Hometown Chinatown

A History of Oakland's Chinese Community, 1852-1995

Eva Armentrout Ma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138862791
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317775812
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie politique

Focusing on the local history of the Chinese in Oakland, California, this study examines common stereotypes in the early Chinese community and Chinatown organizations.

Chapter 1

The Promise, 1852-late 1870s

Chinese began to settle in Oakland in the year of its founding in 1852, that is, a scant two or three years after major Chinese immigration into the United States began. Between 1852 and the mid-1870s, Chinese in Oakland as throughout the United States, were first enthusiastically welcomed, then grudgingly accepted (so long as they kept in their place). Doing their best to ignore criticism and to work around the mountains of limitations gradually placed upon them, Chinese continued to settle in America in ever increasing numbers so long as economic opportunities were available. They settled primarily in California, but by 1870 had also begin living in other western states.¹

At first, Chinese were spread out, living in the countryside and small towns as well as in the larger cities. They were not, as has sometimes been stated, inclined to confine their contacts or their business life exclusively to other Chinese.² Within the cities and towns, Chinese worked in factories or on construction jobs, became peddlers or opened laundries.³ In the countryside, they could be found throughout the western states, working as contract mine laborers or laborers on local railroad lines. Others were commercial fishermen who lived in the Chinese fishing villages found all along the Pacific coast. Even others worked as farm laborers on California’s huge commercial farms, operated truck farms, or worked on land reclamation and levee building projects in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin delta.⁴

But as they were driven from the mines, and as work on the first transcontinental railroad (which employed thousands of Chinese) came to an end, more and more Chinese began to move into the cities. By the late 1860s, most cities along the Pacific coast from San Diego to Seattle had rapidly growing Chinese populations.⁵ The San Francisco Bay Area was another magnet, as were the cities along the road from San Francisco to the gold country, such as Sacramento and Marysvilie.⁶ And on the other side of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Chinese began to settle as far inland as the cities of Nevada State.⁷

Cities with a large Chinese population also began to develop Chinatowns. Popular wisdom would expect these Chinatowns to be places where all the local Chinese crowded together to live in their own, isolated community.⁸ This, emphatically, was not the case. Instead, at this time, Chinese still lived as well as worked scattered throughout both the cities and the countryside. The Chinatowns were mostly social and business centers. They would have shops, a temple or two, gambling establishments, a few residence houses (buildings with lots of bedrooms and one shared kitchen), and perhaps headquarters for social organizations.⁹

As time passed, whites—in Oakland as well as elsewhere—began more and more to resent the evident success which the Chinese enjoyed. When economic depression hit California in 1869–1870, whites and especially white immigrants looking for factory work came to see Chinese as a serious economic threat. In addition, there was much resentment over the Chinese immigrants’ way of living. Whites generally felt that Chinese held to a depraved system of morals, believed in cultural values that were just too exotic, spoke an incomprehensible language, and were also draining the United States of its wealth since Chinese workers sent much of their savings back to China to their families there. Whites also objected to Chinese lotteries and gambling houses, to Chinese’ worship of “heathen gods,” to opium use, and to the Chinese community’s tendency to regulate itself instead of reporting difficulties and crimes to the local police.¹⁰ It might bear mention that in China, lotteries were considered acceptable but many people regarded other forms of gambling with distaste. Opium smoking, introduced into China in the early 19th century by the British, was illegal but widespread. In California, it was not illegal until 1881,¹¹ and until then, users were of all races and backgrounds.

In the early 1870s, helped along by continuing depression, a national panic and a financial crisis, opposition to Chinese spread beyond miners and factory workers into most sectors of white society.¹² By this time, Chinese made up a fifth to a quarter of California’s work force.¹³ Many whites were especially concerned by the small number of women—somewhat less than 10 percent of the Chinese community.¹⁴ There were few women for several reasons, including immigration restrictions, the fact that many Chinese could only find temporary or seasonal work, and Chinese tradition which required the wife to remain in the ancestral home to care for the husband’s parents. As a result, although large-scale employers still welcomed Chinese, growing anti-Chinese sentiment began to set up more legal and social barriers. For example, there were the California law which denied Chinese the right to seek jobs through the state Labor and Employment Exchange, and local ordinances which forbade Chinese to operate boarding houses outside of Chinatowns.¹⁵ These barriers were not insurmountable, however, and it was still possible for Chinese to live and flourish in the United States.

The Chinese of Oakland typified the trends described above. In the mid-1800s, Oakland and the countryside surrounding it seemed a promising area to Chinese settlers. There were first tens and then hundreds of jobs for Chinese in the new industries being developed, and hundreds more for laborers to build the region’s communications network. The land around Oakland was fertile. Many landowners were willing to lease to Chinese, and others hired large numbers as agricultural laborers to bring in the harvest, or to do skilled work such as pruning fruit trees. Chinese were welcomed to open laundries, an occupation that early became associated with them. There was even a place for Chinese in the marketing network, especially in the retailing of fresh produce, which in those days was mostly done by door-to-door peddling.

Not surprisingly, Chinese were among the first settlers of Oakland, as of other California cities. Some claim that a group of Chinese arrived even before Horace Carpentier to log the redwoods in the hills behind the city.¹⁶ They would not have been considered squatters, because they did not lay claim to the land and in fact were probably hired laborers. By 1860, when Oakland figured for the first time in a national census, there were 170 Chinese living within the city limits out of a total population of about 2500.¹⁷ In 1870, there were close to 1,000,¹⁸ and by 1875, after the town of Brooklyn had been annexed, there were 2,000-3,000 out of the total population of 20,000.¹⁹ Chinese were the largest non-white and non-native group then living in the city.

Many of these Chinese, like Chinese elsewhere in California, lived and worked in the factories then growing up in the city as well as in the towns and the countryside around it. The factory workers, whether Chinese or not, in Oakland as elsewhere, usually lived in dormitories on company property. One of the biggest Oakland area factories was J. Lusk Canning, founded in 1868 as an extension of Josiah Lusk’s fruit and vegetable farm directly north of Oakland. A cotton mill in Clinton opened in 1865 using Scotch girls, but the work was reportedly too hard for them and they were replaced by Chinese. Large numbers of Chinese also worked for at least one of the Oakland area’s two fuse and explosives factories. (These factories must have added an element of suspense to city living.) Chinese probably worked for the boot and shoe factory in the town of Lynn as well, since most such factories in California relied on Chinese.²⁰

Between 1870 and 1875, entrepreneurs opened more and more industries in Oakland, and the Chinese role as factory workers continued to grow. Some of the new industries, such as ceramics and terra cotta works, and the cigar factories (hand-rolled cigars were very popular among men in California) were known throughout California for preferring Chinese over workers of other nationalities. In the meantime, older industries increased the number of their Chinese employees. By 1870, at least 100 Chinese worked in the local explosives factories. Clinton’s cotton mill, retooled and renamed Pacific Jute Manufacturing, employed almost 400 Chinese by 1876; and probably double that number within a year.²¹ The J. Lusk Canning Company, which became California’s largest by the mid-1870s, had more than 150 Chinese working in its Oakland plant at that time.

In addition to factory work, by the 1860s and 1870s, many Chinese were getting jobs as cook, gardener, or houseboy. These jobs were in great demand among teen-age boys. Many wealthy, white Bay area businessmen maintained residences in Oakland, which in those days was lovely and semi-rural. They generally preferred hiring Chinese to work on their estates. Chinese took the jobs because they were steady and paid reasonably well. In addition, in some cases the families they worked for allowed time off to attend school, and some even helped finance the education. Finally, a few Chinese were also employed to work in restaurants, wholesale establishments, and dry-goods shops operated by their fellow-countrymen. The number of Chinese-owned businesses was small, however.²²

That Chinese contributed to the construction of American’s first trans-continental railroad is fairly well known. Less well known is that they also built most of the early local lines in California and throughout the western states,²³ lines which for the most part are no longer in existence. In Oakland, Chinese laborers worked by the hundreds laying track, constructing bridges, and grading the roadbed. Oakland’s great railroad construction era was the 1860s. Between 1861 and 1874, local businessmen financed at l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreward
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Promise, 1852-late 1870s
• Chapter 2: Attack, late 1870s-1906
• Chapter 3: Chinatown Develops Its Character, 1906–1929
• Chapter 4: A Second Flowering, 1929–1952
• Chapter 5: Start of a New Cycle, 1952–1996
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index