The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [86]
Many soon learned that it would be a hard road to travel if they remained in agriculture. In California, any Chinese who aspired to be landowning farmers found their dreams thwarted by a state law called the 1913 Alien Land Act, which barred aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning land, even if they could afford to buy it.17 Without the right to purchase and own land, some Chinese were forced to become migrant farm laborers. In an oral history interview, émigré Suen Sum provides us a glimpse of this nomadic lifestyle. Arriving in the United States as a paper son, he had settled in Locke, California, a rural community in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta with an all-Chinese population. Drifting from farm to farm, he washed toilets, chopped wood, picked fruit, tended gardens. “The whites treated us Chinese like slaves,” he recalled. Though he possessed some education—the ability to read and write in his native language, and a high school degree from China—he made barely enough money to live on: ten to twenty cents an hour, ten hours a day. At these wages, Suen Sum could not afford to marry, or do much of anything except work. There were days when he lacked money to buy food. “Every year it was the same. You work year after year, from youth to old age, and I still haven’t saved any money.”
Where landownership was allowed, a few notable Chinese prospered in agriculture, but they were generally the exception rather than the rule. On the Hawaiian islands, Lum Yip Kee, a Cantonese émigré, dominated the poi market with his plantations and processing factory, earning the title of “Taro King.” Another Chinese immigrant to Hawaii, Chun Afong, became a millionaire thanks to his sugarcane holdings, his life inspiring the Jack London short story “Chun Ah Chun.” In California, some Chinese profited by leasing land or by processing the harvests faster than their competitors. A few even managed to purchase land, in spite of the 1913 Alien Land Act. Thomas Foon Chew became known as the “Asparagus King” of San Francisco. In Alviso, California, he owned the Bayside Canning Company; the first cannery to preserve green asparagus. It grew into the third largest cannery in the world (after Del Monte and Libby’s). Chin Lung, a near invalid in his Cantonese childhood, began his career by working in the reclamation of the tule lands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta, a job that left his hands and feet bloody and caused him to cry himself to sleep every night. He saved enough money to lease land across the delta, eventually emerging as the “Chinese Potato King” in the region.
For most Chinese immigrants, however, better opportunities could be found in small towns and cities, not in rural America. Over time, Chinese workers left the ranches altogether, their places taken by migrant Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican laborers. Many gravitated toward industries that had become virtual Chinese monopolies.
As always, restaurants remained a popular place to work. By 1920, roughly a quarter of all Chinese workers in the United States worked in restaurants. Most of these were tiny mom-and-pop enterprises, in which the owner worked as cook and dishwasher and his wife—if he had one—as the waitress and cashier. A few Chinese with sufficient capital rented their own buildings, installed expensive Asian decor, and hired battalions of chefs, waiters, and hostesses.
Regardless of the size of the operation, many Chinese sensed that profits could be made not by offering authentic cuisine from their homeland, but instead dishes that looked Chinese but appealed to the American palate. Chow mein (“fried noodles”), for example, was invented when a Chinese cook accidentally dropped a handful of Chinese pasta into a pot of simmering oil. When the crisp, golden-brown result delighted his customers, he added the item to his menu.