The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [203]
Perhaps one day we will rediscover a basic truth—that while identity may be shaped and exploited by the powerful, its essence belongs, ultimately, to the individual. America was founded on this concept, but has never achieved its ideal.
Our founding fathers articulated a dream of creating a unique form of government, a democracy that would protect from the tyranny of the majority the rights of the minority, down to the individual. Unfortunately, this dream was, and continues to be, a far cry from the realities of American life. Despite their lofty rhetoric, many of the authors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights owned slaves and did not believe that their privilege of freedom extended to women, minorities, or even non-landowners. And tragically, over the past two centuries, this country—In its dealings with blacks, Native Americans, and other ethnic groups—broke faith with the promise of these founding documents. Consequently, the history of America, like the history of so many other countries, has been one long struggle with group identity, an ongoing struggle, with an ever-unclear outcome.
The subjugation of individual rights to the group, leading inevitably to ultranationalism, has long been a cause and justification for war and genocide across the planet. It was to escape the oppression of group identity—the burden of racial antagonisms, inherited by blood—that thousands of Chinese and other immigrants abandoned the homes of their ancestors, for unknown futures in a strange land. Only time can tell if their journey will have been successful. This will depend entirely on whether America can continue to evolve toward the basic egalitarian concept upon which it was founded—“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” For it was the haunting, elusive dream that such a place really existed that first drew many of the Chinese to American shores.
NOTES
Chapter One. The Old Country: Imperial China in the Nineteenth Century
For nineteenth-century eyewitness descriptions of China, see Mrs. J. F. Bishop (Isabella L. Bird), The Yangtze Valley and Beyond: An Account of Journeys in China, chiefly in the province of Szechuan and among the Man-Tze of the Somo Territory (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1899); Robert Fortune, A Residence Among the Chinese; Inland, on the Coast and at Sea (London: J. Murray, 1856); Robert Fortune, Three Years of Wandering in the Northern Provinces of China, including a visit to the tea, silk and cotton countries: with an account of the agriculture and horticulture of the Chinese, new plants, etc. (London: J. Murray, 1847); John Scarth, Twelve Years in China; The People, the Rebels, and the Mandarins; By a British Resident (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable and Company, 1860); Bayard Taylor, A Visit to India, China and Japan; In the Year 1853 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1862).
13 60 million liang of silver: Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, translated by J. R. Foster (Cambridge, England, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 530-31.
14 Lin confiscated 20,000 chests of opium: Gernet, p. 537.
15 “Should I break his nose or kill him”: Paul Carus, “The Chinese Problem,” Open Court XV (October 1901), p. 608, as cited in Robert McClellan, The Heathen Chinee: A Study of American Attitudes Toward China, 1890-1905 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), pp. 88-89.
17 Guangdong credit crisis in 1847: Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 25.
17 a hundred thousand laborers found themselves unemployed: Ibid., p. 25.
17 a Chinese resident in California wrote a letter: San Francisco