<p><br/><br/> <br/><br/> <SPAN name="linkch54" id="linkch54"></SPAN></p>
<h2> CHAPTER LIV. </h2>
<p><br/></p>
<p>Of course there was a large Chinese population in Virginia—it is the
case with every town and city on the Pacific coast. They are a harmless
race when white men either let them alone or treat them no worse than
dogs; in fact they are almost entirely harmless anyhow, for they seldom
think of resenting the vilest insults or the cruelest injuries. They are
quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as
industrious as the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy
one does not exist. So long as a Chinaman has strength to use his hands he
needs no support from anybody; white men often complain of want of work,
but a Chinaman offers no such complaint; he always manages to find
something to do. He is a great convenience to everybody—even to the
worst class of white men, for he bears the most of their sins, suffering
fines for their petty thefts, imprisonment for their robberies, and death
for their murders. Any white man can swear a Chinaman's life away in the
courts, but no Chinaman can testify against a white man. Ours is the "land
of the free"—nobody denies that—nobody challenges it. [Maybe
it is because we won't let other people testify.] As I write, news comes
that in broad daylight in San Francisco, some boys have stoned an
inoffensive Chinaman to death, and that although a large crowd witnessed
the shameful deed, no one interfered.</p>
<p>There are seventy thousand (and possibly one hundred thousand) Chinamen on
the Pacific coast. There were about a thousand in Virginia. They were
penned into a "Chinese quarter"—a thing which they do not
particularly object to, as they are fond of herding together. Their
buildings were of wood; usually only one story high, and set thickly
together along streets scarcely wide enough for a wagon to pass through.
Their quarter was a little removed from the rest of the town. The chief
employment of Chinamen in towns is to wash clothing. They always send a
bill, like this below, pinned to the clothes. It is mere ceremony, for it
does not enlighten the customer much.</p>
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<p>Their price for washing was $2.50 per dozen—rather cheaper than
white people could afford to wash for at that time. A very common sign on
the Chinese houses was: "See Yup, Washer and Ironer"; "Hong Wo, Washer";
"Sam Sing & Ah Hop, Washing." The house servants, cooks, etc., in
California and Nevada, were chiefly Chinamen. There were few white
servants and no Chinawomen so employed. Chinamen make good house servants,
being quick, obedient, patient, quick to learn and tirelessly industrious.
They do not need to be taught a thing twice, as a general thing. They are
imitative. If a Chinaman were to see his master break up a centre table,
in a passion, and kindle a fire with it, that Chinaman would be likely to
resort to the furniture for fuel forever afterward.</p>
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<p>All Chinamen can read, write and cipher with easy facility—pity but
all our petted voters could. In California they rent little patches of
ground and do a deal of gardening. They will raise surprising crops of
vegetables on a sand pile. They waste nothing. What is rubbish to a
Christian, a Chinaman carefully preserves and makes useful in one way or
another. He gathers up all the old oyster and sardine cans that white
people throw away, and procures marketable tin and solder from them by
melting. He gathers up old bones and turns them into manure. In California
he gets a living out of old mining claims that white men have abandoned as
exhausted and worthless—and then the officers come down on him once
a month with an exorbitant swindle to which the legislature has given the
broad, general name of "foreign" mining tax, but it is usually inflicted
on no foreigners but Chinamen. This swindle has in some cases been
repeated once or twice on the same victim in the course of the same month—but
the public treasury was no additionally enriched by it, probably.</p>
<p>Chinamen hold their dead in great reverence—they worship their
departed ancestors, in fact. Hence, in China, a man's front yard, back
yard, or any other part of his premises, is made his family burying
ground, in order that he may visit the graves at any and all times.
Therefore that huge empire is one mighty cemetery; it is ridged and
wringled from its centre to its circumference with graves—and
inasmuch as every foot of ground must be made to do its utmost, in China,
lest the swarming population suffer for food, the very graves are
cultivated and yield a harvest, custom holding this to be no dishonor to
the dead. Since the departed are held in such worshipful reverence, a
Chinaman cannot bear that any indignity be offered the places where they
sleep. Mr. Burlingame said that herein lay China's bitter opposition to
railroads; a road could not be built anywhere in the empire without
disturbing the graves of their ancestors or friends.</p>
<p>A Chinaman hardly believes he could enjoy the hereafter except his body
lay in his beloved China; also, he desires to receive, himself, after
death, that worship with which he has honored his dead that preceded him.
Therefore, if he visits a foreign country, he makes arrangements to have
his bones returned to China in case he dies; if he hires to go to a
foreign country on a labor contract, there is always a stipulation that
his body shall be taken back to China if he dies; if the government sells
a gang of Coolies to a foreigner for the usual five-year term, it is
specified in the contract that their bodies shall be restored to China in
case of death. On the Pacific coast the Chinamen all belong to one or
another of several great companies or organizations, and these companies
keep track of their members, register their names, and ship their bodies
home when they die. The See Yup Company is held to be the largest of
these. The Ning Yeong Company is next, and numbers eighteen thousand
members on the coast. Its headquarters are at San Francisco, where it has
a costly temple, several great officers (one of whom keeps regal state in
seclusion and cannot be approached by common humanity), and a numerous
priesthood. In it I was shown a register of its members, with the dead and
the date of their shipment to China duly marked. Every ship that sails
from San Francisco carries away a heavy freight of Chinese corpses—or
did, at least, until the legislature, with an ingenious refinement of
Christian cruelty, forbade the shipments, as a neat underhanded way of
deterring Chinese immigration. The bill was offered, whether it passed or
not. It is my impression that it passed. There was another bill—it
became a law—compelling every incoming Chinaman to be vaccinated on
the wharf and pay a duly appointed quack (no decent doctor would defile
himself with such legalized robbery) ten dollars for it. As few importers
of Chinese would want to go to an expense like that, the law-makers
thought this would be another heavy blow to Chinese immigration.</p>
<p>What the Chinese quarter of Virginia was like—or, indeed, what the
Chinese quarter of any Pacific coast town was and is like—may be
gathered from this item which I printed in the Enterprise while reporting
for that paper:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>CHINATOWN.—Accompanied by a fellow reporter, we made a trip
through our Chinese quarter the other night. The Chinese have built
their portion of the city to suit themselves; and as they keep neither
carriages nor wagons, their streets are not wide enough, as a general
thing, to admit of the passage of vehicles. At ten o'clock at night the
Chinaman may be seen in all his glory. In every little cooped-up, dingy
cavern of a hut, faint with the odor of burning Josh-lights and with
nothing to see the gloom by save the sickly, guttering tallow candle,
were two or three yellow, long-tailed vagabonds, coiled up on a sort of
short truckle-bed, smoking opium, motionless and with their lustreless
eyes turned inward from excess of satisfaction—or rather the
recent smoker looks thus, immediately after having passed the pipe to
his neighbor—for opium-smoking is a comfortless operation, and
requires constant attention. A lamp sits on the bed, the length of the
long pipe-stem from the smoker's mouth; he puts a pellet of opium on the
end of a wire, sets it on fire, and plasters it into the pipe much as a
Christian would fill a hole with putty; then he applies the bowl to the
lamp and proceeds to smoke—and the stewing and frying of the drug
and the gurgling of the juices in the stem would well-nigh turn the
stomach of a statue. John likes it, though; it soothes him, he takes
about two dozen whiffs, and then rolls over to dream, Heaven only knows
what, for we could not imagine by looking at the soggy creature.
Possibly in his visions he travels far away from the gross world and his
regular washing, and feast on succulent rats and birds'-nests in
Paradise.</p>
<p>Mr. Ah Sing keeps a general grocery and provision store at No. 13 Wang
street. He lavished his hospitality upon our party in the friendliest
way. He had various kinds of colored and colorless wines and brandies,
with unpronouncable names, imported from China in little crockery jugs,
and which he offered to us in dainty little miniature wash-basins of
porcelain. He offered us a mess of birds'-nests; also, small, neat
sausages, of which we could have swallowed several yards if we had
chosen to try, but we suspected that each link contained the corpse of a
mouse, and therefore refrained. Mr. Sing had in his store a thousand
articles of merchandise, curious to behold, impossible to imagine the
uses of, and beyond our ability to describe.</p>
<p>His ducks, however, and his eggs, we could understand; the former were
split open and flattened out like codfish, and came from China in that
shape, and the latter were plastered over with some kind of paste which
kept them fresh and palatable through the long voyage.</p>
<p>We found Mr. Hong Wo, No. 37 Chow-chow street, making up a lottery
scheme—in fact we found a dozen others occupied in the same way in
various parts of the quarter, for about every third Chinaman runs a
lottery, and the balance of the tribe "buck" at it. "Tom," who speaks
faultless English, and used to be chief and only cook to the Territorial
Enterprise, when the establishment kept bachelor's hall two years ago,
said that "Sometime Chinaman buy ticket one dollar hap, ketch um two
tree hundred, sometime no ketch um anything; lottery like one man fight
um seventy—may-be he whip, may-be he get whip heself, welly good."</p>
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<p>However, the percentage being sixty-nine against him, the chances are,
as a general thing, that "he get whip heself." We could not see that
these lotteries differed in any respect from our own, save that the
figures being Chinese, no ignorant white man might ever hope to succeed
in telling "t'other from which;" the manner of drawing is similar to
ours.</p>
<p>Mr. See Yup keeps a fancy store on Live Fox street. He sold us fans of
white feathers, gorgeously ornamented; perfumery that smelled like
Limburger cheese, Chinese pens, and watch-charms made of a stone
unscratchable with steel instruments, yet polished and tinted like the
inner coat of a sea-shell. As tokens of his esteem, See Yup presented
the party with gaudy plumes made of gold tinsel and trimmed with
peacocks' feathers.</p>
<p>We ate chow-chow with chop-sticks in the celestial restaurants; our
comrade chided the moon-eyed damsels in front of the houses for their
want of feminine reserve; we received protecting Josh-lights from our
hosts and "dickered" for a pagan God or two. Finally, we were impressed
with the genius of a Chinese book-keeper; he figured up his accounts on
a machine like a gridiron with buttons strung on its bars; the different
rows represented units, tens, hundreds and thousands. He fingered them
with incredible rapidity—in fact, he pushed them from place to
place as fast as a musical professor's fingers travel over the keys of a
piano.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>They are a kindly disposed, well-meaning race, and are respected and well
treated by the upper classes, all over the Pacific coast. No Californian
gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman, under any
circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the East.
Only the scum of the population do it—they and their children; they,
and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise,
for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as well
as elsewhere in America.</p>
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