Chinese in Northwest America Research Committee (CINARC)
CHINESE LABOR
This page focuses on the ways that ordinary Chinese earned a living in the Northwest.  In the United States, though not in Canada, the distinction between "laborer" and "merchant" was of great importance in terms of immigration law.  Laborers -- defined as persons who worked with their hands -- were much more likely to be refused readmittance when they went back to China to see their families, and after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, no laborer could hope to bring his wife into the country.  In Canada, entry rights depended more on wealth than on class.  Until the 1920s, you could enter Canada and bring your family too as long as you could pay the head tax for yourself and each person with you.

Chinese miners, farmers, fishermen. and laundrymen were classified as laborers but tended to work for themselves or in small cooperatives.  Some of them earned good livings.  Those in other jobs had fewer prospects and often were poor.  The main hope for Chinese trapped in such jobs was to save enough to start businesses of their own.

The page was begun on April 25,1911 and is still far from complete
As in other cities, chop suey was the main attraction
Seattle was different.  Chinese restaurants were less popular.
Even at the height of the boom, Japanese competed effectively
Japanese restaurants  outnum-
bered Chinese restaurants
But restaurants were important to local Chinese anyway
King Fur Cafe was one of the longest-running
Many Chinese restaurants like this one were in Chinatown
They provided work for many Chinese Americans
And for some, a chance to get ahead
At least in the eyes of non-Chinese diners
What about the rest of the Northwest?  BC was not the same
Even though it had chop suey too - in Quesnel. for instance
And anti-Chinese prejudice was still strong in places like Tacoma
This Tacoma restaurant was not a real one: instead, a movie set
We still don't know much about other Northwest places.
If you know about old Chinese restaurants and/or chop suey in those places, please let us know.  Just click on "comments" to leave a message
Chinese Restaurants and Chop Suey in the Pacific Northwest  西北角早期杂碎餐馆
Restaurants

Does a Chinaman do your washing? 替你洗烫的是中国人吗?

“Does a Chinaman do your washing?  If so you're not carrying out the principles of unionism.”  Seattle Union Record
January 20,1906. 

In 1906 Seattle residents with soiled clothes had a choice of laundries.  Followers of union opinion, as expressed by the Knights of Labor in their newspaper, could have patronized any of the 35 American laundries in town.  They could also have tried one of 20 Japanese laundries, which the Knights seem not to have placed on their blacklist yet.  Or they could have defied the union and, like many Americans elsewhere, taken their clothes to a Chinese laundry anyway.  There were 25 of those. 











Ten years earlier, the Seattle Chapter of the Knights may have thought they had permanently cleared out all Chinese workers, including laundrymen.  Through an orchestrated effort culminating in the January 1887 anti-Chinese riots, they closed down every Chinese laundry in the city.  The Polk's city business directory for 1887, compiled before the riots, listed 7 out of the 11 laundries in Seattle as Chinese.  However, in the 1888 directory, Chinese laundries had vanished.  All surviving laundries, as required by union principles, were white.


















This situation did not last.  Seattle’s next decade saw a big rise of population and dressing standards, and hence of dirty shirts that needed the washing, starching, and ironing skills of hand laundrymen.  So, in spite of labor opposition, the Chinese came back.   Between 1890 and 1900 not only did the number of laundries in the city double, but almost half were run by Chinamen.  There were also already a few run by Japanese.  To fanatic white racists this must have seemed an ominous development. 

The editors of Polk’s Directory for Seattle had a hard time deciding how to handle Asian ethnic laundries.  Early editions always listed Chinese laundries separately from “mainstream” laundries, except immediately after the 1886 riot when there were no Chinese laundries to list.  In 1892, when ethnic laundries again appeared as a separate category, Chinese and Japanese laundries were lumped together as “Chinese laundries”.   In 1895 the Japanese were moved from the Chinese category to the mainstream, European-American one.  They stayed there until 1906 when the Directory’s compilers, perhaps aware that the Knights and their supporters did not regard Japanese as honorary whites, chose to join both kinds of Asian laundries in a new separate category, “Chinese and Japanese.”  It was not until the late 1940s that all laundries were listed as one category, specifying Chinese and Japanese in brackets after their laundry names.   

Were the Chinese laundries singled out solely for racist reasons or because they also offered a different kind of service?  Did Native Americans or African-Americans operate laundries at that time?  Did Japanese and Chinese laundrymen regard each other as competitors or as allies?  Why did the percentage of both kinds of ethnic laundries decline in 1910 for a few years?  Why did Japanese laundries, which tended to be bigger than the Chinese kind, begin to decline in number as early as the 1930s?
(Data from Polk's and other city directories)
Chinese Laundry, San Francisco, ca. 1880
Laundries
Chinese Fishing in Washington Territory

Like most students of Chinese America, the present editors were aware that Chinese had been fishermen, as well as fish cannery workers, in California and British Columbia in the19th century .  However, we had believed that, due to the opposition of white fishermen, no Chinese at all had engaged in professional fishing in either Oregon or Washington.  Hence we doubted Grant Keddie, archaeology curator at rhe Royal British Columbia Museum, when he told us that there once had been Chinese fishermen at Port Madison on Bainbridge Island, across Puget Sound from Seattle. 

He was right and we were wrong.  The relevant source is George Brown Goode's classic Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States (1887, Part 2, Sect 4, p 47):

"In Washington Territory there are thirty-three Chinamen engaged in fishing.  About Cape Flattery and Quartermaster's Harbor there are twelve. Near Port Madison there are fifteen engaged in drying fish. They also buy from the Indians.  Especial value is set upon flounders but salmon are held by them in small esteem.  At Port Gamble and Ludlow there are six Chinamen who occupy their time in fishing from the wharves.  They catch a large quantity of dogfish."
Were Chinese fishermen environmentally irresponsible?

And a last item from George Goode, reminiscent of the current campaign against the gill nets used by Korean and other Asian fishermen.  Then as now, spokesmen for the U.S. fishing industry were claiming that only unscrupulous foreigners would use such devices.  Goode (see the two preceding items) quotes the Antioch (California) Ledger, July 6 1876:
Chinese Workers in the Columbia River Canneries

Goode's (see the preceding item) description of salmon canning near the mouth of the Columbia is also interesting.  He states that Chinese workers were hired directly by the plant managers, not through labor contractors. 

"On the Columbia River, Oregon, as many as three thousand Chinamen are engaged in the salmon canneries.  After the salmon have been thrown into a heap on the wharf, the Chinamen cut off the heads, tails and fins and remove the viscera. Some Chinamen become so expert at this branch of the work that they can thus clean 1,700 fish per day. After the fish have been washed and cut into sections they are split into three pieces by the Chinamen, one piece being large enough to fill a can, the others smaller. These fragments are placed on tables at which the Chinamen stand ready to pack them. Other Chinamen put on the covers while yet others solder them where this operation is not done by machinery.

"The Chinese thus do the bulk of the work at the salmon canneries. The supervisors, foremen and bookkeepers are, however, white men. The fish cutters if expert receive from $40 to $45 per month. The majority receive $1 per day of eleven hours and work as required; that is, leaving and coming at any hour that may be set, time during which they are actually at work alone being counted. No other race of people could work at such rates and upon such terms as these and in the present state of things, but for Chinese labor, the canneries must needs be closed. They come in April and leave in August and very few return. They are employed directly and without the aid of any agent. [editors' emphasis]

"The Chinese as a rule work very faithfully. They are never engaged in any drunken riot and their work is uniform. On the other hand they are not devoted to their employers. If dissatisfied they are the hardest class in the world to manage. They would use a knife for two cents. If their pay should exceed a day's indebtedness they would very probably resort to foul mean work. They are inveterate gamblers and their wages as earned go from one to another to pay their gaming debts.

"A Chinaman dare not fish in the Columbia it being an understood thing that he would die for his sport, They are only tolerated because they will work for such low wages. Each cannery employs from one hundred to two hundred Chinamen." (Goode 1887, p 48)

Readers will note that in 1887, in spite of what Goode says, $40-45 per month was good pay by the standards of most parts of the world, including the eastern U.S.   For instance, as late as 1910, 63% of full-time male workers in the Chicago stockyards were earning less than $12 per week for similar work, cutting and canning meat (J. C.Kennedy et al., Wages and Family Budgets..., 1914, p 12, Table III}
According to the Kitsap Country Historical Society, the special census of 1883 counted about twenty Chinese at Port Madison who "worked as laundrymen, fishermen, and cooks."  (http://www.secstate.wa.gov/history/cities_detail.aspx?i=35)
Chinese shrimp fishermen in San Fran-
cisco Bay, Harpers Wkly 20 Mar 1875
Were those fishermen Tankas? 

There were a lot of Chinese fishermen in California during the late 19th century: Jack Chen estimates that there were as many as 2000, living in 28+ villages scattered from Tomales Bay in the north to San Diego in the south.  The main reason why no such villages existed north of the Oregon border is that white Northwesterners regularly threatened death to any Chinese who dared to fish in their waters.
"At Punta Alones and Pescadero the Chinese fishermen carry on a fishery for the capture of surf fish (Embiotoca lateralis, Damalichthys vacca &c), and their methods, being characteristically oriental, are of much interest to a stranger The gill nets are placed among the kelp-covered rocks not far from shore and the boat goes around among the nets to frighten the fish into them. The old man plies the oar sculling the boat. The young man stands in the bow with a long pole which be throws into the water at such an angle that it returns to him. The woman sits in the middle of the boat with the baby strapped on her back. She is armed with two drum sticks with which she keeps up an infernal racket by hammering on the seat in front of her. This is supposed to frighten the fish so that they frantically plunge into the nets. Occasionally this is varied by the woman taking the oar and the old man the drum sticks."
As everyone who has seen Hollywood movies about Hong Kong during the British period knows, traditional Tanka women often sculled boats themselves, many with babies strapped on their backs.

Does this mean that at least some of the 19th century immigrants to California were Tankas?  Perhaps.  It is not easy to imagine an ordinary southern Chinese woman of that period sculling a boat, with or without a baby on her back.
Thomas W. Chinn, H. Mark Lai, and Philip Choy, A History of the Chinese in California, A Syllabus.  San Francisco: Chinese Historical
     Society of America, 1969: pp 36-40
Jack Chen, The Chinese of America, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980
George Brown Goode, Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States, Section IV.  Washington: Government Printing Office, 1887
Considering that (1) so many California Chinese made their living by fishing and that (2) virtually all salt-water fishermen in Guangdong province at that time were Tankas (Pinyin: Danjia), members of an outcast community who lived on boats or in specialized fishing villages, it makes sense to ask, were the California fishermen also Tankas?  Or were they former farmers or tradesmen who learned to fish after coming to America?

In 1887, Goode (pp 37-41) offered useful descriptions of Chinese boats and fishing methods.  The boats used by shrimpers in San Francisco Bay were greatly inferior, in Goode's view, to those used in southern China Coast.  He describes them as "long, unwieldy, clumsily-constructed craft," much less seaworthy than those used on the other side of the Pacific "The Chinese fisherman of China is very different from the Chinese fisherman of California and far above him in equipments, habits, and scale of work.  Confident in his seamanship and skill, he dashes around in his lateen-sailed junk in a reckless manner, ...while the latter tugs painfully at his oar."

This may indicate that the California fishermen did not come from a fishing background in China and, hence, that they were not Tankas.  And yet a couple of Goode's descriptions make one wonder.  One is of fishermen near San Diego, some of whom "live entirely on their boats, visiting their houses on land perhaps once a month." That sounds like Tankas.  So does the following description of fishing families, which Goode quotes from a Professor Jordan:
Tanka woman in China, sculling boat with baby on back. From Ballou's Pictorial, 1855








Fishermen
"WORSE THAN SEA LIONS.  Our legislature has attempted to protect the salmon in our rivers by repealing the law protecting seals.  It is asserted that the seals destroy the salmon which come down annually from the upper rivers to salt water.  This may be true but opinions are conflicting.  However that may be, there is an enemy to the salmon far more dangerous than the round eyed seal, and that is the busy Chinaman.  Only a few days since, we watched the modus operandi of catching fish in our San Joaquin [River]. Two Chinese junks or schooners appeared in the river, each holding an end of a remarkably fine net.  The schooners then separate and sweep the waters with the net to the shore.  Fish of all sizes are thus caught and none. not the smallest salmon trout, are ever returned to the water. Those too small for market are thrown on the shore or fed to poultry.  It is said by those familiar with the Chinaman's mode of fishing that these fine nets leave no young salmon behind and are far greater enemies to their propagation than seals." (Goode 1887: p 47)

One of the best decriptions of an early Chinese-American fishing community is in a short story, William Henry Bishop's "Choy Susan" (Atlantic Monthly, August 1885, pp 256-263), about ocean fishermen near Monterey in California.  The story is also notable because its heroine, Choy Susan, may be the first fictional Chinese-American woman to have been depicted not as a hapless victim but as a strong, intelligent, and capable person.
Chinese Fishing Boats off San Francisco, from Harpers Magazine 1883