Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (57 page)

IT I am grateful to Zhao Shaoping of Xinhui District, Guangdong Province,
for sharing this folk song with me.

18. Compared to Chinese and Italian women, Jewish, Polish, and Irish
women were less inhibited about leaving home and emigrating to a new country. See Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 198 5); Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buf-
falo,188o-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971); Dino Cinel, From Italy
to San Francisco: The Immigrant Experience (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 11982); Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 11990); Hasia R. Diner, Erin's
Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); and Doris Weatherford, Foreign and Female: Immigrant Women in America, 1840-1930 (New York:
Schocken Books, 1986).

19. For an analysis of why more Chinese women immigrated to Hawaii than
to California and why more Japanese women emigrated than Chinese women,
see Ronald Takaki, "They Also Came: The Migration of Chinese and Japanese
Women to Hawaii and the Continental United States," Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1990, PP. 3-19.

zo. During the 18 50s Chinese residents and businesses were located in different parts of the city, with a small settlement around Sacramento Street. By
the 1187os Chinatown had become a segregated ethnic enclave, six blocks long
(between California and Broadway Streets) by two blocks wide (between Stockton and Kearny Streets). See Thomas W. Chinn, ed., A History of the Chinese in
Calijbrnia:A Syllabus (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America,
1969), pp. so-i s; and Otis Gibson, The Chinese in America (Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1877), pp. 63-94. For a fuller discussion of institutional racism
and Chinese resistance, see Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive
History (Boston: Twayne, 11991), chap. 3; and Charles J. McClain, In Search of
Equality: The Chinese Struggle Against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century
America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).

zi. See Chan, Asian Americans, chap. 3; and Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), chap. io.

zz. For a discussion of how immigration laws and policies in the United States
shaped Chinese American family life and community development, see Bill Ong
Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy,
1850-1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

z3. My calculations are based on statistics provided in S. W. Kung, Chinese
in American Life: Some Aspects of Their History, Status, Problems, and Contributions (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), PP. 33, 92-93; Coolidge,
Chinese Immigration, p. 98; and Helen Chen, "Chinese Immigration into the
United States: An Analysis of Changes in Immigration Policies" (Ph.D. diss.,
Brandeis University, 1980), pp. 176-91.

z4. In re Ah Quan, zi Federal Reporter i82 (1884); and Case of the Chinese Wife, z1 Federal Reporter 785 (1884). For a discussion of these and other
significant cases relating to the exclusion of Chinese women, see Sucheng Chan,
"The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870-11943," in Entry Denied: Exclusion
and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943, ed. Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), PP. 94-146.

25. In re Chung Toy Ho and Wong Choy Sin, 4z Federal Reporter 398 (1890).
See also United States v. Gue Lim, 88 Federal Reporter 1136 (1897).

z6. I am indebted to Waverly Lowell, director of the San Francisco District
Office, Immigration and Naturalization Service, for this quote from the CDCF-
SFDO files. The San Francisco Call made a similar observation on November
23, 1895, in a story about Customs detaining seven Chinese women at the Presbyterian Mission Home on suspicion of fraudulent entry: "The size of the foot
is an important factor in determining the character of the women of China, and
none of the ladies in Miss Houseworth's charge have the diminutive feet which
are said to distinguish the ladies of the higher class" (p. 7).

27. See Weatherford, Foreign and Female; and Maxine Schwartz Seller, Immigrant Women (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981).

z8. See Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars.

29. See Maxine Schwartz Seller, To Seek America: A History of Ethnic Life
in the United States(Englewood, N.J.: J. S. Ozer, 1977), pp. 127-30; S. Glenn,
Daughters of the Shtetl; and Diner, Erin's Daughters in America.

30. See Paul Ong, "Chinese Labor in Early San Francisco: Racial Segmentation and Industrial Expansion," Amerasia journal 8, no. i (spring/summer
1981): 69-92.

31. See Jacqueline Baker Barnhart, The Fair but Frail: Prostitution in San
Francisco, 1849-1900 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1986), chap. 5; and
R. A. Burchell, The San Francisco Irish, 1848-1880 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1979), pp. 17-18. According to Mary Lou Locke in "Out of
the Shadows and into the Western Sun: Working Women of the Late NineteenthCentury Urban Far West," Journal of Urban History 16, no. 2 (February 1990):
178, only 6 percent of the young female workers in San Francisco worked in
factories in 188o.

3 z. "Condition of the Chinese Quarter," San Francisco Municipal Reports
for the Fiscal Year 1884-85, Ending June 30, 1885 (San Francisco: Board of Supervisors, 1885), p. z16.

33. Lucie Cheng Hirata, "Chinese Immigrant Women in Nineteenth-Century California," in Women of America: A History, ed. C. R. Berkin and M. B.
Norton (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1979), PP. 236, 239-40; and Ruth Hall
Whitfield, "Public Opinion and the Chinese Question in San Francisco, 19001947" (Master's thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1947), p. 7. Moreover, as pointed out in William Issel and Robert Cherny, San Francisco,
1865-193 2: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 70-73, manufacturers often paid
Chinese workers less than white workers for doing the same tasks.

34. Herbert Ashbury, The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San
Francisco Underground (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 19 3 3), PP. 3 2-3 5. Ashbury noted that within a few years of the gold rush, "San Francisco possessed a
red-light district that was larger than those of many cities several times its size,"
and "there was no country in the world that was not represented in San Francisco by at least one prostitute" (p. 34). Like many other journalistic accounts
of the heyday of prostitution in San Francisco, Ashbury's book is suspect and
needs to be used judiciously in the absence of writings by Chinese prostitutes
themselves.

3 5. Albert Benard de Russailh, Last Adventure, San Francisco in 1851 (San
Francisco: Westgate, 1931), pp. 29, 11.

36. Barnhart, Fair but Frail, p. 6o. For other studies on prostitution in the
West, see Anne Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitution in the American West, 1865-9o (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Ruth Rosen,
The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); and Brenda Elaine Pillors, "The Criminalization
of Prostitution in the United States: The Case of San Francisco, 1854-1919
(Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1982).

37. Lucie Cheng Hirata, "Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes
in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. i (autumn 1979): 1z. According to Ashbury, Barbary Coast, pp.
i 8o-81, "The prices paid for prostitutes in the San Francisco market varied with
the years and with the quality of the merchandise and was naturally dependent
to a great extent upon supply and demand. Before the passage of the exclusion
acts the prettiest Chinese girls could be purchased for a few hundred dollars each,
but after about 1888, when it became necessary to smuggle them into this country, prices rose enormously. During the early eighteen-nineties they ranged from
about $10o for a one-year-old girl to a maximum of $1,200 for a girl of fourteen, which was considered the best age for prostitution. Children of six to ten
brought from $zoo to $8oo. About 1897 girls of twelve to fifteen sometimes
sold for as high as $z,5oo each."

3 8. M. G. C. Edholm, "A Stain on the Flag," Californian Illustrated Magazine i (February 1892): 162.

39. Chinese Immigration: The Social, Moral, and Political Effect of Chinese
Immigration. Testimony Taken Before a Committee of the Senate of the State of
California, Appointed April3d, 1876 (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1876),
p. 63. Evidence that, like this contract, allegedly pointed to immoral and criminal behavior on the part of the Chinese was often used by exclusionists to justify anti-Chinese legislation.

40. On the subject of indentured servants in the United States, see Richard
B. Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946); and Sharon V. Salinger, "To Serve Well and Faithfully": Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-18oo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

41. Ashbury, Barbary Coast, p. 180; and Mildred Crowl Martin, Chinatown's
Angry Angel: The Story of Donaldina Cameron (Palo Alto: Pacific Books, 1977),
p. 80.

42. Hirata, "Free, Indentured, Enslaved," p. 15.

43. Ibid., p. 13; San Francisco Chronicle, December 5, 1869, P. 3.

44. Ashbury, Barbary Coast, pp. 174-76; and Nell Kimball: The Life as an
American Madam by Herself, ed. Stephen Longstreet (New York: Macmillan,
1970), pp. 226-27. Both Ashbury and Kimball wrote about Selina, a Chinese
prostitute who knew how to capitalize on the Oriental fantasies of white men.
Kimball described her thus: "I myself knew Selina, a Chinese tart, the best looker
I ever saw among them-what was called `a stunner.' She had a marvelous body,
thin and yet just right in hips and breasts, not skimped as with most Chinese.
She could chatter the artistic comeon to a john-about scrolls, screens, and give
off a sense of culture, which a man likes sometimes when he's buying a woman's
time and he's budgeting his vitality. She had a place, a three room kip in Bartlett Alley, and it was: For Whites Only.... Customers had to book her three days in
ahead, she was that much in demand she claimed. And she got a whole buck,
not the usual seventy-five cent price. She was a looksee seller, taking off her clothes
for fifty cents so the trick could check for himself-as Lai [her laundry woman]
told me-that in her sex parts she ran north-to-south like the white girls, and
not east-to-west. It's amazing the idea you can sell a man about fornicationhe'll pay and even if fooled, feel at least he's gotten some knowledge or experience" (p. 227).

45. San Francisco Chronicle, April 17, 1892, p. I.

46. San Francisco Call, December 6, 1908, p. 3.

47. Alexander McLeod, Pigtails and Gold Dust (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton
Printers, 1948), P. 183.

48. Ashbury, Barbary Coast, pp. 176-77; Hirata, "Free, Indentured, Enslaved," pp. 13-14; and Nell Kimball, pp. zz1-z3.

49• Chinese Immigration, pp. 47, 80. The following sensationalized description of the "hospital" to which diseased prostitutes were brought to die appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on December 5, 1869: "Led by night to
this hold of a `hospital,' she is forced within the door and made to lie down
upon the shelf. A cup of water, another of boiled rice, and a little metal oil lamp
are placed by her side.... Those who have immediate charge of the establishment know how long the oil should last, and when the limit is reached they return to the `hospital,' unbar the door and enter.... Generally the woman is dead,
either by starvation or from her own hand; but sometimes life is not extinct; the
spark yet remains when the `doctors' enter; yet this makes but little difference
to them. They come for a corpse, and they never go away without it" (p. 3).

50. My calculations are based on statistics given in Hirata, "Free, Indentured,
Enslaved," pp. 23-24; Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, pp. 54-5 5, 62-63, 68-69;
and idem, "Exclusion of Chinese Women," p. 107. I would favor the higher figures for 186o and i 88o given by Sucheng Chan, in which she took unlisted prostitutes into consideration by looking closely at household composition. Whenever single women between the ages of fifteen and forty-five were shown living
in all-female households, she coded them as "probable prostitutes" ("Exclusion,"
p. 141). Although the accuracy of U.S. census statistics, particularly for a group
that is primarily non-English-speaking like the Chinese, is questionable, the manuscript census is one of the few sources available that provides information on
household composition and the socioeconomic background of Chinese women.

51. Megumi Dick Osumi, "Asians and California's Anti-Miscegenation
Laws," in Asian and Pacific American Experiences: Women's Perspectives, ed.
Nobuya Tsuchida (Minneapolis: Asian/Pacific American Learning Resource
Center and General College, University of Minnesota, 1982), p. 6.

52. In contrast, Chinese men were able to intermarry in British Malaya, North
Borneo, Sarawak, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, Hawaii, Mexico,
Guatemala, Peru, Siberia, and Australia; as a result, prostitution was not as widespread in these places as it was in the continental United States. See Ching Chao
Wu, "Chinese Immigration in the Pacific Area" (Master's thesis, University of
Chicago, 1926), pp. 26-28; and idem, "Chinatowns: A Study of Symbiosis and
Assimilation" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1928), chap. 4.

53. Hirata, "Free, Indentured, Enslaved," pp. 8-29. Prostitution in general at this time was just as lucrative for everyone. As Barnhart points out in chapter 6 of The Fair but Frail, a wide sector of society profited from prostitution,
including business people such as dressmakers, jewelers, doctors, liquor salesmen, and theater managers, as well as judges and other municipal officers who
took bribes.