married an Indian-American. Starting post-80s, but especially in the 2000s, we have had a growing trend of multi-ethnic multi-racial Asian children born in the USA.
I am really curious how this will play out. Maybe this is the outcome of the what happened in the 80s post Vincent Chin which helped various Asian and mixed Asian people to develop a pan-Asian identity.
In other countries
Peru has absorbed various Asian ethnicities, but most have been assimilating into the mainstream culture, if not back into their ethnic group. I am not sure I know of a pan-Asian Peruvian identity that developed.
Countries like the Philippines and Thailand have absorbed many different Asian ethnic groups, but they usually assimilate into Filipino and Thai respectively. In Malaysia, they keep their separate identities, but you will find the group called “Eurasian” in Malaysia and Singapore, which is a mixture of many Asian ethnic groups tied to a previous male European ancestor, and tending towards being more Western in their orientation. The 22nd century Asian American might be something like that (but they won’t call it Eurasian – it will be just generic Asian-American)
Maybe Australia will develop something like that, I don’t’ know.
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@Kiwi,
I assume that places like Cupertino are almost all brain drain families with many with origins in Taiwan. I am sure that they see their history as nothing to do with the railroads and mines, the coolie trade, the Exclusion act, the massacres and genocides, the war with Japan, McCarthyism, anti-miscegenation, and Affirmative action as it was practiced in the 1960s-1980s. They don’t see the connection with Vincent Chin.
This is testament to the fact that Asian-American history, which is part of the history of all Americans, has been wiped out from their history textbooks. Is that a good thing?
I think the “old school” ones also have to take courses in university, but their difference is that they do have a family narrative history which is tied to the pre-1965 era.
I do wonder about African-American brain drain immigrants and their children. How well do they related to the history of Slavery in the USA and Jim Crow?
I don’t think that is why we have the Model Minority stereotype. I think it is why we have ample confirmation bias for the Model Minority stereotype.
The Model Minority stereotype was created in the 1960s as a backlash against Affirmative Action and the Black Power movement, well before we had brain drain immigrants to form any stereotype. Then the USA imported students who would become the brain drain labour of the 1980s- onward and not teach them anything about pre-1965.
It would be like removing the history of Slavery and lynching and Jim Crow from the textbooks for children of post-1965 brain drain immigrants from Africa and the West Indies. What would be the relevance to THEM? Should it still be part of the historical narrative?
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@Kiwi,
I think each group has its own unique situation.
Native Americans (and Native Hawaiians) do not have “new immigrants”. The only thing that can happen is a resurgence in identity and interest in their heritage cultures and historical racial experience.
Maybe 80-90% of black Americans are descendant from pre-1965 residents. There is still a multi-generational narrative from slavery and Jim Crow that prevails. But the post-1965 brain drain immigrants only focus on what they see today. They cannot relate directly or easily to the history of slavery and Jim Crow.
There is of course some shared contemporary experience that is post civil rights, e.g., racial profiling.
For Asian-Americans, maybe 25% are descendant of pre-1965 residents (90% of Japanese-Americans, 25-30% of Chinese and Filipinos, 15% of Indian, 10% of Korean, near zero for Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, etc.). For USA native born Asian-Americans (including from Hawaii), they are probably split close to 50-50 (ie, children of old school v. children of brain drain.) That effectively splits Asian-Americans into 2 parts. There is a shared experience that some of them older immigrants and their children have (particular Chinese- Japanese- and Filipino) who entered during the racist historical past and they do have an anti-racist frame. For Brain drain and refugee families, that history is not something that is part of their family narrative and their anti-racist frame is weaker. And unless they take an Asian-American Studies class in university or read up heavily on their own, they will not learn about it as it is not in their high school history textbooks.
There is also a shared contemporary experience.
– current day stereotypes (e.g., Asian male bashing)
– Perpetual foreigner stereotype
– Pervasiveness of Model minority stereotype
– bamboo ceiling
– Reverse Affirmative Action concerns (e.g., university admissions)
– some residual stereotypes from the past (e.g., Ching Chong)
but the ethnic cleansing, anti-miscegenation. Alien Land Law, Aliens ineligible for citizenship, Immigration exclusion and internment experiences just don’t mean anything to children of brain drain.
The Pan-Asian “melting” of Americans of different Asian ethnicities will affect them both.
How would you characterize the motivations and orientation for brain drain children regarding contemporary race relations in US society?
Latino-Americans have a different experience, and I suspect each ethnic group would have to be split up, esp. Mexican-American vs. Caribbean. Mexican-American has been in the USA for 450 years, yet half of them are treated as immigrants. That is a very different experience than for both blacks and Asians.
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Yes, my meaning was despite different social origins and immigration history in the US, they share certain contemporary race relations issues.
Yellow Peril is an old stereotype that might be still applied today to all groups of Asian Americans.
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@ Jefe
Good point.
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@Linda, Bulanik,
At the Shenzhen side of the border crossing yesterday I saw an elderly man (maybe near 80) in a wheelchair whom at first I thought might have been black, but I noticed that he was mixed Chinese-black, surrounded by younger Chinese attendants. He was being held up by immigration officials.
I realized that this is not the first time I have seen this. I wonder how many part-African Chinese are still be found in that region of China.
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Thanks, all, for a very informative and stimulating discussion on topics that are not widely discussed as far as I know. @jejfe @Bulanik re: the drawing at the top of this post about Chinese in the South, the artist is unknown but it appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Sept. 25, 1869, p. 32 and was entitled, Figure 2 What shall we do with John Chinaman? The timing is shortly after the completion of the transcontinental railroad on May 10, 1869 and the Memphis Southern planters meetings in July, I think, 1869 to consider contracting for Chinese labor to replace the slave labor.
The point raised, and explanation for, the ‘disconnect’ between the early paper son and descendants prior to say, 1943, and those ‘brain drain’ arrivals after 1965 is quite important and not generally recognized. NonChinese tend to lump all Chinese in America into one big group, Chinese Americans, which ignores the huge differences among the several subgroups.
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@ John Jung
“..Not widely discussed”? What understatement! 😀
To my mind, it is rare.
I’m not American and never lived in the US, but even in the UK or European contexts, this is the first time — in my experience at least — that subjects like these have even been “flavour of the month” when any discussion has centred on the narratives or histories of different Asian peoples in the New World.
That is my impression. Would I be correct in thinking this?
If this impression is correct, then why is it so? (I have an opinion about that, but I feel I simply don’t know enough about the US discourse to be sure about it.)
Thank you for explaining the origins of the illustration, and also the context.
***
Also, your blog looks great.
I paid a brief visit to it, and have to say the information is fascinating.
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@John Jung,
Thank you for ringing in here. I was the one who drafted this and a few related posts that Abagond helped me condense to fit his blog post parameters. When I was looking up information for them, I ran into your blog. I think you are the authority on the history of Chinese-Americans in the Deep South. I haven’t heard of anyone else who done as much research or published as much material on this topic as you have.
However, I did not get those photos from your blog. I found them elsewhere first, then found them later on your blog.
Thanks for answering Bulanik’s prior question. Please let us know if this post or any of the others have any errors so that they can be corrected.
(https://abagond.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/chinese-americans-in-the-deep-south-after-1882/)
(https://abagond.wordpress.com/2014/06/12/chinese-americans-in-mississippi-under-jim-crow/)
Maybe I can give some explanation about why these topics got posted on Abagond’s blog.
My early childhood was spent in the back of my grandparents’ laundry in Washington, DC. They came as paper son and daughter in the 1930s (which I later learned why our family name did not match our original surname). My mother, however, was a white (German-French descent) lady from Anniston, AL. I was born in the year of the Freedom Rides, and while I was looking for some stuff, I ran into this blog. I found out that he does posts on a wide variety of topics.
But, my father’s two older sisters, after they came to the USA from China (1939 and 1942 respectively) fleeing the Japanese (also as paper daughters), they both married China-born grocers in Mississippi. They had big families, and all of my elder first cousins on my father’s side grew up in the same town in the Mississippi Delta. Both of them left in the 1970s, one to CA (early 70s), one to NY (late 70s). My father and his younger sisters spent a year in MS going to school there in the early 1950s.
One of my father’s female cousins (my great uncle’s daughter – see below). married a China-born man who was a colonel in the US Army. He was stationed for 2 years (1960-1962) in, of all places, Anniston, AL. I know the 3 daughters who were in their early teens at the time and went to the same Jr. High School as my mother! I cannot remember the segregated facilities, but they did and told me about their experiences.
In my last year in university, I joined the first Asian American studies class ever offered there. I chose to do a paper on the Chinese in Mississippi, and it was then that I ran into Loewen’s book. Loewen figures prominently in Abagond’s blog posts.
My grandfather’s older brother based in NY, who came to the USA first, made his living in the paper son trade, from the early 1900s to the 1940s. He went back after WWII and they threw a big banquet in his honour. It was then that he met his first daughter (already age 47) for the first time from his first marriage. There are so many untold stories of separation from the Exclusion Act. In the 1990s, I went to my grandfather’s village and ran into a woman in her 80s who told me about her husband who went to the USA some 60 years earlier. Her husband in the USA died (my father said he remembers who she was talking about) while she was stuck in “his” ancestral village.
My grandfather’s father came as a young man during the Railroad era, going back and forth a few times (giving birth to sons), but was eventually lynched by a white mob in Oregon sometime in the early 1890s. I never learned this history in school – had to look up myself what actually happened and why.
There was always some interest in black-Asian relations on this blog, so I told Abagond I would write something about Mississippi and Asian-Americans during the Jim Crow era. It was in preparation for that that I ran into your blog.
But you still remember that time period from your youth, and have done so much research on it, so I think you are the expert. But I think these are stories that all Americans (and even non-Americans) should learn about, so I thought about sharing some of it here. I found many people reblogged stuff on their blogs too, saying it was stuff they had never heard of. I hope that maybe it will also attract more people to your blog.
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Thanks for your compliment, Glad you found my comments useful. As for why little attention has been given to Chinese in the Deep South, a major reason is that until after WW II, there were very few Chinese in the region. Augusta, GA. was the largest Chinese community (there were more Chinese in the Mississippi Delta, but aside from Greenville, they were scattered across many miles, with only a handful in any one town. Even today, I find many people are surprised to learn there were Chinese in the South as far back as the 1880s. Also, the black-white issues were so strong that the interest in most other ethnic groups was limited.
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Thanks for providing some personal background relevant to your informative post as well as clarifying your role as a guest contributor to Abagond’s blog.
BTW, I might know, or know of, your Mississippi relatives as well as some people who knew them (would you mind sending me their names and city to me at jrjung at yahoo dot com?)
If you have any documentation or more info associated with your grandfather’s brother (your grand-uncle, I guess is the term) who was in “the paper son trade” that would be most interesting. The accounts I have read about the acquisition of (false) papers sound as if they were purchased on a 1:1 basis, often among trusted relatives. One brother, for example, might sell or give his prematurely deceased son’s papers to a nephew. Or a man who falsely reported the existence of sons when he visited China would sell these papers to people who needed them to send their own male relatives to the U. S. But I never heard of, which is not to say they didn’t exist, someone like a broker who dealt in the paper son marketplace.
A rich source of perhaps superficial information about the earliest Chinese in the South is archival newspaper databases such as newspapers.com or genealogy bank. I was surprised how many articles I could find on the dozen or so Chinese laundrymen (all bachelors) in my hometown, Macon, Georgia, from 1885 until the 1920s… after which they all left, died, or ? until 1928 when my immigrant parents moved there and were the only Chinese in town until 1956 when we moved to San Francisco.
I posted a link to a manuscript on this topic: http://www.scribd.com/doc/201370916/Chinese-Laundrymen-in-the-Heart-of-Georgia-1884-1956
I agree with you that the stories of Chinese in the South need to be recorded and shared so that history gives a more accurate and complete record. Only the “tip of the iceberg” has been seen so far, and hopefully, more of it will be observed before some of it becomes irretrievable.
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Hi,
Each of the 2 families of my relatives operated separated grocery stores in Greenwood, MS. Both sets are now deceased, but all but one of my cousins who grew up there are still around. They probably still know some stuff. I guess I can send their names of their parents in the meantime. Of course we have the paper name and “real” name issue.
Regarding my grand uncle (1876-1966), I heard stories from his children of his second wife and my elder aunts about his work in the paper son document trade. However, they are all now deceased too (His oldest daughter from his 2nd wife lived 1924-2004), but maybe their children (his grandchildren) have some papers.
I have also heard stories about my grand uncle from outside his immediate family. I heard many people discuss about his role in the paper son business (eg, a mother telling their children to be nice to my me or my family because that was the family that brought them over and all their other relatives). I also heard about him on my first 2 trips to Taishan (in 1984 and 1998) – the man (distant relative) living in my grandfather’s house (b. 1936-1937) told me that when my grand uncle came back to Taishan after WWII, they threw a big celebration banquet for him to recognize his role in bringing so many paper sons and daughters to the USA.
My grandfather was the younger brother, so he was not the “famous” one like his older brother.
Well, it seems your blogs and books are doing just that. Keep up the good work.
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@ John, thanks: I had a feeling the reason was this.
The black-white discourse dominates.
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@jefe Thanks for the additional details re: your Delta Chinese ties. There were a lot of Joe (Chow) Chinese in the Delta including Greenwood. Here is a link to Maria Joe’s store there which I visited a few years ago that you may find of interest: http://vimeo.com/19454274 I will ask my friends if they might have known, or known of, your Greenwood grocer relatives. And, from your description of the paper son procurer, I know that someone near Greenwood, Ray Joe, was regarded as a similar community leader who was influential.
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Hi John,
I actually saw that video a few months back when I was looking up stuff for the guest posts. I found the woman interesting because she talks just like my 2nd Aunt did, with this Chinese- Mississippi black accent. My 2nd Aunt’s husband had a much stronger accent when he spoke English – he obviously learned it from his customers. My 1st Aunt and her husband didn’t speak as much English, so it was not so pronounced.
When my 2nd Aunt and her husband left MS for CA in the early 70s, their oldest son actually stayed behind for a while until the late 70s running the grocery store (he was in his 20s). My 1st Aunt stayed in MS until about 1978 when she and her husband retired and moved to NY. So, if anybody was there from the early 70s or earlier, they will probably remember my relatives.
Maybe the story of my cousins who moved to CA would be like yours, only 15 years later, ie the culture shock of growing up in the Deep South and suddenly find oneself around Chinese-Americans who grew up in CA.
Maybe I should take the discussion offline before I start sharing personal names, places, dates and other data. I’m busy on something these few days, but I’ll follow up.
Maybe a couple of my cousins who grew up in MS might be interested in learning about personal stuff related to their father, for example. I personally would like to write a story about the MS delta’s complex racial triangle in more personal terms (maybe even a fictional account synthesized with reference to actual events) to help the current and next generations of Americans understand about the place, and it would be important to be historically accurate.
In your research in MS, did you talk to many Chinese who married blacks? (or their children?) My aunts told me that there were many families there like that. If you had that kind of info, I think people on this blog would be interested.
I actually have never been to MS (although I spent summer school breaks in AL). I met all my relatives from there in CA or NY (or DC when they came to visit). My father and younger Aunts did spend a year there in the early 50s, but my younger Aunts finished the school year there, my father, who was in high school by then, went back to stay at the house of one of his high school friends to finish out the school year.
Question: Was Joe their paper name? It might be relevant to one of my Aunt’s husbands.
Re: paper son/daughter phenomenon, I could envision the case where a grocer in MS wanted to bring his son or secure a wife for himself or his son, but had no more relatives who had more paper sons to share with him. He might have to contact a broker (in NY or CA) to locate someone with a document for him, and who would prepare all the crib sheets they needed to get through immigration.
That is not what my grandmother did. She was born in 1909, but claimed she was born in SF in 1902 so that she could use a document to indicate that she was a native born US citizen (before the SF earthquake). She did not come until the mid-30s. Later on (1939), she claimed that the daughter of my grandfather’s first wife was hers, so that my oldest Aunt could come over.
Given the connection between my grand uncle, who acted as a paper son trader, and his younger brother’s daughters (my Aunts) who married grocers in MS, I wouldn’t be surprised if he played a key role in some of the paper son/daughter trade for the MS delta.
One more question: there are certainly tens of thousands of people (maybe even more) with some family ties to the Chinese who settled in the Mississippi Delta, or Augusta, GA. Have you had many contact you? Maybe if you got to know them all, you could piece together all the puzzles.
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@jefe You have a rich family history associated with the Delta Chinese… feel free to contact me at jrjung at yahoo dot com if you have other info to discuss offline. I’ll get back after i get time to talk to my Delta contacts. As for Black-Chinese marriages (common-law probably), I know of a few instances, but they were not publicized for many reasons. To move up the social ladder, Chinese had to ‘distance’ themselves from Blacks, who ironically were their main customers in the stores. I found some cases in census records around 1910 of a family with a Chinese grocer father with a non-Chinese surnamed wife born in the South… but its not clear if the non-Chinese wife was black or white (also with several U. S, born children). (Given that it was much easier for a Chinese in those days to marry a Black than a White woman, it is likely that it was to a Black woman).
Re: “tens of thousands”? with family ties to Chinese in the South, I am not good at the math, but we can agree that over time there would be many! I have had contact with maybe 10 of these ‘relatives’ at most… one wants to write a novel about her grandparents life in Augusta, for example. I guess these early Chinese in the South are receiving more interest than ever… historical topics of interest seem to require a certain temporal distance before they become trendy (maybe that it a hyperbole). I have been working on other projects and have not had the time to update the MS Delta webpage for a while… I did create a Facebook page that occasionally gets some posts of an historical, as opposed to personal activities, nature. https://www.facebook.com/groups/msdeltachinese/
With your knowledge and personal ties, you would be a good candidate to pursue this topic!
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OK, sending email to you now.
I have never been to Greenwood. My father never took us to visit his sisters there when I was a small child, and by the time I got old enough to do it myself, they had already left. But yes, 13 of my 16 first cousins grew up in Mississippi, my 2 youngest Aunts went to school there for a year and my father also spent a few months there as a teenager, so I was always interested in what happened there.
As they were forced to distance themselves in the 1930s so that their children could go to the local schools, I suspect most of the Chinese-Black relations were mainly before WWII, and esp. before 1910, before the men could start to bring wives over. Have you read Loewen’s book? He said he interviewed many of the Chinese-Black families in MS, and found some more married to Choctaw, Mexican, and even a few in common law relationship with white women.
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John Jung, sent email a few weeks ago, but not sure if it was ever received.
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After looking into James Brown, esp. since his movie biopic is coming out, I found out that he recognizes that he is partially of Chinese descent. This makes sense, since he is from the area around Augusta, Georgia, and that was one of the regions where Chinese were imported to work on cotton plantations.
Then I found this link
(http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/01/asian_results_for_a_genealogy_test_but_i_m_black.html)
There apparently is a non-insignificant minority of African-American males tracing their Y-haplogroup back to China or other places in Asia, but with no evidence of that on their mitochondrial haplogroup side.
I already knew that Oprah Winfrey and Earl Woods (Tiger Woods’s father) was part Chinese, but I wonder how much is really spread into the African-American population. Oprah’s family is from the Mississippi Delta, so it is very possible for her.
This result does not surprise me. Given a 90% male ratio for Asians in the USA from mid-19th to early 20th century and the interracial bans on relations with whites, I would expect that many Asian males sought black women for sexual relations.
In the South, we have evidence of many Asian men marrying black women, but even for those NOT marrying black women there must have had many having relationships with blacks. At first they worked side by side blacks, then they encountered mostly blacks in their work. It makes perfect sense they sought black women for sexual outlets.
Even in the West, there is evidence that Chinese and other Asian men sought black women, due to the lack of Asian women and the ban on white women. I have suspicions that it was more widespread than history has recorded. Perhaps it is not so widely recorded as many did not form families with the black women as
– many of the fathers were kicked out of the country or killed
– some had to break them off for other reasons (e.g., due to segregation or to domestic Anti-Chinese settlement forcing them to move away).
With their Asian fathers absent, their children probably did not talk about it. With no opportunity to marry Asians or whites, they inevitably married blacks.
I’m am going to make a bold statement. I suspect that the majority of the descendants from the 19th century Asian immigrants alive today are African-American . A minority might identify as white today. Only a minority of them today actually still identify as Asian American (if you think about it, they would have to be descendant of a man who actually had kids with Asian women and their kids with Asian women – something next to impossible during the Exclusion era. Even less likely, but still possible would the case where a mixed Asian female might take an Asian husband, and raise the kids to identify as Asian, but a black/Asian male in the late 19th century would almost entirely be forced to take a black wife or at least seek sexual relations with black women.)
Of course, we would have to research this further to confirm, but now that we have DNA testing, Asian ancestry showing up in the African-American population is no coincidence.
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jefe You raise some good points on a topic that is a touchy subject for Chinese Americans (not to mention for Chinese in China), but much less so today than in days of Jim Crow. However, the ‘truth’ is probably not as extreme as you ‘boldly’ state at the end. For one, Chinese grocers in the Delta, and elsewhere, qualified as “Merchants” and they were exempt from the Chinese Exclusion Law as far as being able to bring wives and children (some with false identities) to the U. S. Probably the majority did go back and marry a Chinese picked out for them by family and/or matchmaker.
As for the second, and probably 3rd generations, Chinese, especially in the Delta) had high rates of marriage to other Chinese, despite the small pool of eligible partners.
Also , the exclusion law did not prevent Chinese. laborers or merchants, from marrying a Chinese girl (as young as teens) who was born in the U.S. (say San Francisco, for example) to a Chinese father and Chinese mother.
As you suggest, Chinese men in the Jim Crow South who did marry or have children with a non-Chinese were more likely to have a black than a white partner. However, in other places, e.g., New York City, in the early 20th century many of this mixed pairings of Chinese were with Irish women.
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Thank you Jefe.
Thak you John Jung.
…this has to be one of the most fascinating threads ever.
There’s so much hidden in plain sight, hardly ever spoken of and practically NEVER acknowledged.
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John,
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
I suspect that many of the relations did not necessarily end up in marriage, or some other arrangement that would leave a historical record. With hundreds of thousands of Chinese entering the USA 1848-1882, and only a few thousand women, we must have seen a lot going on that was never recorded.
And 1 Chinese man who started having children in 1870 could have thousands of descendants today, 6 generations of 4 children each would leave us with 4000 descendants today each with a small percentage of Chinese ancestry. Chang and Eng Bunker’s descendants number in that magnitude, and I am sure that nearly all of them identify as white people.
It is similar to the fact that the majority of descendants of black slaves in the USA are actually white people (some 70 million white Americans). White people with some African ancestry in the USA number at least 50% more than the entire African-American population. Probably less than 1 million Chinese Americans *might* be able to trace a small part of their ancestry to 19th century Chinese immigrants, yet I bet MORE than 1 million whites and more than 1 million blacks can (in obviously, very small amounts). I think that is a low ball estimate.
I would even be as bold as suggesting that for whites who can trace their ancestry, at least a large part of it, to before the civil war, they are more than likely to have some black African ancestry.
A Chinese man would have to actually get a Chinese wife to have chinese descendants (or their mixed children would have to marry back into chinese to have chinese descendants). With ratios of 10 to 1 in the USA, it means that most did not get wives. If most did get wives, we would have found thousands of Chinese kids born in the south in the late 19th century. Yet we do not. Undoubtedly, the vast majority did not go back to China to pick out a wife, at least not until after the San Francisco earthquake.
My 2 aunts’ husbands did not go back to China to pick a wife. They were picked for them and sent to Mississippi.
re: what you said
yes, true, but there was so very few of these. They calculated that if all the men who claimed to have had been born in SF prior to the earthquake had actually been born there, each woman would have to have borne 800 sons.
Re: the South, we had thousands of Chinese enter the south after 1870. yet we only had enough numbers of Chinese children to challenge Jim Crow in the 1920s (who were born starting 1910). Of course, many left the South, but that could only really be explained (timewise) by the paper son/daughter phenomenon after the earthquake. What happened for the first 40-50 years? I suspect there may have been a fair number of Chinese-black progeny that were never recorded in the Census as such. Any born after 1882 would have simply been marked down as “colored” (remember that the USA was trying to get rid of Chinese, not increase the population). Those thousands of Chinese who left the south 1870-1910s – they left no “mark”?
And we learned that the Chinese community had to “disown” the mixed Chinese-black community 1920s-1940s. I bet there was a taboo touchy subject that got buried at that time.
Even in Macon, GA – you mentioned that your father was the first laundry owner to take a Chinese wife and to have kids born in Macon. Are we saying that for the 70 years before you were born, those series of men there stayed celibate bachelors?
And I bet there was stuff going on the cotton plantations in South Carolina and Georgia (not to mention Mississippi) that was never recorded in documents.
As you mention, it is a taboo subject among Chinese-Americans. I bet it is a taboo subject among African-Americans as well. Maybe it is a subject that no one wants to touch. YET some African-Americans trying, hoping to trace their DNA to Africa end up finding markers tracing back to China (or other parts of Asia). How does this happen otherwise? ESPECIALLY, if we find it on the Y chromosome haplogroups that point to a paternal ancestor.
Finally, I find it hard to believe that most of the men entered the Mississippi delta on a merchant visa and thus exempt from the Exclusion law. Neither of my two Aunt’s husbands did. They entered as paper sons. And we have some who entered before 1882 on neither. My grandfather’s older brother first entered the USA as a young boy in the early 1880s. Then he came back in the late 1890s as a young man as a “returnee” & leaving a wife back in China. Yet he could NEVER bring his wife over. By the time he could get papers for her, she was viewed as being too old to have more children, so he got a second young wife using papers.
If entering the USA as a merchant were that simple, we would have had many more entering as such during the exclusion era. Yet we do not (at least not many).
Most of the accounts of the ones I have read about who entered the USA as merchants during the Exclusion era were not automatically able to bring wives and children. If they came as a single man, some had to resort to bring over a wife as a paper daughter.
Yes, I do know that some Chinese in NY took Irish wives. I have seen some record of that. Also, my father’s cousin born in NY in 1924 also told me that some of the Chinese men had taken white wives and were still active in the Chinese community there.
Of course, I am speculating (and need to do further research), but I suspect that, at least on this topic (Asian ancestry in the African-American population), you are speculating too.
But, thank you, anyhow, for engaging about this. DNA studies might bring up a lot of more information, or at least food for thought in the next few years.
BTW, did you get my email?
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Thanks for the feedback… it is complicated… but even more so in South Africa… Here are 2 links to Ufrieda Ho .. if they don’t work, just google her name
Chinese Reclassified as Black in South Africa
View on http://www.youtube.com
Paper Sons and Daughters: Growing up Chinese in South Africa (Modern African Writing Series)
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i see the link to Ho’s memoir on Amazon didn’t work: I’ll try again here: Paper Sons and Daughters: Growing up Chinese in South Africa (Modern African Writing Series)
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Thanks for your heads up.
Your you tube link does not go anywhere either.
But I have heard of Ms. Ho’s book. Even she mentioned that the concept of “paper son / paper daughter” actually came from the USA, the phenomenon of which started after City Hall burned down in SF in 1906. It is interesting that the term used in South Africa came from the USA because they later used a similar methodology.
Chinese being reclassified as black post-Apartheid is a completely different matter from African-Americans in the USA having Chinese (or other Asian) ancestry. In S. A., it was specifically done so that ethnic Chinese could enjoy some of the Affirmative Action rights extended to blacks (but, say, not to Coloureds or Asians).
It seems that mixed Chinese-Black persons in the USA during Jim Crow inevitably got classified as “colored” or “Negro”, unless they later married Asians and got reclassified as something else.
To tell the truth, I don’t trust census / birth records. They changed the “race” of my father on my birth certificate so as not to run afoul of anti-miscegenation laws. I was always thinking that I should get my birth certificate changed to be more accurate.
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It is told by one of my uncles or uncles couisons.. that one of their ancestors were a worker at the new train yards or tracks and he had stand of a watch of the workers working on the tracks and to check if the job was going right or done etc or it is supervising the track workers. And my uncle had said they were “B..” of saying (relatives) that one of ancestors were Japanese or Chinese or maybe it could of been Vietnamese but it was Japanese more commonly and he said that one of the ancestors far back in the days or centuries ago was related to a emperor. And the surname “O” was given later..! And one of his or the family ancestor( ..one line from the Vega family”). The family and migrated to New mexico and married one of my great grandfathers of one family in the 1900’s and migrated further away and some went back someway in a state in the south!
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Ran across this story on another blog.
It is more or less consistent with this post. But the author of that post based his story largely on Iris Chang’s account. I had consulted other sources, first writing about this way back when I was in university (and accessed Iris Chang’s book only AFTER this post).
Anyhow, interesting to read another account.
Chinese Plantation Workers
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Sorry, I misplaced your e-mail momentarily…. but wanted to respond to your query about labor contractors… Sue Fawn Chung, in Chapter 1 of her 2015 book, Chinese in the Woods, has an excellent discussion on this important and generally understated aspect of Chinese emigration. (send me your e mail and I will forward some of that material to you).
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[…] Sourced through Scoop.it from: abagond.wordpress.com […]
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The online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture has an entry devoted to the history of the Chinese population in the state, tracing back to 1869 during Reconstruction.
(http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=5971)
Like Mississippi,
** they were recruited to work on plantations, but later migrated to small businesses, ie, laundries and grocery stores
** many Chinese men formed families with black women, at least during the first half of the Jim Crow period
** the proliferation of grocery stores coincided with the decline of the plantation commissary
Some aspects of Arkansas distinguished it from the neighboring state of Mississippi,eg,
** Unlike Mississippi, Chinese students weren’t universally booted out of white schools in Arkansas, so there was less need to set up separate schools for Chinese students as they did in Mississippi.
** The Arkansas Delta was also home to two of the Japanese-American internment camps during WWII, which moved the local governments to pass laws adversely affecting both Japanese- and Chinese- Americans during WWII.
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On Sept 15, 2018, there will be a symposium in Little Rock on the history of the Chinese in the Arkansas Delta. Admission is Free.
From China’s Farmlands to Arkansas’s Delta: A History of Arkansas’s Chinese…
(https://www.eventbrite.com/e/from-chinas-farmlands-to-arkansass-delta-a-history-of-arkansass-chinese-immigrants-tickets-47952000725)
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@jefe
This is the first time I wish I were in the USA when reading this blog.
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There is also a marginal theory that the Chinese people were the first ones to discover America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He
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