The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [50]
Originally known as Lalu Nathov, Polly Bemis was born in 1853 to an impoverished farm family in China. After a severe crop failure and a raid on the village by outlaws, her father was forced to sell Polly to the outlaws for two bags of seed. Resold in the United States for $2,500, she became the slave and concubine of Hong King, a Chinese saloon owner in Warren, Idaho, until Charlie Bemis won her in a poker game. An educated man from a prominent New England family, Bemis granted Polly her freedom. She soon repaid his kindness: when a miner shot Bemis in the face, Polly performed surgery with a razor blade to save his life. After his recovery, Bemis asked her to marry him, and they spent the rest of their lives as ranchers at the bottom of a canyon on the Salmon River in Idaho. Polly Bemis, who used her knowledge of Chinese herbs to nurse sick children, became a much-beloved neighbor in the community.
Yet other women were never able to escape the world of prostitution. There are stories of women rushing into marriage to escape the brothel, only to discover themselves wedded to a new pimp. Their desperation for a better life made them easy prey for unscrupulous men with no qualms about forcing them back into the sex trade. Some former prostitutes married honest, loving men, only to be abducted by gangsters in their husbands’ absence. According to Donaldina Cameron, highbinders would hunt down and kidnap these married women even after they had moved to remote rural villages.7
In time, those who unable to leave the profession became outcasts, scorned by Chinese and whites alike. When they grew old and sick, many were treated like human refuse and simply thrown out onto the streets. The hospitals of the American West would not help them—white San Francisco physicians lobbied to exclude Chinese prostitutes from the hospitals—and few could afford the services of Chinese herbalists. Clan associations and the Six Companies established nursing facilities for former prostitutes, but they were tiny, dark, squalid rooms furnished with a few straw mats, referred to by some as “death-houses.” A visitor to one of these facilities described entering through a low door into a room dimly lit by a Chinese nut-oil lamp, and finding “stretched on the floor of this damp, foul-smelling den... four female figures . . . victims of the most fearful... loathsome disease.”
And what of those Chinese women who came to America as wives? In China, society mandated that a married woman’s life centered on the family, serving them from cradle to grave. According to one school of ancient Chinese philosophy, the “Three Obediences” dictated that she first obey her father, then her husband after marriage, and finally her eldest son when widowed.
Because the average worker could not afford to support a family in the United States, most Chinese women emigrants who were not prostitutes were wives of merchants. Most had grown up in modest but respectable families in small villages near Canton. They tended to be middle-class, because upper-class families would not allow their daughters to marry outside China, and because many Chinese merchants in the United States considered working-class women beneath them.
Having been raised in a protected, insular household, the typical merchant’s wife had never ventured far beyond her village until journeying to the United States. Even more problematic was the fact that the middle and upper classes in China practiced the nine-hundred-year-old tradition of bandaging a young girl’s