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The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [256]

By Root 1466 0
graduate; garment industry workers; Hong Kong wives; isolation of; laundry wives; marriage of. See marriage; merchants’ wives; military roles of; numbers of; as prostitutes. See prostitution; racism against; ratio of Chinese men to; relative freedom of; in San Francisco; scarcity of ; slavery of; stereotypes of; tongs and; upbringing of; as wives; working; during World War II

Women’s Army Corps

Wong, Anna May

Wong, Cy

Wong, Delbert

Wong, Esther

Wong, Fred

Wong, George

Wong, H. K.

Wong, Jade Snow

Wong, Joel

Wong, Mark

Wong, Paul S.

Wong, Victor

Wong Ah So

Wong Kee

Wong Kim Ark

Wong Loy

Wong Shee

Wong Wai

Woo, S. B.

Workingmen’s Party of California

World Trade Organization

World War II

Wu, Chien-Shiung

Wu, David

Wu, Frank

Wu, Jian Xiong

Xerox

Xiao Chen

Yahoo!

Yale University

Yan, Swallow

Yang, Chen-ning

Yang, Jerry

Yang, K. T.

Yang, Linda

Yang, Linda Tsao

Yang Chen-ning

Yee, Tet

Yee Pai

Yeh Ming Hsin

Yick Wo v. Hopkins

Ying, Ouyang

YMCA

Young, Alice

Yu, Albert

Yu, Alice Fong

Yu, Renqiu

Yuan Jialiu

Yuan Shikai

Yung, Judy

Yung Wing

Yu Shuing

Yut Kum

Zhang Deiyi

Zhan Tianyou

Zhong Guoqing

Zia, Helen

1

The Chinese delegation to Cuba led to the signing of a 1879 treaty between China and Spain to end the coolie trade, and the delegation to Peru resulted in treaties that protected the rights of Chinese immigrants in that country, and permitted only immigration on a voluntary basis.

2

The nickname grew out of Chinese claims of being part of a celestial kingdom.

3

Eventually, U.S. engineers would build the Panama Canal in the early twentieth century.

4

Gambling was as addictive for Chinese railroad workers as whiskey among their white counterparts. Chinese gamblers left their mark on Nevada, where casinos credit the nineteenth-century Chinese railroad workers with introducing the game of keno, based on the Chinese lottery game of pak kop piu.

5

Years later, some of the Chinese railroad workers would journey back to the Sierra Nevada to search for the remains of their colleagues. On these expeditions, known as jup seen you (“retrieving deceased friends”), they would hunt for old grave sites, usually a heap of stones near the tracks marked by a wooden stake. Digging underneath the stones, they would find a skeleton next to a wax-sealed bottle, holding a strip of cloth inscribed with the worker’s name, birth date, and district of origin.

6

This license fee was repealed in 1864.

7

Even women who had not been prostitutes were treated by the tongs as property, without rights of their own. In Seattle, a Chinese widow who turned down several proposals of marriage from tong members received an ultimatum: “She would either have to marry one of them men or go back to China,” a neighbor recalled. “This woman came over to me and cried. She said she did not want to go back to China. Her children had been born here and she wanted to stay in the country.” The tongs forced her to return anyway.

8

One Chinese student, Chung Mun-yew, became coxswain for the Yale varsity crew team, helping Yale defeat Harvard in 1880 and 1881 in races along the Thames River. Another student, Liang Tun-yen, led a Chinese baseball team to several victories.

9

These graduates had the good fortune of witnessing the height of America’s industrial and technological revolution during the nineteenth century: during the 1870s, the decade of the mission’s existence, Alexander Graham Bell would invent the telephone, and Thomas Edison the phonograph and electric light bulb.

10

By 1882, the Sun would report that the Chinese “from the fashionable clubs of Mott and Park Street rode... in Chatham Square coaches, carrying a liberal supply of liquor and cigars... accompanied by their Irish wives, many of them young, buxom and attractive.”

11

The exclusionists expanded their reach beyond the continental United States into newly annexed territory. In 1898, the U.S. government applied the exclusion laws to the Chinese community on the Hawaiian islands. While the Hawaiians received U.S. citizenship upon

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