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By Root 1434 0

Alger legend. Born in 1811 in Siam (today Thailand), sons of a poor ethnic Chinese fisherman, their bizarre appearance was so disturbing to their fellow countrymen that the authorities considered condemning them to death. Later, a British trader discovered the twins and persuaded their family to send them on a world tour, starting in 1829, for a fixed monthly salary. When their contract expired on their twenty-first birthday, the twins went into business on their own. For the next seven years, they made a fortune touring the United States and Europe, rubbing elbows with European royalty and the cream of Western society. In 1839, the twins visited Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and, falling in love with the region, decided to retire from show business and live there permanently. Wholeheartedly adopting southern culture, they ran their own plantation, complete with thirty-three black slaves, and established themselves as two of the wealthiest men in the county. Though legally nonwhites could not become naturalized U.S. citizens under a 1790 statute, the twins managed, nonetheless, to establish themselves as U.S. citizens in their new community, adopting “Bunker” as their official surname to honor one of their friends. The Bunkers also married two local white women and fathered twenty-one children between them. (During the Civil War, two of their eldest sons enlisted in the Confederate army the moment they came of age.)

The Bunkers might have been tolerated, but were also protected by their world fame and especially by their great wealth. Their neighbors seemed to have viewed them as friends and contributors to the community; being only two, not an immigrant group, they posed no threat to established ways. Their ownership of black slaves reinforced the notion that, however odd they looked, they were of one mind with their fellow plantation owners. Had they been forced to endure the brutal realities of being industrial wage-earners or small farmers in nineteenth-century America, they might not have been so kindly disposed toward those who lived so splendidly off the labor of others.

Such was the America the first wave of Chinese immigrants entered. If the Chinese were not part of the focus of the debate on racial politics, it was probably because there were simply too few of them to arouse much fear and suspicion. Their time would come.

CHAPTER THREE

“Never Fear, and You Will Be Lucky”: Journey and Arrival in San Francisco

Americans are very rich people. They want the Chinaman to come and make him very welcome. There you will have great pay, large houses, and food and clothing of the finest description. You can write to your friends or send them money at any time and we will be responsible for the safe delivery. It is a nice country, without mandarins or soldiers. All alike; big man no larger than little man. There are a great many Chinamen there now, and it will not be a strange country. China god is there, and the agents of this house. Never fear, and you will be lucky.

—A nineteenth-century circular translated into the Chinese language, posted in the Canton region by a Hong Kong brokerage office

Flush with hope, dazzled by tales of immediate riches, the Chinese who dreamed of what they would find in California were not warned that many grave dangers lay between Guangdong and Gold Mountain. For the unsuspecting, the first danger—and perhaps the worst—lay waiting just a few miles away, in Guangdong’s own busy port city, Canton.

In Chinese the term k’u-li literally means “hard strength.” Foreigners living in China often employed it to describe household help or menial Chinese laborers, but the term would take on a different coloration in the 1840s, when European capitalists experienced labor shortages on colonial plantations in regions like South America and the Caribbean. With the help of unscrupulous Chinese recruiters, or crimps, as they were called, a devil’s bargain was struck to replace African slave labor with Asian slave labor. Coastal cities, such as Amoy, Macao, Hong Kong, and Canton, served as