63
Chinese Ethnicity and the American
Heroic Artisan in Henry Grimm’s
The Chinese Must Go (1879)
Hsin-yun Ou
H
enry Grimm’s The Chinese Must Go appeared at the peak of the vitriolic anti-Chinese sentiment that broke out in California in the 1870s.1 This racial drama touched on the national debate over “the Chinese question” and used theatrical performance as a persuasive ideological force to advocate exclusion of Chinese immigrants from the United States. According to David Roediger, this farce provided “a way for men to carouse after work” at the Anti-Coolie Club, a white working-class male “preserve for communal bonding.”2 Unlike most of the nineteenth-century yellowface performances that distorted Chinese immigrants mainly for comic effect, Grimm’s play enunciates rigorous dialectical criticism of the Chinese.Drawing upon the work of recent scholars such as Yong Chen, James Moy, and Floyd Cheung, who have used Chinese language sources such as newspapers, letters, diaries, diplomatic writings, and Chinese govern-ment reports in order to explicate what was done to the Chinese and how the Chinese reacted to it, this essay examines the place of Chinese workers in a late nineteenth-century American ethnic/gender hierarchy.3 I explore the issues concerning Chinese immigrants by assuming various perspectives along a spectrum from Euro-American to Chinese, arguing from such vantage points that ethnicity and gender play a significant role both in reiterating negative stereotypes and in complicating or resisting them. While James Moy claims that Grimm’s farce indicates that the earlier American construction of the “deceitful” Chinese was required to rationalize a strategy that white Americans would later employ in their dealings with Asians,4 I would suggest that Grimm’s melodrama criti-cizes not only Chinese supporters but anti-Chinese agitators as well. The
play’s satire on white workers may partially explain why, in fact, there is no record of a performance of the play at any established theater in San Francisco,5 while a later production at the Bird Cage Theatre in Tucson, Arizona, outside California where the play is set and the characters are satirized, is known to have received “thunderous applause.”6 Floyd Cheung maintains that Grimm’s play articulates American racial stereotypes that waver between the frighteningly feminized and the menacingly mascu-line. He observes that the play’s depictions of the Chinese as threatening reveal an underlying Euro-American anxiety about masculinity.7 Cheung’s reading corrects Dave Williams’s assertion that late nineteenth-century American playwrights portrayed the Chinese only as effeminate, power-less, and comical, rather than as economically or culturally dangerous.8 Yet Grimm’s play manifests not only an ambiguous gendering of the Chinese, but an equivalent contradictory gendering of white workers. While seem-ing to be masculine in drivseem-ing off the Chinese with violence, for instance, a white worker could be regarded as feminized because of his failure to compete legitimately for “respectable” work. In The Chinese Must Go, the contradictory gendering of both Chinese and white laborers stems not only from Euro-American gender anxiety, but from misconceptions of the Chinese immigrant experience in the United States.
I. Feminization of Chinese Laborers
Grimm’s portrayal of Chinese workers appears to convey populist an-tagonism against the Chinese. The play depicts the Blaine family in San Francisco and their reliance on Chinese helpers for their daily housework. William, a tailor, and his son Frank blame Chinese labor for their finan-cial tribulations and attempt to justify their ill treatment of the Chinese by claiming that they are deserving of punishment. Not coincidentally, their surname—Blaine—is likely to allude to a contemporary politician, James Gillespie Blaine (1830–93), a Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, known to have strongly favored Exclusion Acts against Chinese immigration.9 The title of the play, in fact, was borrowed from the slogan of the Workingmen’s Party of California, a white labor union that sought anti-Chinese legislation. In fear of increasing unemployment and losing their livelihood, members of the Workingmen’s Party promoted
national refutation of the Chinese; their leader, Denis Kearney, ended every speech with the catchphrase “the Chinese must go.”
In addition to economic competition, public health issues were racialized to fuel anti-Chinese sentiment in San Francisco. After the Workingmen’s Party won control of the mayor’s office in San Francisco in 1879, “Chinatown” was declared a health hazard. The campaign included warnings against the employment of the Chinese as domestic servants, since this would allow them to spread their “Oriental” diseases and un-natural habits among American children.10 In response to the wave of anti-Chinese sentiment, over thirty pieces of legislation restricting the rights of Chinese immigrants to marry, own property, and practice certain professions were introduced at the state and federal level in the 1870s and 1880s.11 A widespread anti-Chinese animus in Western states led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first immigration law in America to restrict entry on the basis of race. Renewed every ten years until its indefinite extension in 1904, the Chinese Exclusion Act denied Chinese laborers the right to enter the United States.
First performed in 1879, The Chinese Must Go responded to popu-lar culture from 1870 onward that portrayed the Chinese in a negative fashion and culminated in exclusionary laws.12 As a work of yellowface minstrelsy, the play called for impersonations by white actors that relied on the queue, the traditional hairstyle worn by Chinese men, costuming (usually a navy blue or black tunic with loose fitting pants), makeup (to sallow the skin), taped eyelids,13 and posture. Among these, Chinese immigrant dress and braiding of the queue were considered evidence of femininity. Witness the costuming directives in George M. Baker’s New
Brooms Sweep Clean (1871): “blue blouse, loose yellow pants fastened at
the ankles, white stockings, heavy brogans, flesh colored skull-cup [and] a long black cue [queue],”14 and in Bret Harte’s Two Men of Sandy Bar (1876): “Hop Sing.—Dress Chinese coolie; blue blouse, and dark-blue drawers gathered at ankles; straw conical hat, and wooden sabot.”15 Grimm’s play literally dresses the Chinese in dreary, loose-fitting work-men’s clothing suggesting their downgraded, feminized social status. In what appears to be an act of revulsion against emasculated Chinese males, at the beginning of the play, the protagonist Frank Blaine pulls a Chinese servant, Sam Gin, by his queue. “They are,” Frank’s sister Lizzie
tells Sam Gin, “all trying to pull you back to China” (100). Undeniably, many American writers mocked the queue by calling them “pigtails,” while some cartoonists even went so far as to draw the Chinese as rodent-like animals. The Chinese often faced legal sanctions against the queue, as in 1873 when the San Francisco Board of Supervisors considered passing a “queue” ordinance that “all Chinese sentenced to the Country Jail be deprived of their pig-tails.”16
If one were to view the play from the Chinese immigrant’s perspective, Frank’s tugging of Sam Gin’s queue is clearly an act of physical abuse, but so too may it be construed as emotionally injurious, a symbolic violation of masculinity. Though played by a white actor, Sam Gin appropriately enacts a Chinese immigrant’s humiliation at what is obviously intended to be a degrading gesture. And while Sam Gin does not resort to violence to avenge the insult, he nonetheless scolds Frank in a rage: “Damn hoodlum. What for you foolee me all the time?” (99). Then he makes a complaint to Lizzie: “Your brother damn hoodlum, he pullee my tail all the time” (99–100). In point of fact, the bodily display of the queue connotes com-plex cultural meanings for Chinese men in the nineteenth century, since the cutting of hair marked both oppression and sovereignty in China and later in America. Since the establishment of the Qing dynasty in 1644, Han Chinese men were required to shave their foreheads and wear their hair in a braided plait as a sign of loyalty to their Manchu conquerors; failure to wear the queue was a sign of rebellion, punishable by death. Over two hundred years later, however, Chinese immigrants regarded their queues as a symbol of racial identity, which they sought to maintain despite impediments imposed by US law. A federal court record of Ho Ah
Kow v. Nunan (1879) offers a glimpse of the complex feelings of Chinese
men about their queues. The sheriff of San Francisco, Matthew Nunan, enforced the Queue Ordinances passed in 1876, which required male prisoners, regardless of ethnicity and race, to have their heads shaved within an inch of the scalp.17 Ho Ah Kow filed a civil suit against Nunan for damages, claiming that the ordinance caused him irreparable harm, since these acts brought a Chinese male “disgrace among his country-men and … with it the constant dread of misfortune and suffering after death.”18 As further substantiation of this complicated matter, an 1878 article published in the American Missionary recounts the insistence of
Chinese men on preserving their queues as racial and cultural identity markers even after their conversion to Christianity:
Not long ago a young man became a Christian, and his friends … wrote a false report to his parents in China, telling them that their son in California not only had forsaken his old religion and the worshipping of his ancestors, but also had cut off his long queue and dressed in foreigners’ clothes. When they received this news, they wept and made many inquiries.… When the young man heard of this, he wrote home to them, telling them it was true that he had become a Christian, but it was not true that he had cut his queue and wore the foreigner’s clothing, and said that he was a Chinaman still.19
From the perspective of a Chinese man, then, the queue represented mas-culinity and cultural identity, and as such became the primary motive for preserving it along with, or more persistently than, other traditional values and customs, even in a new land. Nonetheless, in nineteenth-century California, the Chinese male’s practice of wearing his hair long and in a braid was perceived as sexually ambiguous; consequently, when he was assaulted, as Sam Gin is in the play, his queue often became the principal target of the attack. Further evidence of this phenomenon can be seen in Bret Harte’s letter to the Springfield Republican on 30 March 1867:
Regularly every year they [the Chinese] were driven out of the mining camps, except when the enlightened Caucasian found it more convenient to rob them.… They furnished innocent amusement to the honest miner, when gambling, horse-racing, or debauchery palled on his civilized taste, and their Chinese tails, particularly when tied together, cut off or pulled out, were more enjoyable than the Arabian nights entertainments.20
Grimm’s play not only disparages cultural traits ascribed to the Chi-nese, but also assigns pidgin English to Chinese characters to create an effect, here to infantilize and emasculate them, or to render them into unassimilable aliens. Indeed, many late nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants did mispronounce words and commit grammatical errors, habitually adding the syllable -ee to the endings of words, though such lan-guage distortions could be attributed to the influences of Chinese syntax and pronunciation. But because the pidgin English spoken by the Chinese resembled the parodies of black dialects in blackface performances, its articulation conjured up assumptions of intellectual inferiority, even though some playwrights simply intended to stage local color realism.21 Intriguingly, the encounter between the nineteenth-century Chinese
working-class immigrants and Californians produced impressions of the Chinese that contrasted sharply with eighteenth-century depictions of cultivated “Mandarins,” who spoke elegant English blank verse in iambic pentameter as in Arthur Murphy’s The Orphan of China.22
If this racial and linguistic bias were not bad enough, the Chinese were relentlessly feminized because their jobs as laundrymen and domestic servants were regarded by white Americans as women’s work. When the play opens, Ah Coy is demanding the money the Blaine family owes him for his domestic services. In nineteenth-century America, despite the early association of Chinese men with mining and work on the railroads, popular stereotypes portrayed them as capable only of feminized jobs. According to Otis Gibson, of the ten or twelve thousand Chinese in San Francisco in the 1870s, about twenty-five hundred were employed as domestic servants.23 In addition, white employers placed emphasis on the servile manners of Chinese workers and contrasted their docility with white workers’ insubordination, thereby justifying the “cheapness” of Chinese labor. Two employers of railroad workers, Charles Crocker and Leland Stanford of the Central Pacific, denigrated the Chinese by char-acterizing them as emasculated “pets” serving Euro-American masters.24 These gendered images of the Chinese as weak and cowardly domestic slaves equated them with prevailing American stereotypes of women.
As a matter of fact, white Americans failed to question the experiences of Chinese male workers. While Chinese immigrants took domestic jobs primarily because of legal and racial prejudice barring them from other occupations, and because of the shortage of servants on the West Coast,25 they were not likely to have perceived themselves as feminized, but rather as breadwinners and household patriarchs. According to Chinese patriarchal ideologies, they were the “men of the house” as long as they were able to support their families back in China. The early immigration of the Chinese was brought about by a number of factors, including the California Gold Rush (starting from 1849), a major civil war in China (the Taiping Rebellion, 1851–64), and the second Opium War (1856–60). The Taiping Rebellion, for instance, contributed to the neglect of farmland, and hence flood and famine, with an estimated death toll of between twenty and thirty million due to warfare and resulting starvation.26 Despite their strong attachment to the homeland, Chinese immigrants endured
uprisings and natural disasters in order to come to the American West. Notwithstanding the inhospitable treatment they have received in the United States, they were more than willing to work diligently in order to help their destitute families in China. Even when they assumed feminized roles, as long as they retained their status as breadwinners in the minds of their families, the remittances sent back home allowed them to maintain a sense of masculine self-esteem to keep “the patriarchy intact.”27 As a result, Chinese workers in the U.S. are likely to have been more confident of their masculinity than white labor would have expected them to be.
II. The Chinese Immigrants and Masculinity
Grimm’s play not only reflects the racialized practice that feminized and derogated the Chinese, but it also dramatizes the deteriorating state of white masculine dominance. While the play accentuates Chinese male workers’ feminine attributes, it also points toward a white American view of the Chinese as ambitious competitors intending to dominate the American labor market. Like many of the yellowface performances relating to the daily lives of the American public, The Chinese Must Go is a depic-tion of San Francisco in the late 1870s, a time of great financial distress for the Euro-American working class. In 1870, the Chinese constituted only 8.6 percent of the total population of California, but a threatening 25 percent of the wage-earning force.28 Given these facts it is not surprising that the fundamental concern of the play is the economic challenge of cheap Chinese labor to the masculinity of white workers who could not compete with an immigrant work ethic. Grimm’s comedy discloses the contradiction concerning American concepts of Chinese ethnicity, to be sure, but perhaps more importantly exposes a process of self-definition for US nationhood.
In The Chinese Must Go, the Euro-American characters perceive the Chinese as possessing manly qualities because of their aspiration to instigate an economic takeover. At the beginning of the play, William Blaine and his wife, Dora, have not paid their Chinese servant Ah Coy his six-dollar wage for the previous month’s work. Then, the laundryman Lam Woo enters to demand sixteen dollars for his work, threatening to keep the family’s clothes as a pledge. The first scene opens with Ah
Coy talking to Sam Gin, predicting the Chinese takeover of American economy: “White man big fools; eaty too muchee, drinky too muchee, and talkee too muchee” (99). Sam Gin complains about white men be-ing paid more than the Chinese for the same job, but Ah Coy challenges his claim: “By and by white man catchee no money; Chinaman catchee heap money; Chinaman workee cheap, plenty work; white man workee dear, no work.… By and by, no more white workingman in California; all Chinaman—sabee?” (99).29 Correspondingly, Slim Chunk Pin, the representative from the Six Companies (agents that recruited Chinese labor),30 exclaims: “We can do without the white people altogether. Why should we allow them always to skim the cream from the milk; we have submitted to it long enough. In ten years more, California will be ours” (102).
Clearly, these statements point toward white American anxiety about Chinese greed for racial domination and reiterate concerns expressed in many contemporary writings. D. McGregor Means’s 1877 journal article, for instance, states that:
A life-boat is designed for saving men from drowning, but if it is loaded beyond its capacity it will sink. Our ship of State may suffer a similar expe-rience.… Do we feel so firmly convinced that the Chinese are created our equals, that we should surrender to them the control of our government in case they become the majority?31
Apprehension like this intensified during a spurt of economic growth between 1870 and 1900, when the accumulation of wealth by a number of entrepreneurial families, such as the Carnegies and the Rockefellers, led to concerns that economic inequities would destabilize the nation. Although immigrants produced an abundance of cheap labor and capital during economic expansion, social problems emerged during downturns. US capitalist desire for Chinese markets and a Chinese workforce gave rise to other workers’ fear of competition. Thousands of Chinese released from employment during the railroad construction of 1869 were competitors in the job market, working for low wages that, in effect, reduced the overall standard of living. The antitrust movement pressed for federal regulation by equating minority workers at the hands of monopolies to slaves and by proposing racist legislative measures. Exclusionist supporters feared that the Chinese labor force was exacerbating the conflict between white
labor and capital, since from 1870 onward industrialists used Chinese immigrants to regulate defiant workers. Frustrated with capitalism, white activists blamed the Chinese for white unemployment.32
The Chinese denied the allegation that their intent was to take over the American economy. In an “Address to the Public,” the Chinese com-munity leaders explained that, instead of taking the places of better men, they performed menial work and opened the way to “higher and more lucrative employments” for others, and therefore “lifted others up.” In regard to the other accusations— that they do not profit the country any, do not invest anything here, but send everything home to China—they said, “The money that you pay us for our labor, we send home; but the work remains for you,”—as, for instance, the Pacific Railroad.33
Indeed, throughout the anti-Chinese movement, Chinese workers were crucial to the completion of the Pacific railroad, the development of industry and the local economies by providing services and through pay-ment of excessive taxation. Owing to their efforts and contributions—both to China and to the United States—these Chinese workers saw themselves neither as feminized “domestics” nor as menacing masculine rivals.
III. The American “Heroic Artisan” versus Chinese “Slavery”
The white characters in Grimm’s play, like most of those in nineteenth-century yellowface drama, however, ignore Chinese contributions to the United States, and refute mutually beneficial cooperation with the Chinese. In the play, William Blaine condemns US capitalist greediness enabled by Chinese slavery:
[N]ow, most men are nothing else than slaves of their stomach, and many a man sells body and soul—turns actually a slave—only to satisfy the crav-ing of his stomach. This very cause brcrav-ings those hordes of Chinese to our shore; and if we allow the surplus millions of their country to invade ours, they will degrade us to the same level. (111–12)
This speech reflects contemporary debates concerning African slavery prior to the Civil War, which provided a foundational context for the subsequent shaping of American views of the character of the Chinese coolie. Before the Civil War, the “vices of the negroes which slavery had produced” were held to justify “keeping so degraded a race in such a condition.”34 Now, the Chinese in Western states were also associated
with slavery. Chinese-white relations were subjected to a process of “ne-groization,” because Chinese immigrants, like black slaves, were stereo-typed as enemies to free-labor society.35 Witness a statement in the San
Francisco Chronicle that compares the Chinese coolie to the black slave
and condemns both as opposed to the interests of a free white working class: “When the coolie arrives here he is as rigidly under the control of contractor who brought him as ever an African slave was under his master on South Carolina or Louisiana.”36
By associating the Chinese with black slaves, the white characters in Grimm’s comedy de-emphasize the contributions of Chinese workers to the United States and contrast them with the republican paradigm of the Heroic Artisan, a mode of masculinity characterized by independence and virtue. Since the early republic, working-class manhood had been based on the self-employed craftsman who both embodied and enacted the virtues of hard work. Self-reliance and the ability to be a breadwinner (along with simplicity and confidence in judgment) were major components of this heroic ideal as imagined by contemporary culture.37 Yet while assiduity was considered a republican virtue of the Heroic Artisan or the “self-made man,” the assiduity of Chinese laborers, because of their alleged lack of independence, was more often equated to slavery. Euro-Americans pre-sumed that, through a contract system, Chinese coolies were procured in China (mostly in Canton Province) by “labor-brokers, who hire them for a stipulated employment, price, and term, and contract their service thus procured to employers here.”38 They also presumed that the Six Companies were supposed to have supervised their production and service undertak-ings. Assumed to be working as “contract labor,” the Chinese workforce was further opposed to the republican desire for class mobility.39
Nonetheless, Chinese laborers considered themselves to be an indus-trious labor force making slavery unnecessary rather than an inferior race vulnerable to vindictive exploitation. An 1876 article published in the
New York Times concerning the Six Companies’ system of control states
that “the Chinese of all degrees, factors or laborers, deny that there is any condition of servitude attached to their peculiar system of operations.”40 According to Mary Coolidge,
Almost every intelligent American who has studied Chinese life or written upon it, all the missionaries among them, the better educated immigration
officials in this country and many employers of Chinese, unite in declaring that they came just as freely as the immigrants at Atlantic ports.41
Meanwhile, both the Six Companies in San Francisco and railroad em-ployers asserted that Chinese laborers came as voluntary immigrants, earned wages, and thus were not slaves. It might be a misconception that the Chinese were virtual slaves to the Six Companies. Set up in 1862, the Six Companies rebuked the Chinese “coolie” stereotype through letters to government leaders, newspapers, and litigation, and they helped Chinese workers strike for higher wages and fewer hours.42 In 1867, for example, two thousand Chinese railroad laborers, helped by the Six Companies, went on strike to demand equal wages, an eight-hour day, and better treatment from foremen by whom they were constantly whipped. Ap-proximately 90 percent of the Central Pacific’s ten thousand workers were Chinese who had enabled the company to accelerate construction. Yet, the Central Pacific management wired New York to inquire about hiring ten thousand blacks to replace the strikers, and its superintendent Charles Crocker cut off the strikers’ food supply, forcing the strike’s termination within a week.43 Thus, the Chinese were victims of capitalist exploitation rather than a threat to the well-being of the United States.
The Chinese Must Go exhibits the irony of the prevalent American
perception of the Chinese; its white characters attack Chinese workers for their emasculation while simultaneously assailing their economic ambition. Such irony echoes in a poem written by Daniel O’Connell in the 1870s, in which the persona of a Chinese worker claims:
We can do your women’s labor at half a woman’s rate; We can load the stately vessels that pass in your Golden Gate; We’ll monopolize and master every craft upon your shore,
And we’ll starve you out with fifty—aye, five hundred thousand more!44
Like the poem, Grimm’s play illustrates the history of the Chinese in America as riddled in contradiction, subject to both inferiorization and demonization, thus exposing the effects of a prevailing misinterpretation, or ignorance, of Chinese immigration.
IV. American Masculinity and Contradictory Gendering
Misperceptions as enacted in the play include the contradictory gendering of white laborers. The inconsistent gendering of the Chinese was brought
about not only by white America’s misunderstanding of Chinese culture, but by tentative definitions of American masculinity in a time of economic decline. In the play, the conflicting gendering of white workers is perceiv-able in the cross-dressing of the protagonist Frank Blaine. At first glance, the performances of Frank’s cross-gender or cross-race masquerading aim to steal money or to take his vengeance are orchestrated as a farcical play-within-a-play in order to fulfill the audience wish by punishing the Chinese and their supporters. Unable to find a viable job, Frank resorts to cross-dressing twice as his sister to dupe her suitors. When the Blaine family goes to the train station to meet Reverend Howard Sneaker, Frank remains and disguises himself as his sister in order to swindle Captain Julius Turtlesnap. He gets Turtlesnap drunk, takes a watch and a purse from him, and then provokes the hapless captain into fighting the police, who haul Turtlesnap off to jail, leaving Frank in possession of eighty dollars (109). Later, Frank tricks Reverend Sneaker with the same masquerade. Reverend Sneaker, having taken another road and evaded the Blaine at the train station, takes liberties with the disguised Frank. When Frank takes off his dress to reveal his true identity, Sneaker realizes that he is a deceiver deceived. Frank accuses the preacher of religious fraud and drives the clergyman out of the house, saying, “All religious frauds must go” (111).
These two farcical scenes explicitly ridicule pro-Chinese capitalists (represented by Captain Julius Turtlesnap) and pro-Chinese missionaries (represented by Reverend Howard Sneaker). Frank disparages capitalists for depriving white workers: “I never robbed a poor man yet; that’s the reason I am such a poor hand in the stock business” (109). Also, Frank accuses Reverend Sneaker of supporting the Chinese immigration and claiming that the white laborers can live on low wages: “A man, who under the pretension of teaching the doctrine of Jesus Christ, sneers at the poor laborer that the rich may look with a more favorable eye on him, is, in my eyes the meanest fraud possible” (105–6). In effect, Reverend “Sneaker” is aptly named since he lives by soliciting funds from capitalists to convert the Chinese to Christianity. Frank satirizes the preacher in his song:
Mr. Sneaker Is a speaker,
A dollar a day, he tells the nation Keeps the laborers from starvation; That’s enough, he knows it sure. (108)
Frank believes that, much as Sneaker betrays the Blaine family, the Rev-erend deceives the general public about Chinese immigration. William Blaine also condemns the Reverend’s hypocrisy: “It is very easy for a man who has never earned a day’s wages in his life to go around and blow about the brotherhood of man as long as he can fool the fools out of sixty dol-lars a day” (112). Lizzie’s song critiques the preacher in similar fashion:
Mr. Sneaker is a preacher, A preacher is he; And he made lots of money Out of the Heathen Chinee. (114)
At the end of the play, Frank cross-dresses again, this time as the Chinese woman whom Sam Gin is expecting from China. When the Chinese laundryman is counting his money, Frank takes up an idol, puts it over his head, chains him, and robs him of two hundred dollars. The play ends with Sam Gin whimpering and lamenting the loss of his money and fiancée. This denouement is probably intended to amuse the audience with the punishment of the Chinese, especially for their paganism. Chinese idolatry is ridiculed earlier in this act in which several Chinese characters prostrate themselves before the four idols of Fire, Water, Air, and Earth in a temple at the rear part of a Chinese washhouse. As a source of hilarity and mirthful entertainment, the play stereotypes Chinese immigrants as pagans (often called “celestials” or “heathen chinee”) to highlight the undesirability of their backwardness.
Nonetheless, Frank’s enjoyment of his disguises as a woman sub-verts his manhood just as surely as his idle behavior suggests unmanly inclinations. The staging of Frank’s cross-dressing raises questions about the Euro-American concept of masculinity in relation to an American work ethic and brings to light a discernible misinterpretation of Chinese ambition and moral values. Earlier in the play, William mentions the republican concept of the Heroic Artisan and sees a masculine man as a man who works conscientiously: “Work is the root of all lasting prosper-ity” (104). Yet his son Frank does nothing but drink, gamble, and steal.
When Dora accuses William of failing to find work for their son, William reproaches the Chinese for his troubles in trying to locate a position for Frank: “Haven’t I been hunting for a place for years? Isn’t every factory and every store crammed with those cursed Chinamen?” (100). Later in a soliloquy, William again expresses his grief: “My son is growing up in idleness, and idleness is the source of all mischief” (104). William, how-ever, attributes his son’s idleness to Chinese competition: “Owing to the large immigration of coolies it is almost next to impossible to find any work suitable for a boy of his age” (104). These complaints echo those of the contemporary cartoonists mentioned earlier and songwriters who blamed the Chinese for the unemployment of white youth. An illustra-tion from the periodical the Wasp, entitled “What Shall We Do with Our Boys?” portrays a Chinese worker as an octopus taking over every line of industry, with idle white laborers standing aside, likely to be locked up in the jails depicted in the distance.45 By filling all available jobs, the Chinese allegedly corrupted the character of idle young Euro-Americans whose only option was to assume the life of a hoodlum. Even after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, popular songs complained about Chinese labor. The third part of the song “The Chinese, the Chinese, you know” (1885), for instance, epitomizes prevalent anti-Chinese feeling:
Now what shall we do with our girls and our boys? Is a question that we must decide
. . .
If they don’t learn to toil, why they surely will spoil, And society will cast them aside
. . .
They will wander forlorn with the finger of scorn, Pointing at them wherever they go
. . .
And they will fill early graves through these Mongolian slaves, The Chinese, the Chinese, you know [CHORUS].46
With similar worries over his son, William tells Frank: “You ought to do something, Frank, and quit running around with other boys in the streets.… What will become of you if you are not able to support yourself?” (105). William believes in the values of the Heroic Artisan and wishes that Frank could become an honest toiler, unafraid of hard work, and proud of his craftsmanship and self-reliance.
Yet, Frank would rather commit theft, fraud, and violence than take up a respectable job, his idleness resulting from a personal disdain for honest labor. When Frank returns home after losing all his money at billiards, William declares that he has found his son a job as a “bootblack,” the only work “which is not monopolized by the Chinese” (105). In astonishment Frank rejects it immediately: “Bootblack! Did you call me into existence for no other purpose than to black other people’s boots? Why didn’t you leave me where I was? A bootblack! ha! ha! ha! Father, you mock me” (105). Frank prefers to obtain money through fraud instead of hard work, and therefore his unemployment should not be attributed only to competi-tion with the Chinese. If Frank’s long-term unemployment has damaged his character, he makes his own decision when he still has alternatives. His mother Dora rightly believes that Frank cannot find a job because he is too lazy and that Chinese rivalry is only one of the “excuses” (100) for white unemployment. The characterization of Frank as an idle youth forsaking the republican ideal of the Heroic Artisan is indicative of the failure of some white workingmen to reassert their positions as respect-able citizens.
V. Consumption, Violence, and American Masculinity
Grimm’s play illustrates a transformation that gradually emerged after the Civil War. That is, in denigrating industrious labor provided by the Chinese, Americans began to dissociate traditional connections between masculinity and production, placing more emphasis on consumption.47 In the play, the Chinese servant Ah Coy maintains that “Chinaman no wife, no children, save plenty money” (99) and that “[w]hite people damn fools. Too muchee eaty, too muchee drinkee” (102). Sam Gin states that “China-man take too muchee money to China” (102). Many Chinese immigrants considered themselves sojourners who would eventually return to China; therefore, they consumed very little compared with white Americans. Although the ideal of a hard-working family man remains “one of the central characteristics of American manhood until the present day,”48 more and more Americans were unable to accept the kind of masculin-ity exemplified by hard-working productive Chinese workers. In 1870, Henry N. Day condemned what he perceived to be Chinese selfishness
in the New Englander and Yale Review: “They come for employment and for gain, with expectation for the most part of returning to enjoy their acquisitions in their native homes.”49 Five years later, in a slightly differ-ent vein, Frances A. Walker writes in Scribners Monthly: “Even when the Chinaman comes to the States, he leaves his wife and children behind him … ; his supreme wish is ever to return to his native land.… Surely, a great element among us is not to be built up by immigration of this kind.”50 When William Irwin, governor of California, urged the legislature of that state to lobby Congress to prevent unlimited Chinese immigration, the document stated that “the 180,000 Chinamen constitute one sixth of the population of California, pay less than one-four-hundredth of the State revenue, and send back to China $180,000,000 annually ($1,000 each).”51 In 1878, M. J. Dee criticized Chinese immigrants for their minimal con-sumption in the North American Review:
[T]hose characteristics of the Chinaman which we most despise—his miserable little figure, his pinched and wretched way of living, his slavish and tireless industry, his indifference to high and costly pleasures which our civilization almost makes necessities, his capacity to live in swarms in wretched dens … all these make him a most formidable rival for ultimate survival as the fittest.52
The shift in emphasis from production to consumption was also af-fected by the rise of American capitalism. Before the Civil War, manliness had customarily been associated with active production while femininity had been connected with passive consumption. In the post–Civil War years, however, the relationship between labor and notions of manhood changed as wage work became the norm for working men. Following industrialization, the growth of capital’s power over labor, as well as automation, diminished an artisan’s opportunities of rising to the status of independent craftsman. The growing unemployment of the working class due to economic depressions in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, prob-lematized the notion of the Heroic Artisan.53 Since wage workers asserted their status as family breadwinner by providing a disposable income for family consumption, they advocated that white working-class manhood should be associated with the consumer side of things instead.54
In The Chinese Must Go, however, Frank indulges himself in consump-tion, not for supporting his family, but for his own pleasure of drinking
and gambling. These are not proper kinds of consumption, as his sister Lizzie claims. Their mother Dora tells Lizzie to give Frank a dollar to spend, expecting him to squander it all on beer—“That’s sure to keep him all day in the beer saloon”—but Lizzie decides that she should instead buy Frank “something useful with it” (113). Lizzie emphasizes the importance of appropriate consumption as well as production: after she takes over the housework from the Chinese servants, she feels more energetic when she has work to do.
The play not only exemplifies contemporary fluctuating views of American masculinity in relation to consumption, but also points to those views with regard to brutal treatment of the Chinese. Frank’s seem-ingly masculine violence against the Chinese is as illicit as his fraudulent feminine disguise. The Chinese have performed services for the Blaine household, and therefore have legitimate claims to compensation. Al-though indebted to their Chinese servants, the Blaine family condemns these creditors. After the Blaines refuse to pay Ah Coy and Lam Woo, Frank imitates his father by beating them out of the house, shouting, “That’s the way to make them go” (104). When these Chinese men return with policemen, Frank disguises himself as a woman and escapes arrest. His seemingly masculine violence in striking the Chinese (another form of domestic violence) may be understood as unmanly because of the il-legitimacy of his conduct.
Frank’s violent behavior toward the Chinese reflects the callous manners of those white citizens and politicians who eradicated Chinese residents in California and the Pacific Northwest in the second half of the nineteenth century. Whereas in the 1860s the American government encouraged Chinese immigration to provide inexpensive labor, during the 1870s and 1880s the Chinese faced legislated discrimination and physical violence. During anti-Chinese riots in Los Angeles in 1871, for instance, twenty-one Chinese were shot, hanged, or burned to death by white mobs.55 Animosity toward the Chinese in California was so deep-seated that, in 1876, the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco reported that twenty thousand men in San Francisco were prepared “with fire and steel” to take the law into their own hands.56 Californians resented the success of Chinese miners and oppressed the Chinese through physical assault, expulsion, discriminatory taxes, and legal deprivations of various
sorts. A three-day anti-Chinese riot that occurred in San Francisco in June 1877, in fact, had to be suppressed by federal troops and vigilantes.57 In 1878, the mob in San Francisco had been forming military companies to the extent that the police commissioners had to appoint a number of special police for the preservation of social order.58
The characterization of Frank Blaine in The Chinese Must Go touches on the late nineteenth-century concept of American masculinity, which was gradually shifting away from the Heroic Artisan’s emphasis on self-reliance, hard work, virtue, and honesty. When Frank resorts to cross-dressing in order to make money, he is employing a similar survival strategy as the feminized Chinese domestic workers. Yet Frank’s feminiza-tion of himself is intended, not for assiduous producfeminiza-tion, but for morally defective purposes, engaging in crimes such as stealing, robbing, fraud, and violence. The play thereby discloses an American society in which some of the white workers degrade themselves when they fail to compete with the Chinese, even though Grimm, vis-à-vis his white characters, accuses the Chinese of the whites’ degradation.
VI. Conclusion
The Chinese Must Go demonstrates that the construction of Chineseness
does not stand in isolation in the creative work of a single playwright, but rather draws on the contradictory gendering of Chinese immigrants and white laborers in the culture of the time; the incongruity results not only from the Euro-American anxiety about shifting notions of masculinity, but from a widespread misapprehension of the Chinese immigrant expe-rience in the United States. As Harold R. Isaacs observes, “by examining the images we hold, say, of the Chinese and Indians, we can learn a great deal about Chinese and Indians, but mostly we learn about ourselves.”59 The Chinese were the only group of immigrants ever formally barred from entering the United States, and the construction of Chineseness was often employed to affirm the social concerns of a white America. To illustrate their notions of American society, many nineteenth-century writers resorted to “Oriental” stereotypes and inserted representations of Chinese laborers into discussions of American nationhood. During this period, when “American Orientalism displaced US expansionist interests
in Asia onto racialized figurations of Asian workers within the national space,”60dominant attitudes toward Chinese immigrants converged with the United States’ own race, class, and gender discourses.
Grimm’s play appears to convey populist antagonism against the Chinese by dramatizing feminized cultural traits, pidgin English, and domestic service while at the same time it points toward the deteriorating state of white masculine dominance by depicting the Euro-American fear of Chinese competition instigated by the US capitalists. In effect, due to their contributions—both to China and to the United States—Chinese workers are likely to have understood themselves neither as feminized “parasites” nor as menacing rivals, but rather as an industrious alternative labor force, one that contributed to the American economy and rendered slavery unnecessary. The white characters in Grimm’s play ignore Chinese contributions, however, and by associating them with the dependent servitude of black slaves contrast them with the republican paradigm of the Heroic Artisan. As such, The Chinese Must Go exhibits the irony of contemporary American perceptions that attacked Chinese culture for its emasculation while assailing the threatening masculinity of Chinese competition and the rationale for Chinese immigration. Furthermore, the play suggests the contradictory gendering of white laborers, instigated by their tentative definitions of American masculinity in a time of economic decline. The protagonist Frank Blaine commits frauds against a capitalist, a pro-Chinese missionary, and several Chinese workers. His unmanly idle behavior is indicative of the contemporary work ethics that was gradually shifting away from the Heroic Artisan’s emphasis on self-reliance and hard work.
National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Notes
1 All citations are from Henry Grimm, The Chinese Must Go, in The Chinese Other, 1850–1925:
An Anthology of Plays, ed. Dave Williams (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 97–120.
2 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working
Class (London: Verso, 1991), 120. See also Williams, The Chinese Other, 97.
3 Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943: A Trans- Pacific Community (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000). James S. Moy, Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993). Floyd Cheung, “Anxious and Ambivalent Representations:
Nineteenth-Century Images of Chinese American Men,” Journal of American Culture 30 (2007): 293–309.
4 Moy, 46.
5 In 1879, a small advertisement in the leading San Francisco newspaper offered the play to
theater managers. See Williams, The Chinese Other, 97.
6 Dave Williams, Misreading the Chinese Character: Images of the Chinese in Euroamerican
Drama to 1925 (New York: Lang, 2000), 115.
7 Cheung, 293–309.
8 Williams, Misreading the Chinese Character, 97.
9 See, for instance, Russell H. Bastert, “A New Approach to the Origins of Blaine’s Pan American
Policy,” Hispanic American Historical Review 39 (1959): 375–412 (377).
10 See S. C. Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785–1882
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969).
11 Julia Buxton, The Political Economy of Narcotics: Production, Consumption and Global
Markets (London: Zed Books, 2006), 21–22.
12 Harper’s Weekly, 15 March 1879.
13 A simulation of epicanthic folds, a fold of skin extending from the eyelid over the
in-ner canthus of the eye. See Sean Metzger, “Charles Parsloe’s Chinese Fetish: An Example of Yellowface Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Melodrama,” Theatre Journal 56 (2004): 627–51 (635).
14 George M. Baker, New Brooms Sweep Clean, in The Social Stage (Boston: Lee & Shepard,
1871), 263; also in Williams, The Chinese Other, 10–11.
15 Bret Harte, Two Men of Sandy Bar (Boston: Adamant Media Corporation, 2004), 9. 16 “Small-Pox among Chinese Immigrants at San Francisco Know-Nothingism,” New York
Times, 28 May 1873, 1. Also see C. J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1994), 65.
17 McClain, 73.
18 As quoted in Metzger, 638.
19 “Address by Fung Affoo,” American Missionary 32, no. 3 (March 1878): 81–83.
20 Bret Harte, Bret Harte’s California: Letters to the “Springfield Republican” and “Christian
Register,” 1866–67, ed. Gary Scharnhorst (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), 113.
21 Michael North and Eric Lott consider it a misconception to regard all ethnicized forms of
nonstandard language as instances of racism. See Holger Kersten, “America’s Multilingualism and the Problem of the Literary Representation of ‘Pidgin English’, ” Amerikastudien/American Studies 51 (2006): 75–91 (75).
22 This play was performed in 1768 at the John Street Theatre in New York, where it was
revived as late as 1842. Also, five performances were given in the Southwark Theatre, Philadel-phia, Pennsylvania, in 1767 (16 Jan., 6 Feb.), 1770 (16 Feb.), 1789 (16 March), and 1791 (7 Feb.). See T. C. Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre in the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1933).
23 Otis Gibson, “Chinaman or White Man, Which”: Reply to Father Buchard (San Francisco:
Alta, 1873), 8 (as delivered in San Francisco, published at the request of the “San Francisco Meth-odist Preachers’ Meeting”).
24 See Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990), 231.
25 The strong demand for servants in the West resulted from its distance from the ports of
entry of European immigrants and from black servants in the South. See David Katzman, Seven
Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978), 55.
26 The large-scale revolt against the Qing government was eventually put down by the Qing
army aided by French and British forces. See Thomas H. Reilly, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom:
Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004).
27 See Joan S. Wang, “Race, Gender, and Laundry Work: The Roles of Chinese Laundrymen
and American Women in the United States, 1850–1950,” Journal of American Ethnic History 24 (2004): 58–99 (74).
28 Takaki, 216.
29 The Spanish and Portuguese gave the Chinaman saber, which means “to know.” See “Pigeon
English,” New York Times, 25 July 1875, 10.
30 The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) is known to the American
public as the Chinese Six Companies.
31 D. McGregor Means, “Chinese Immigration and Political Economy,” New Englander and
Yale Review 6, no. 138 (January 1877): 1–11 (10).
32 Cheung, 304.
33 Caroline C. Leighton, Life at Puget Sound, with Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory,
British Columbia, Oregon, and California, 1865–1881 (New York: Charles T. Dillingham, 1884),
118 (Diary, 20 March 1877).
34 Frances Power Cobbe, “What Shall We Do With Our Old Maids?” Fraser’s Magazine,
November 1862, 594–610 (606).
35 Dan Caldwell, “The Negroization of the Chinese Stereotype in California,” Southern
Cali-fornia Quarterly 53 (1971): 123–32.
36 San Francisco Chronicle, 6 March 1879.
37 See Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press,
1996), 13–42. Jeff House, “Sweeney among the Archetypes: The Literary Hero in American Culture,”
Journal of American Culture 16, no. 4 (1993): 65–71 (70).
38 Henry N. Day, “The Chinese Migration,” New Englander and Yale Review 29, no. 110
(January 1870): 1–23 (6).
39 Matthew A. Watson, “The Argonauts of ’49: Class, Gender, and Partnership in Bret Harte’s
West,” Western American Literature 40.1 (2005): 33–53 (50).
40 “The Latest Chinese Scare,” New York Times, 5 April 1876, 4.
41 Mary Coolidge, Chinese Immigration (New York: Henry Holt, 1909), 48. 42 Peter Kwong, Forbidden Workers (New York: New Press, 1997). 43 Takaki, 229.
44 Daniel O’Connell, “Song of the Tartar Horde,” quoted in William Purviance Fenn, Ah Sin
and His Brethren in American Literature (Peking: College of Chinese Studies, 1933), 18–19.
45 Wasp, Jan.–June 1882, collected in the Bancroft Library.
46 “The Chinese, the Chinese, you know,” lyrics by J. E. Donnelly, composed by W. S. Mullaly
(San Francisco: J. L. A. Brodersen, 1885), collected in the Library of Congress.
47 Kimmel, 16. 48 Ibid., 20.
49 Henry N. Day, “The Chinese Migration,” New Englander and Yale Review 29, no. 110
(January 1870): 1–23 (6).
50 Frances A. Walker, “Our Domestic Service,” Scribners Monthly, 11, no. 2 (December 1875),
273–78 (278).
51 “Chinese Notes,” American Missionary, 32, no. 1 (Jan. 1878): 9–10 (9).
52 M. J. Dee, “Chinese Immigration,” North American Review 126, no. 262 (May 1878):
506–27 (524).
53 See Roediger, passim.
54 Currarino, Rosanne. “ ‘Meat vs. Rice’: The Ideal of Manly Labor and Anti-Chinese Hysteria
in Nineteenth-Century America,” Men and Masculinities 9 (2007): 476–90.
55 See Daniels, Roger, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 58–59.
56 “The Latest Chinese Scare,” New York Times, 5 April 1876, 4.
57 Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1991), 85–86.
58 “Trouble in San Francisco; a Threatened Attack on Chinese Immigrants by So-Called
Work-ing Men—The City Authorities Determined to Preserve Order—Arrest of the LeadWork-ing Agitators,”
New York Times, 18 January 1878, 2.
59 Harold R. Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds: American Views of China and India (New York:
Sharpe, 1980), 40.
60 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University
