The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [62]
CHANG-HONEY: Sky we po kee bang too, mucho puck ti, rum foo, toodie shee sicke.
Despite these caricatures, the Chinese-Irish marriages seemed to work well. When a New York World reporter told two Irish women they should be married to whites, not Chinese, one retorted that their Chinese husbands were as “white” as anyone, even “whiter” than most of their neighbors. Some Chinese husbands were studying English at night, to move up in American society. A writer for the New York Sun described his visit to a Chinese clubhouse and his exchange with a “young and pretty Irish girl, scarcely over eighteen”:
“Today we had a nice dinner, chickens and such things, and the men and their wives are now smoking and drinking sour wine. The wives are all Irish girls. I’m married.” “What, married to a Chinaman?” “Certainly,” she answered proudly, “married two weeks today.” Then laughing outright she went on to say that the Chinamen were all good “fellows,” that they work hard, go to night school, and are devoted to their wives.10
Originally, many Chinese immigrants did not plan to fall in love with non-Chinese women. Take the example of Charles Sun, who arrived in California in 1878 and later moved to a small Illinois town to work for his cousin, a laundryman called Fook Soo. While delivering freshly washed clothes, Fook Soo met the daughter of a rich white family and maintained a secret, two-year romance with her. When she became pregnant he skipped town and returned to China to marry a native woman. Feeling compassion for his cousin’s abandoned lover (her family immediately disowned her, then grudgingly took her back), Charles Sun offered her financial support, then marriage. Eventually they reared four children together. “It was hard for me to refuse her,” he later told an interviewer. “She was so pitiful! I was really in love with her at that period already, even though I had no intention that I should marry a white woman... [or spend] my whole life in that little town.”
Some Chinese men already had wives back in the old country, because their families had taken the precaution of marrying them off before they left for Gold Mountain. And no doubt some loved the Chinese wives they had left behind, and were loyal enough to send them regular remittance checks, year after year. But in time, some Chinese emigres met other women in America, women who could easily compete for affection with the fading memories of those first wives back in China.
Having a relationship with a non-Chinese woman was often the tipping point in the assimilation process, the point where the emigre first started saying “back in China,” rather than “back home.” Some men who took American girlfriends, and even some who took new wives, continued to send funds back to their China families, and some didn’t. The people in the home villages would carefully make note of this, for though they were thousands of miles apart, they kept tabs on their Gold Mountain men with newsletters and gazetteers. An unspoken agreement soon evolved. As long as the money kept arriving, the village would tolerate infidelity from the men, but not their wives. Even if they wed other women in the United States, the first wives were expected to remain “Gold Mountain widows” if the husband continued to support his children in China. However, if the money flow stopped, the reverse applied—the village was willing to look the other way if the wives chose to remarry.
As the Chinese dispersed across the United States, many left behind mixed-race children. Unfortunately, no systematic studies have traced the lives of these children; indeed, few reliable statistics exist on any of the early Chinese, let alone their descendants. California was the only state in the union to list the Chinese as a separate group in the 1860 U.S. census. In most states, the census counted only whites, blacks, and mulattos, and the Chinese were often classified as either “white” or “black.”
Occasional glimpses of these children can be found in scattered newspaper and magazine accounts. “It is very curious to hear