The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [21]
The Chinese crimps used a variety of methods to fill their quotas. Men in debt, men imprisoned after clan fights, and men eager for work to avoid starvation all served as ideal candidates for entrapment, but for naive youths arriving in coastal cities fresh from the villages, the danger of entrapment was greater still. Some victims were lured into teahouses, regaled with stories of fortunes to be made overseas, and deceived into signing labor contracts for work in South America. When persuasion failed, the crimp resorted to outright abduction, and a British consul observed that even in broad daylight men could not leave their houses “without a danger of being hustled, under false pretenses of debt or delinquency, and carried off a prisoner in the hands of crimps, to be sold to the purveyors of coolies at so much a head, and carried off to sea, never to be heard of.”
Once a person had fallen into the hands of coolie traders, it was almost impossible to escape. The victims were locked in filthy, disease-ridden receiving stations, or barracoons, which the Chinese called zhuzi guan (literally, “pig pens”). Because of its squalor, this trafficking in human bodies was also referred to as “the buying and selling of piglets.” In one zhuzi guan at Macao, slave traders beat gongs and set off fireworks to hide the frantic cries for help. In Amoy, they stripped the men naked and stamped their chests with letters indicating their destination—for instance, “P” for Peru, or “S” for the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii)—then herded the prisoners onto ships and locked them in bamboo cages or chained them to posts. As with the African slave system, the more people a trader could cram into a vessel, the greater his profit for the voyage. During the African slave trade, approximately 15 to 30 percent died during capture or confinement along the African coast, and an additional 10 to 15 percent perished during the journey across the Atlantic Ocean. In the mid-1800s, the death rate of coolies in transit also hovered between 15 and 45 percent.
In 1873 and 1874, the Chinese government sent official delegations to South America to learn the fate of these coolies,1 and the picture that emerged was shocking. Chinese slaves on the Cuban sugar plantations were made to labor twenty-one out of the twenty-four hours, and, fed only about three unripe bananas per meal, many quickly died from hunger and exhaustion. Those who survived a few years often bore scars from repeated whippings. Others (probably those who had tried to escape) had had their limbs maimed or lacerated. Suicides were not uncommon. Some slit their own throats, others ingested opium, still others jumped into wells and drowned.
An equally horrific situation existed in Peru, where the Chinese were put to work on the Chincha Islands. The islands provided a rich source of guano (bird droppings), which Peru exported as fertilizer to Europe and North America. The unfortunate Chinese sent to labor on the guano beds endured both blazing heat and the unbearable stench of fowl excrement. Those too weak to stand worked on their knees, picking out gravel from guano, and guards stood sentinel on the shores to prevent coolies from accessing the only means of freeing themselves from their misery—hurling themselves into the sea.
Fortunately, the vast majority of emigrants were able to protect themselves by working through responsible emigration brokers, called k’o-t’ou or towkay. While these brokers could hardly be characterized as Good Samaritans—viewed in their entirety, their actions were clearly exploitative—they did provide some protection to men eager to emigrate but ignorant about how to protect themselves against the dangers into which they might fall. Broker-sponsored