The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [16]
While the community willingly accepted the idea that the young men who left for Gold Mountain might be gone for many months, if not years, perhaps they knew it was important to cement each man’s ties to his home village. To remind him that the purpose of his trip was to earn money to bring back home, they usually married him off to a local woman and even encouraged him to father a child in the months or even weeks before he left. This step—the creation of a new family—carried a dual purpose: it would obligate him to send back remittances, and would also ensure the preservation of the ancestral bloodline.
A Cantonese nursery rhyme of the era, a simple ditty, expressed the collective longings of entire families:
Swallows and magpies, flying in glee:
Greetings for New Year.
Daddy has gone to Gold Mountain
To earn money.
He will earn gold and silver,
Ten thousand taels.
When he returns,
We will build a house and buy farmland.
That, at least, was the plan.
CHAPTER TWO
America: A New Hope
America in the twenty-first century gleams for many hopeful immigrants; this was no less the case 150 years ago. Less than a century after its colonial rebellion, the young and vibrant country broadcast to the world a raw new culture not necessarily locked into old ways—certainly it contrasted sharply with the ancient mores enforced by petrified bureaucracies in China and Europe. To thousands worldwide who found themselves desperately trapped, without money, property, job, or future, this land of wide-open spaces, seemingly infinite resources, and unsettled territories (ignoring, of course, the long tenure of Native Americans) held out the promise that here was a place where a person could walk away from his or her past and begin again, reinvent himself or herself and give that new self a better life.
Few other countries offered such simple luxury of space—land enough for all, the stories said! Only 23 million people lived in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, compared to 430 million in China, a country similar in physical size: in short, one American for almost twenty Chinese. Only 15 percent of the U.S. population lived in towns of more than 2,500 people. The vast majority lived on small farms or in hamlets, mostly east of the Mississippi River. A person could walk for days in most areas along the East Coast, the most densely populated region in the country, and never lose sight of the woods. And west of the Mississippi stretched largely unpopulated land as far as the eye could see, a sight unmatched in any other temperate zone on the planet.
Compared to Europe’s great cosmopolitan centers, American cities were tiny in size and provincial in character. More than one million lived in Paris, more than two million in London. By contrast, a mere six cities in the United States had more than 100,000 people, and only one—New York—held more than half a million citizens. Even New York, America’s largest metropolis, was hardly what we think of today as urban: in what is now midtown Manhattan, families reared chickens in their yards, while in Brooklyn, hogs and cattle strolled down village streets.
Long before the first wave of Chinese reached California, America had fired the dreams of the poor of Europe, with most coming from the British Isles, others from France, Germany, Italy, and eastern Europe. As the nineteenth century approached its midpoint, more than one million Irish immigrants in flight from their country’s potato famine arrived on America’s shores. To escape the weight of British oppression, the unreasonable rents and taxes levied upon them, and the religious discrimination to which they were subjected in their own land, the Irish had been coming in a constant trickle for decades. But now there was an extra urgency in their migration; almost half the immigrants arriving in America in the 1840s were Irish, to whom America meant