Gold Mountain or Gum Shan (金山) is a Chinese name given to California after gold was discovered there. The Chinese first came to the US in large numbers as part of the California Gold Rush (1848–1855).
In January 1848 gold was discovered in the mountains east of San Francisco. It turned the Spanish mission town into a big city – and the Chinese were there almost from the start. By April three Chinese people were living in San Francisco. By 1850 Chinatown was taking shape.
Nearly all the Chinese came came from just one province: Guangdong, in the south of China. It was being squeezed by British banks and torn apart by war.
At first the Chinese were welcomed in California. But after just a few years, by 1853, stuff like this started to appear in newspapers:
“[The Chinese are] morally a far worse class to have among us than the negro. They are idolatrous in their religion – in their disposition cunning and deceited, and in their habits libidinous and offensive. They have certain redeeming features of craft, industry and economy, and like other men in the fallen estate, ‘they have wrought out many inventions.’ But they are not of that kin that Americans can ever associate or sympathize with. They are not of our people and never will be, though they remain here forever …”
That same year the state supreme court, in People v Hall, ruled that the Chinese could not give testimony in court against a White man. That left them with little protection under the law. Whites could pretty much do whatever they wanted and get away with it.
That made it hard, for instance, to hold onto gold claims that Whites wanted. The Chinese found themselves picking over claims Whites had lost interest in.
Some did become amazingly rich all the same, returning to China to become powerful landlords. But most, knowing that the odds were against them, gave up mining one by one and returned to San Francisco to make their life there.
By 1849 there was a Chinese restaurant. By 1851 a laundry. By 1852 a Chinese theatre, with epic Chinese operas. By 1854 a newspaper, the Gold Hills News.
Restaurants and laundries were particularly successful, serving both Chinese and Whites. This was when “Chinese food” became a thing among White people. There were few women in San Francisco and White men considered cooking and washing clothes beneath them – leaving an opening for Chinese men to make a living without seeming to be a threat.
Chop suey was invented then. The story goes that some drunk White miners came into a restaurant just before closing wanting to be served, so the cook stir-fried some table scraps. It proved a hit.
Before the first Chinese laundry opened, many men, both White and Chinese, sent their shirts to Hong Kong! Then Honolulu. In terms of travel time, California was closer to China than it was to most of the US. That changed in 1869 with the opening of the Transcontinental Railroad.
– Abagond, 2017.
Source: mainly “The Chinese in America” (2003) by Iris Chang.
See also:
- Welcome to Asian American History Month 2017
- Chinese Americans
- Afong Moy – the first Chinese American woman
- Chinese Exclusion Act – of 1882
- perpetual foreigner stereotype
- “Chinese food”
- Melbourne Day 1 – See the last paragraph of that post, about the Chinese and the Melbourne gold strike. Much the same sort of thing.
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Sometimes Gum Shan can refer to the the US in general, or sometimes only to San Francisco. In fact, after gold was discovered in Australia, the name of San Francisco was changed from “Gold Mountain” to “舊金山” or “Old Gold Mountain. It was called “Old Gold Mountain” because “新金山” or “New Gold Mountain” thereafter referred to Melbourne, Australia.
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Very interesting. In the Spring I took a graduate seminar in Asian-American literature in the state university system in California. One of my papers was called “The Sides of the Gold Mountain”.
Apparently, both Japanese and Chinese immigrants continued to the call and think of America as the “Gold Mountain”, by which they meant, the place you could go and get rich. Many of the unassimilated older generation even in the Postwar continued to harbor thoughts of getting rich and returning to the home country even when by all plausible considerations – aging, the existence of Americanized, English-speaking children and grandchildren, and the political changes in East Asia follow the world war, this was no conceivable.
In Japanese-American society, this was a great cause of the fracture between the older and younger generations probably even above the internment experience. John Okada, the sometimes unpopular John Okada, chronicles this divide and the influence of the Americanization process in his novel “No-no Boy”.
My paper also made me sometimes unpopular. That is what happens when you refuse to paint with a broad brush. Life in on the sides of the Gold Mountain was not so good, some of it in my estimation was due to the self isolation of the older generation.
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“There were few women in San Francisco and White men considered cooking and washing clothes beneath them – leaving an opening for Chinese men to make a living without seeming to be a threat.”
… which could be part of the reason that Asian-American men are stereotyped as being less masculine than other males. People think of cooks and cleaners before, say, kamikazes, samurais, martial artists… or just regular guys.
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Enlightening post.
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re: Paige
just the beginning of a string of measures, e.g.,
The Page Act of 1875, enacted to keep Asian women out of the US
1882 Chinese Exclusion Act – kept wives and children out
Anti-miscegenation laws – kept white women out of reach 1880s-1960s
Asian War Brides act (1945) – let white men (and indirectly black men) bring over Asian wives not subject to the quotas that Asian men had to face after WWII.
Hollywood stereotypes – When was the last time you saw an Asian man in a leading or romantic role? I have to go all the way back to James Shigeta in the 1950s.
By the time the immigration laws were relaxed after the war brides act, white men began to think that they “owned” the sexual proclivity of Asian women, accentuated during/ after the Vietnam war.
What do you do after 160+ years of desexualization and emasculation that continues unabated to this day?
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