The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [39]
At this time in the nineteenth century, one week’s pay in America was equivalent to several months of wages in China. Thus, from the meager earnings of many Chinese in America emerged a new class of aristocrats in Guangdong province. Thanks to favorable exchange rates, as well as the willingness of their relatives in America to work long, hard hours, many “Gold Mountain families,” as they had now become known, enjoyed a level of prosperity previous generations could only dream of. With those hard-earned foreign wages, they built family homes and summer vacation homes, hired tutors for their children and sent these children to universities. And soon a new mindset emerged and spread—with such rich relatives in America, why work at all?
In Toishan county, for example, where the remittances flowed the heaviest, the once austere Chinese work ethic all but disappeared within a couple of decades. One by one, formerly thrifty Gold Mountain wives who once maintained taut households, or who had painstakingly fashioned handicrafts to sell at the local markets, now delegated their manual tasks to servants. The sons, brothers, and nephews of Gold Mountain men, many of whom had once been industrious farmers, hired laborers to do the work for them, or even neglected their fields and irrigation systems entirely to import food from other regions. It was only a matter of time before Toishan would depend so heavily on foreign rice purchased by foreign remittances that a local wag noted, “when the ships occasionally cannot [sail,] fires in kitchens immediately stop burning.” Within a few decades, Toishan, a region once renowned as one of the most entrepreneurial in China and which had supported itself in the mid-1850s, was fast becoming a welfare state, with family after family living on the backbreaking labor of a Chinese husband working round the clock half a world away.
Even more debilitating than the gradual loss of skills and drive was the acquisition of expensive tastes. For a growing number of Gold Mountain families, the pursuit of pleasure became an obsession. Women acquired rare artwork and jewelry, while men gambled away fortunes, smoked opium, and bought new concubines. A Chinese historian complained that the Toishan region, once “simple, reverential, and thrifty” because of its poor soil, changed drastically after so many of its young men went overseas to earn money: “In a flash, clothing and food tend toward Chinese American, the business of marriage becomes especially contentious, wasteful, and excessively extravagant.”
While some families had the foresight to save, others spent recklessly. Because the flow of money from overseas seemed endless, there was no incentive to question these new lifestyles. Fortunately, not all this money was squandered on private indulgences. Many Gold Mountain families donated generous sums to create new schools, colleges, libraries, and other public works. By the late nineteenth century, a Toishan gazetteer commented that “various charities are everywhere,” observing that vast sums of overseas money had funded local hospitals, lecture halls, orphanages, and land for the poor. But it also noted, “The customs of the people are gradually becoming wasteful. Capping ceremonies [a coming-of-age ritual in which a father honored his son on his twentieth birthday] and wedding banquets required the expenditure of several hundred gold pieces. Fields lie barren and infertile and cannot be restored to their original state.”
And there was another problem, one of even greater concern. Just when the traditional Toishan personal and familial values, derived from Confucianism, were degenerating, social unrest increased. The mid-nineteenth century was a time of spontaneous uprisings congealing into outright rebellions in this part of China. One of those, the Red Turban rebellion, an outgrowth of the Triads’ secret criminal network, plotted the overthrow of the Manchu government. For years, Triad bandits had been terrorizing rural villages,