President Nixon gamely tries out his chopsticks at a banquet given in his honor, 1972. Credit: White House Photo Collection.

They Might Be Giants

China and the U.S.

10.09.15

Americans have traded with China since the earliest days of the Republic. During the colonial era and for early Americans, China was a source of luxury goods like tea, porcelain, and silk. For some of their descendants, it was the destination for an illicit and lucrative trade in opium. Later, Chinese immigrants helped to build the American West. But the relationship between the two countries has often been fraught, with each side fearing that the other is seeking the upper hand. In this episode, Brian, Ed and Peter explore the long and often turbulent history between the two countries, now the top economies in the world. How does our past history with China color our present relationship?

China; U.S.-China relations

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BRIAN: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh. Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived for his recent state visit with some contentious topics on the dock.

NEWS ANCHOR: It’s his first as China’s leader, and comes amid growing tension over cyberhacking, and military moves in the South China Sea. Xi will–

BRIAN: Tensions between the world’s two biggest economies are nothing new. Back in the early 19th century, troubles centered on the American role in smuggling drugs to China.

JOHN HADDAD: You could say it ripped the fabric of Chinese society.

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BRIAN: Today on BackStory, the history of US-China relations, from secret Cold War diplomacy in the 1970s, to conjoined twins who challenged America’s black and white notions of race in the 1830s.

JOE ORSER: The Virginia assemblymen ultimately decided they were slaves. And they said, we’re Chinese, we’re not some menial piece of property.

BRIAN: Coming up on BackStory, the tumultuous history of US-Chinese relations. Don’t go away.

PETER: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory, with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, and I’m here with Peter Onuf.

PETER: Hey, Brian.

BRIAN: And Ed Ayers is with us.

ED: Hey, guys. In 1880, Americans learned how the United States collapsed– at least in the pages of one novel, Last Days of the Republic.

GORDON CHANG: So the book says that it is actually for readers in the 20th century who want to know how the American republic fell in the 19th century.

ED: This is Gordon Chang, a historian at Stanford University. He says that the book’s author, Pierton Dooner, pinned the country’s fictional downfall on one group of people, the Chinese.

Like all good propaganda, Dooner started with some actual facts. Many Chinese immigrants had indeed begun arriving on US shores in the 1840s and 1850s, but he then presented an apocalyptic vision of what this influx of Chinese people meant for the country.

GORDON CHANG: In order to insert themselves into American life, they become citizens by the hundreds of thousands. They become voting members of the republic, and use this not to strengthen the republic, but to gather power for themselves first in the West Coast. And then these hundreds of thousands, if not now millions of Chinese who are in the country, that they now rise up to become soldiers.

ED: In the ensuing chaos, Dooner described these Chinese invaders waging war against upstanding Anglo-Americans.

GORDON CHANG: And there are these massive slaughters and military suppressions of those Americans who rise up to try to stop this invasion.

ED: By the end of the 1880s, Dooner wrote, the conquerors had hoisted the flag of the imperial dragon of China over the nation’s capital.

GORDON CHANG: The last sentence of The Last Days of the Republic reads, “thus passed away the glory of the Union of states, at the dawn of the 20th century.”

ED: Now, clearly Dooner was extreme in his racial views. But Last Days of the Republic is just one example of Yellow Peril literature, which flourished in the late 19th century.

GORDON CHANG: This Yellow Peril genre has certain things in common. So the Chinese are racialized in these various dimensions. Biologically, they are presented as sort of a different sort of species, in that the Chinese are able to survive and thrive on rice, that they’re sort of homogeneous, whereas decent Americans are factious, and individualistic, and moral. So this literature does both a sort of characterization of the Chinese, but also a commentary on whites, or Americans, and how they have to wake up to this threat.

ED: That fictional message had real world consequences. These Yellow Peril books fed the nativist backlash against Chinese immigrants. Politicians eventually passed laws restricting Chinese immigration to the United States. And though the overt racism of Yellow Peril literature is a thing of the past, Chang says that those underlying attitudes have not entirely disappeared.

NEWS ANCHOR: $300 billion, that’s an estimate of how much American business is losing. Intellectual property theft every year, most of it blamed on the Chinese.

DONALD TRUMP: I think you have to do something to rein in China. Today, they’re making it absolutely impossible for the United States to compete.

NEWS ANCHOR: Good news for China on Monday, but bad news for us. The country’s economy power is likely to surpass the United States in less than two decades, meaning Asia could overtake North America in–

GORDON CHANG: There is a sense today, I think, that China imperils the republic. Now, there’s no doubt that China is a powerful, and significant, and growing factor in the world. But in my view, the kind of response that many have to this taps into or draws from, or is unconsciously inspired by some of these longstanding fears and worries.

PETER: President Obama hosted a state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping last month. News commentators highlighted mounting tensions over China’s cyberattacks and military maneuvers in the South China Sea. But others noted that Xi’s presence at the White House indicated that the world’s two biggest economies have much to gain by cooperating in economics and trade. Xi noted this more benign China also has a very long history in America.
BRIAN: So today on the show, we’re going to untangle those twin strands in the history of US-Chinese relations. We’ve got stories of Chinese conjoined twins navigating the shifting racial politics of 19th century America, and of the secret diplomacy that paved the way for President Nixon’s historic trip to Beijing in 1972. We’ll also try some mouth watering cuisine that’s a direct descendant of 19th century laws restricting Chinese immigration.

PETER: But first, we’re going to dive into the contentious history of trade between China and the United States. In the 18th century, luxury goods like Chinese porcelain and silk could be found in homes around the 13 colonies. Chinese tea even played a starring role in the American Revolution.

JOHN HADDAD: The very tea that was dumped into Boston Harbor in the 1770s was tea from China, brought by the British East India Company.

PETER: This is historian John Haddad. He says trade with China became even more important after the revolution. That’s why a group of Yankee merchants set sail for the port of Canton in 1784. Now, the Chinese were more than happy to sell teat and porcelain, but they weren’t interested in buying anything from the Americans. British traders had run into the same problem.

JOHN HADDAD: When the Emperor gave his famous response to King George III, saying you don’t have anything that we want, he was in fact incorrect. It turns out that the world did have products that the Chinese wanted to buy.

PETER: Actually, just one product– opium. Even though this highly addictive drug was illegal in China, the British had been smuggling opium in from India since the early 1700s. American merchants wanted in on the action, so they found their own source of opium in Turkey, and started smuggling it into China in the 1820s.

JOHN HADDAD: It brought devastation to Chinese society. You could say it ripped the fabric of Chinese society, because so many people who might otherwise have had productive lives as fathers, or as workers of some sort were instead spending their time and spending their money not on nutrition, not on raising their families. They were instead wasting their money and their time, servicing their opium addictions.

PETER: So there are millions of people involved, both users and then the people who depended on users.

JOHN HADDAD: Now, there were also missionaries stationed in Canton who were outraged by the opium trade. And you can understand why. They were trying to sell the Gospel to the Chinese, and having a pretty tough time doing so because the Chinese, the missionaries said, associated Western civilization with the Bible, and with opium.

PETER: So play it out. Tell us what happens in this conflict among traders and missionaries, and what the long term impact is on China itself.

JOHN HADDAD: Now I should say here first that China was closed at this time in its history. By closed, I mean that a European or American ship could not sail to China and weigh anchor at any Chinese port. You could go to one and only one place, and that was Canton, China. And this was how China tried to maintain control over its foreign trade, and any ideas that foreigners might bring.

Well, how did it all resolve? The opium crisis grew worse and worse, and something had to be done. Now, this is– well, there had been little crackdowns previously, but none of them had been successful, and foreigners usually laughed at them and said, well, the status quo will return shortly. And they were always right. This time, though, China meant business.

PETER: In 1839, the Chinese cracked down on British and American opium smugglers, confiscating and destroying millions of dollars worth of drugs. Chinese officials also set up a blockade of Canton, so no ships could enter or leave the harbor. The lucrative China trade came to a halt. China said if the foreigners promised to stop selling opium, legal foreign trade could resume. The Americans quickly agreed.

JOHN HADDAD: The British were another story, however. And they sent word to Parliament and to the Queen that injustices had happened in China, and England responded by sending state of the art warships. And we know what’s coming. The Opium War is what’s coming. This force, when it arrived, had its way with Chinese forces. England won the war, and a treaty was signed called the Treaty of Nanking. And the Treaty of Nanking opened up China to British trade.

PETER: So John, technically opium is still illegal. And this is an illegal trade, isn’t it?

JOHN HADDAD: Yes, the opium trade would continue as usual, but now China had lost the will and the resolve to try to block it. So opium trading becomes much more common after the Opium War than before.

PETER: Right. And our righteous Americans come back and rejoin the trade?

JOHN HADDAD: They did. And they resumed opium trading. China has stopped cracking down on opium, and is now looking the other way. China is weakened, at this point.

PETER: The people who are promoting morality, of course, are the missionaries. We’ve left them to the side for quite awhile, now. They were cheering on that anti-opium initiative, but it failed. So how does this play out?

JOHN HADDAD: The missionaries found themselves in an interesting position. They abhorred the traders– always did, because the traders brought opium. They also were angry at the Chinese government for remaining closed, and they desperately wanted for China to open up to missionary activity. So their view on the Opium War was that it was an unjust war, yet they were in favor of those British gunboats blowing China open because they wanted access to Chinese souls. So missionaries were in this strange position of being against the purpose of the Opium War, to protect the opium trade, but rooting for the British, because they viewed the British as the hand of God, a battering ram to open up China to evangelical activity.

PETER: So the bottom line is that Christianity followed the opium trade, that that was the vector. That’s what opened China, and–

JOHN HADDAD: That was the–

PETER: –missionaries wouldn’t say that, but they’re free riding on the diffusion of opium, that vigorous trade.

JOHN HADDAD: Yes.

PETER: Well, John, I get the impression that the Opium Wars were a tremendously important turning point in Chinese history.

JOHN HADDAD: The Opium War really initiated a new phase in Chinese history, and a sad one. It was a phase of– a 100 year phase of humiliation for the Chinese, during which the Ching dynasty had been knocked off its pedestal. And that means that both Chinese civilians and foreigners alike both viewed it as weak, and in decay. The end of the Opium War, China must now put down internal rebellions that challenged the Ching dynasty’s sovereignty.

And foreigners see that they can bully China, that they can set up little fiefdoms, if you will, in the treaty ports, and then gradually expand their advantage. So we begin the stage where China is not in control of its own territory, as foreigners grow in influence.

PETER: And you could say that opium– penetration into China anticipated that. How do Chinese people remember this horrible century you’re describing?

JOHN HADDAD: In our American memory, we don’t tend to think much about it. What most Americans–

PETER: What memory?

JOHN HADDAD: Yeah, what memory? Now, you shift to the Chinese person. To many of them, especially those who study history– and most of them do– the Opium War and the opium addiction crisis, it’s as if these things happened yesterday. And Chinese people today still feel acutely the humiliation that began with the Opium War.

They still think about that today, which is why when you turned on your televisions in 2008 and you watched the Olympics, you could probably see, even if you didn’t know much Chinese history, that China was saying through the Olympics and that elaborate opening ceremony, we have arrived. We are back to being the Middle Kingdom, the center of the world.

PETER: John Haddad, Professor of American Studies and Popular Culture at Penn State University, Harrisburg is the author of America’s First Adventure in China, Trade, Treaties, Opium, and Salvation. John, thanks for joining us today. That was a terrific interview.

JOHN HADDAD: Peter, I enjoyed every minute.

PETER: Earlier we heard from Gordon Chang. He’s a historian at Stanford University, and the author of Fateful Ties, a History of America’s Preoccupation with China.

PETER: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. We’re reflecting on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to America with an hour on the history of US-China relations. We’re going to turn from America’s history in China to a story of early Chinese immigrants in the US.

ED: In the 1830s, few Americans would ever have seen a Chinese person in the flesh, with two prominent exceptions. The headlines said it all.

NEWSPAPER REPORTER: The Siamese twins have arrived in New York, on their way to Boston.

NEWSPAPER REPORTER: Those human anatomical wonders have again commenced to exhibit themselves about the country.

NEWSPAPER REPORTER: They are united to each other by a ligature, or band about 3 and 1/2 inches in length, and 8 in circumference.

NEWSPAPER REPORTER: They have adopted the American style of dress in everything except the hair, which is 3 feet in length, and worn by them braided in the Chinese style.

NEWSPAPER REPORTER: They are the original Siamese twins, and no humbug.

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JOE ORSER: In 1829, there were two brothers, conjoined twins, who were brought to the United States from the country of Siam, which we today know as Thailand. And they were placed on exhibit. And the stage name that they used was The Siamese Twins.

ED: This is historian Joe Orser. He says that the twins, named Chang and Eng, made a living traveling from town to town. Sometimes they performed acrobatics. Other times, they simply sat in a parlor for an intimate chat with customers. But they always displayed the band of flash that connected them just above the waist.

From the beginning, Americans had medical and philosophical questions about the conjoined twins, but much of the talk focus on their race. Though born in Siam, the twins were ethnically Chinese. And when they arrived in the US in 1829, Americans didn’t know what to make of them. Where they black or white, slave or free?

Orser says that when the twins took their act to Virginia in 1832, state lawmakers felt compelled to debate their status.

JOE ORSER: The Virginia assemblymen ultimately decided that they were slaves. They were owned by this American sea captain, Abel Coffin, who had brought them over from Siam to the United States. And this offended the twins to no end. The way that they respond to this was by turning to their Chineseness. They’re from a country, Siam, which had slavery, a form of slavery in which the Chinese were exempt. And so they said, we’re Chinese, we’re not some menial, low level piece of property.

ED: By the end of the 1830s, Chang and Eng had made enough money exhibiting themselves to buy some property in rural North Carolina. Orser says the twins were quite shrewd about American racial politics. They realized that North Carolinians, like Virginians, viewed the world in terms of black and white. So Chiang and Eng set out to prove their whiteness to their Southern neighbors.

JOE ORSER: They owned land. They married white sisters, at a time when miscegenation, marriage between races, was prohibited. They owned– it varied from as few as 18 to as many as 30 slaves.

ED: And the twins didn’t stop there. In the 1840 Census, they were listed as Chang and Eng Bunker, two white brothers. They became naturalized citizens, a legal status that was only available to free white men at the time. Their children, all 21 of them, were also classified as white on the Census.

JOE ORSER: And each had a son fight for the South, for the Confederacy.

ED: The rural community accepted them. In the words of one neighbor, Chang and Eng Bunker were Southerners true and true. But outside their North Carolina hometown, the ground was shifting. Tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants began arriving in the West after the California Gold Rush of 1849. Those Chinese certainly weren’t accepted by their white neighbors.

JOE ORSER: And people began to write letters to editors and saying, well, golly I heard that in San Francisco Chinese have been prohibited from testifying in court, from enjoying any benefits of citizenship. In fact, they’re being barred from citizenship. What about the twins? And so increasingly starting in the 1850s, you have the Chinese presence in America coloring the way that Americans think about Chang and Eng.

ED: By the 1870s, as the nativist backlash against Chinese immigrants intensified, the brothers’ hard won assimilation started slipping away. Their children found doors that had been open to their fathers were now closing.

JOE ORSER: When some of Chang and Eng’s sons start to move west in Missouri and in Kansas, in official records people begin to mark them as Chinese, which is really curious considering they had never been marked thus at home in North Carolina.

ED: Chang and Eng died in 1874, within a few hours of each other. They were 62 years old. They were still listed as white on the Census. But their obituaries, published in newspapers across the country, showed how much of American attitudes toward Chinese had changed over the course of their lifetime.

NEWSPAPER REPORTER: Both were ignorant, and had intelligence that scarcely rose above low cunning.

NEWSPAPER REPORTER: Their faces were peculiarly repelling, yellow in hue and closely resembling those of the Chinese cigar sellers of Chatham Street.

JOE ORSER: When they die, the most vile things are written about them. And so by the end of their life, there’s just not as much room to maneuver. Kind of this iron cage has descended on the family, and they are no longer able to situate themselves in ways that are beneficial to them.

ED: When they first arrived in America, Chang and Eng had wanted to be identified as Chinese. But there was no clear place for Chinese immigrants in America’s racial hierarchy. By the time they died, there was a very clear place for them. They could only be Chinese.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Joe Orser helped us tell that story. He’s a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, and the author of The Lives of Chang and Eng, Siam’s Twins in 19th Century America.

PETER: We’ve been talking today about Chinese history in the US. But now let’s head just South of the California border to the large, bustling city of Mexicali, Mexico. If you ask people here about the city’s most notable regional cuisine, they won’t say street tacos or mole– they’ll say Chinese food. Mexicali has something like 200 Chinese restaurants. Why? The answer has a lot to do with United States history, and a law passed well over a century ago. Reporter Lisa Morehouse has the story.

LISA MOREHOUSE: People have eaten Chinese food in Mexicali, Mexico for more than 100 years. Today, one of the oldest and grandest restaurants is called El Dragon. The food’s unique to this region– Chinese with some Mexican flavors, explains co owner George Lim.

GEORGE LIM: This new dish, it’s a rachera, which is like the best meet for tacos.

LISA MOREHOUSE: Beef with asparagus and black bean sauce. While the meat’s clearly Mexican–

GEORGE LIM: And asparagus could be both Chinese and Mexican. But the sauce, the black bean, that’s Chinese.

LISA MOREHOUSE: It was mostly Chinese immigrants who first settled Mexicali, more than a century ago. We’ll explain why in just a minute. At that time, Chinese cooks used Mexican ingredients like chilis, jicama, and certain cuts of meat because they were the only things available. Now, Chinese food has such a culinary legacy in Mexicali that it makes better business sense for George Lim to commute south across the border from his home in California every day for work. Here, he brings out another hybrid dish.

GEORGE LIM: There’s this egg roll actually this cook invented. It’s this Chinese egg roll, but he makes it with shrimp, cilantro, and Philadelphia cheese.

LISA MOREHOUSE: It seems like it shouldn’t be good, but it is. And this is the only place I’ve ever seen avocado and fried rice. Food like this can be found in establishments all over this region.

ROBERT CHAO ROMERO: The restaurants that you see now are the remnant of the Chinese population that used to fill the US-Mexico borderlands in Mexicali, and in Baja California.

LISA MOREHOUSE: This is Robert Chao Romero, a professor at UCLA. He teaches in both the Chicano Studies and Asian American Studies departments.

ROBERT CHAO ROMERO: Chinese started to go to Mexico after the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in the United States.

LISA MOREHOUSE: To understand that, we have to go back to the 19th century. Chinese immigrant laborers began arriving in California in the 1840s and ’50s for the Gold Rush. They helped build the Transcontinental Railroad and establish agriculture and fishing industries in the West.

ROBERT CHAO ROMERO: It’s kind of a sad history. White workers in California did not like Chinese immigrant laborers. They felt that the Chinese worked for really cheap wages, and they couldn’t compete. And so there was an organized anti-Chinese movement.

LISA MOREHOUSE: So in 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting any immigration of Chinese laborers.

ROBERT CHAO ROMERO: The Chinese were the first ethnic group ever in US history to be singled out and banned from the United States.

LISA MOREHOUSE: The Exclusion Act didn’t stop immigration, it just redirected it.

ROBERT CHAO ROMERO: Tens of thousands of Chinese went to Mexico, and eventually got smuggled into the US. So the Chinese invented undocumented immigration from Mexico, smuggling with coyotes–

LISA MOREHOUSE: Guides hired to lead people across the border.

ROBERT CHAO ROMERO: –and smuggling with false papers, in boats and in trains, and all those kinds of things. The infrastructure for that was all invented by the Chinese.

LISA MOREHOUSE: In fact, today’s border patrol grew out of what was called the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors. These were men on horseback, then cars, and even boats, who monitored the border from Texas to California, to keep the Chinese out. Many Chinese immigrants settled in Mexicali, becoming grocers, merchants, and restaurant owners. Others did smuggle across, and made lives in the US, including Imperial County, California.

Mr. Gee.

EDMUND GEE: Hello.

LISA MOREHOUSE: Hi, I’m Lisa.

This history played out over generations in Edmund Gee’s family. I meet Gee at his house in the town of Brawley, California. He’s a leader in the Chinese-American community.

EDMUND GEE: I’m the president of the Imperial Valley Benevolent Association, for many, many years.

LISA MOREHOUSE: His family’s relationship with the US started three generations back.

EDMUND GEE: Great grandpa came over–

LISA MOREHOUSE: With a few others from his village in southern China.

EDMUND GEE: –then after that, they all tried to come across through Mexico, especially to the Rio Grand River. Sometimes the water is dry, they can walk, do a little swimming over to the United States. He’s one of them. Unfortunately, he went and got caught in El Paso. They had to send him back.

LISA MOREHOUSE: But years later, in the ’30s, Gee’s father made it, probably as a paper son, which means he used fake documents to come through San Francisco, finding its way to Imperial County where he started Working at a restaurant. Edmund Gee ran a grocery store here for 43, years and he’s co-owned a couple of Chinese restaurants in Imperial County.

About 15 miles away in the city of El Centro, the Fortune Garden Restaurant is packed. The Salcedo family sits in a coveted booth almost drooling, as they wait for their food to arrive. They drive over an hour, a couple times a month, just to eat their favorite dishes.

SALCEDO SISTER 1: The salt and pepper fish. It’s like rare fish.

SALCEDO SISTER 2: Sort of like a Baja style fish. But yeah, with the–

SALCEDO SISTER 1: Lots of kinds of peppers, and the chili peppers, and onion, and stuff like that to us.

SALCEDO SISTER 2: To us, it’s like a fusion of Mexican ingredients with the Chinese. It’s very different than if you go to any other Chinese, Americanized Chinese restaurant.

LISA MOREHOUSE: I leave the Salcedo the family as they carefully mix Chinese mustard, a little spicy sriracha and ketchup into a special dipping sauce for barbecue pork.

JENISSA ZHOU: When they order, they don’t say barbecue pork. They say carnita– carnita colorada.

LISA MOREHOUSE: This is restaurant owner Jenissa Zhou, who came to the US from southern China. Her husband Carlos is for Mexicali, Mexico, where he also worked in Chinese restaurants. The food doesn’t look exactly like what Zhou knows from back in China.

JENISSA ZHOU: You can see every table, they have lemon. Chinese food, we don’t eat lemon, right?

LISA MOREHOUSE: And the kitchen looks different, too. Here, the cooks speak to each other in Cantonese, but the waiters speak Spanish and English– one simple snapshot of how history has shaped the people and cuisine in three different countries.

[SPEAKING SPANISH]

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PETER: Lisa Morehouse is a reporter based in San Francisco. Shed produced that story through a fellowship at Hedgebrook, a residency for women writers. Vicki Lee helped with recording and translating.

This is BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today, we’re exploring the long history of US-China relations.

BRIAN: On July 3, 1986, President Ronald Reagan gave out 12 medals to outstanding immigrants. This was at a ceremony celebrating the Centennial of the Statue of Liberty. Three of those metals went to people of Chinese descent, architect IM Pei, computer scientist An Wang, and astronaut Franklin R. Chang Diaz.

Now, we’ve been hearing a lot today about the negative stereotypes of the Chinese, especially in the 19th century when the images of the Yellow Peril were widespread. But the professionals receiving those awards in 1986 fell into a more recent American stereotype of Chinese and Asians in general, those who excel in fields of science and engineering. They’re the immigrants the US wants, the quote, “model minorities.”

MADELINE HSU: The idea is that people are able to come as immigrants.

BRIAN: This is Madeline Hsu, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin.

MADELINE HSU: And by dint of hard work, of focusing on your education, on focusing on your work and career, you eventually will be able to succeed and attain markings of middle class success. And so all of these things we associate and we see very visibly among Asian Americans.

BRIAN: How did Chinese-Americans go from being seen as a threat to democracy to a model minority? The answer actually goes back to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act we heard about earlier in the show. That law didn’t exclude all Chinese. Certain classes of people were exempt. Chief among them were students. In the 1870s, before the Exclusion Act, both countries encourage Chinese students to study in America.

MADELINE HSU: The idea behind students is that you can train them and that you can teach them, and these are the ones who are the most readily acculturable to the United States, the ones best positioned to appreciate the benefits of American civilization. And when you send them back to China, they are also in a position to influence other Chinese to have similarly benign and even favorable views of the United States.

BRIAN: Tell me more about the Chinese government’s stake in all of this.

MADELINE HSU: So from very early on there is great attention to practical fields. By the 1870s, China, which was a severely declining power, realized that it needed to start learning practical skills, practically technologies from more powerful countries. And in 1872, the Chinese government pioneers an international education program called the Chinese Educational Mission, which ran for about a decade. It sent about 120 young men to study in New England, with the hopes that they would then come back to China and serve in the government, and help the Chinese government to modernize and to self-strengthen. Many of these young men are instrumental in helping China develop its earliest railroads, telegraphs, mining systems.

BRIAN: Chinese students continued attending American universities well into the 20th century. Many of them returned to China, as America’s restrictive immigration laws required. But Hsu says the idea of the model minority slowly emerged over the decades, from Chinese students who stayed in the US.

For many of them, geopolitics reclassified them. Take the case of architect IM Pei, who arrived in 1935 and was later honored by President Reagan.

MADELINE HSU: IM Pei comes to the United States with every intention eventually of going back to China, because he comes from a very elite family, his father is a banker. He goes to University of Pennsylvania, MIT, also Harvard University. What happens to IM Pei, though, is that he gets caught up in the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, and then the Chinese Civil War, which turns him from a student into a refugee. And by 1948, it has become clear that China will become Communist.

And the US government is faced with this question of what to do about these students who by the old set of regulations are supposed to go back to China. And at this junction the United States realizes, because of its own very restrictive and impractical immigration laws which discriminate on the basis of race and national origin, that it needs to make some sort of provision for these very valuable Chinese workers and intellectuals.

And IM Pei decides to get his citizenship in the United States in 1955, and is able to become very successful across this time period helping to demonstrate the usefulness of people with high levels of education, and certain kinds of work experiences, and work capacities. He also was taken as something of a civil rights symbol. In 1964, he is chosen by Jackie Kennedy to design JFK’s Memorial Library. And this was considered a great breakthrough, in terms of the integration of Chinese-Americans and Asian Americans, more generally.

BRIAN: In your own personal experience, have you come to know Chinese Americans who feel the kind of pressure that goes with the quote, “model minority” stereotype?

MADELINE HSU: Oh, all the time. As a high school student, my physics teacher was disappointed that I didn’t excel more in physics, but I really wasn’t that interested in physics. So I actually look like a model minority, but I’m not a model minority because my parents’ generation, there are already several people with graduate degrees. My grandfather’s generation, my grandfather was a famous intellectual. And so if you see me as a highly attaining, well educated professional in the United States, I’m just sort of staying even.

And of course, it’s a little bit tricky because after all, it’s not as terrible a thing to have this expectation that you are smart and do well in school, but it is a problem if you aren’t in fact doing that well. We also have minority populations of Asian Americans who are not of this kind of background.

BRIAN: Well, thank you for joining us on BackStory today.

MADELINE HSU: Thank you for having me.

BRIAN: Madeline Hsu teaches history at the University of Texas Austin. Her book is called The Good Immigrants, How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority.

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The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943. Two decades later, the Hart-Celler Act abolished the immigrant quota system based on national origin. The Hart-Celler Act ushered in a huge wave of immigration, especially from Asian countries. But because the Cold War was in full swing, loosening immigration laws didn’t do much to reduce tensions between the US and China.

PETER: Every once in awhile we like to take questions from our dedicated listeners who write to us on Facebook, Twitter, and our website. Today we got a call from Eric, all the way from Xiamen in Fujian Province, China. Eric, welcome to the show.

ERIC: It’s a pleasure. Thank you.

PETER: What do you got for us?

ERIC: In China, there was a big parade commemorating the Japanese surrender in World War II. And so everyone here was watching it on TV. And my wife, Chinese wife and my mother-in-law were watching the parade. And my wife looks to my Chinese mother-in-law and says, do you know what really happened, why Japan surrendered? And the mother-in-law says, well, China pushed them back. And my wife looked at her and said, no, you know, Harry S Truman and Nagasaki, and Hiroshima and nuclear weapons, et cetera. And my mother-in-law looked at her and said, he’s brainwashed you– speaking of me.

PETER: (LAUGHING) Why did you do that?

ERIC: Right. I have no answer. But my wife, I respect. She looked at my mother-in-law and said, no, the government has brainwashed you. And so I want to ask the Backstory hosts, how do you talk to someone when they’ve already decided what history is? Because I run into that every day with students, colleagues, just people on the streets, et cetera. So what do we do with that?

ED: Well, Eric, this is Ed. And I often tell this story about when I was getting ready to go to graduate school. And I told my mom, who was a fifth grade teacher, that I was going to go study history. And she said, well, what for, honey? We already know what happened.

And I think that’s kind of the way we teach history in all countries is that we know what happened, it’s your job as a child to memorize it, and then to turn it into multiple choice questions. And so I think that we begin very early in conveying the sense that history is a closed book, and it’s your job to open it up and memorize what’s inside it. So I don’t know that that– it seems to be– I don’t know if it’s a universal. I don’t know if any people encourage their children to question what their elders are telling them about how we got here. But I wonder if you think it’s– is it different in China, from what you’ve seen in the States?

ERIC: Yeah. I see your point. I think there is a mutual we’ve got it figured out, this is our story, and we’re moving forward with it. I think in the US we are kind of more– we understand when somebody questions history. Here, it’s shocking. It’s surprising.

BRIAN: There probably are instances where the Chinese government, for instance, has changed its story about the history of China itself. And I think that working with your wife, for instance, or even just asking your mother-in-law whether there are any examples of that, or any occasions that she’s aware of. That might provide you with a bit of an opening to begin a discussion. And the one thing I’ve learned really on BackStory is that history really is just a discussion. And if you can start that discussion rather than lecturing back and forth at each other, I think you’ll be at least to the second cup of tea.

PETER: Americans have this advantage, is we have so many competing versions of American history because of the experiences of different groups, and they are always in play and they’re being contested. So you’re quite right. I mean, history is a live thing. And I think what– the common theme, Eric, is that there are assumptions on either side.

And Americans like to think we’re so sophisticated, because we can argue about everything. But I don’t think we really examine our assumptions. And that’s what we see in your family’s story, about your mother-in-law. She’s just not thinking about what’s happening. Where are the facts? Well, are we thinking about what America might look like to the larger world? No, I don’t think so. Well, we are on BackStory, Peter.

[LAUGHTER]

Hey, Eric, thanks very much for the call.

BRIAN: Thank you, Eric.

ERIC: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure. Great talking with you. Bye bye.

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PETER: If you’ve got a question for us about an upcoming episode, we’d love to hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, or our website, backstoryradio.org. We’re working I shows about the history of disability in America, and US memory of the Confederacy.

ED: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory. And today, we’re unpacking the complicated history of US-China relations.

Now, last month state dinner at the White House was President Xi’s first, but it wouldn’t have been possible without another first, President Richard Nixon’s state visit to China in 1972.

BRIAN: Just a year before, the idea of an American president setting foot in Communist China would have been unthinkable. The two countries were bitter Cold War foes. But Chinese leader Mao Zedong and President Nixon separately realized they had a common enemy in the Soviet Union.

Because the US didn’t recognize the People’s Republic of China, the leaders had no obvious way to communicate. Author Nicholas Griffin wrote a book about this quandary. He says Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, began by approaching neutral countries.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: And sure enough, a month later a handwritten note arrives from China through the Pakistani ambassador, and is delivered straight to Nixon and to Kissinger.

BRIAN: So he’s carrying a briefcase with his note, and just takes it out and says, don’t tell anybody about this but I’ve got a note for you?

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: It’s a handwritten note. It’s not on any stationary, and you have to take the Pakistani ambassador’s word that that’s actually the hand of Zhou Enlai, the Chinese Premier. So that’s how the Americans reply, in this sort of similar manner, not on official stationery. These notes are traveling through Pakistan diplomatic baggage. They don’t get there for a couple of weeks. I mean, It’s hard to imagine now that this thing takes place very, very slowly and tentatively.

BRIAN: So was there one moment in all of this that you’d identify as a real breakthrough?

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: Well, there’s sort of one moment where it sort of forced a breakthrough. They start doing this sort of slow motion dance of I’ll do this, and then we’ll see what your signal is. And this was all going well back and forth, until they made their move that we didn’t catch.

What Mao had done was he’d stuck an American journalist called Edgar Snow by his side during one of their great parades. And he thought that was a very obvious signal to America that things were rolling along nicely in this flirtation. But of course, Edgar Snow was a very left wing journalist. And Mao had always presumed he must be secretly working for the CIA. But of course to Kissinger and Nixon, he was this sort of raving lefty who they didn’t trust at all.

BRIAN: Right, so they misread the signal.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: Yeah. So we didn’t think of that as their signal. So there we are waiting for their signal. They’ve made it, and we didn’t get it. And we sort of lapse back into silence.

BRIAN: You know, Nick, this is beginning to sound like a lot of dances that I went to as a teenager.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: You’re probably right.

BRIAN: OK, so signal’s sent, signal’s missed. What’s the signal that is unmissable?

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: Well, I think that’s the question the Chinese ask themselves. How can we come up with something so blindingly obvious–

BRIAN: For these dumb Americans?

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: –for these dumb Americans, that everyone’s going to get it, and not just Kissinger and Nixon, but the entire of America is now going to get it. It’s going to be that obvious. They decided to choose to support ping pong.

BRIAN: So how did they go about orchestrating that? Or did they orchestrate it? Was it just an accident?

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: What they had done was there was going to be a world championships of table tennis in Japan. And of course, China didn’t have diplomatic relations with Japan, either. So they very quickly had to approach the Japanese sporting authorities and government, and ask if they could be included as a last minute team. And the idea was to have the Chinese table tennis team approach the American table tennis team, which was the strangest collection of this broad section of America. So it had everything from high school girls, to a black immigrant from Guyana who worked in the United Nations, to a hippie, Glenn Cowan. The guy was 19 years old, had sort of long brown hair, and wore tie dye, bell bottom trousers.

It couldn’t have been a greater difference between the two teams. There was a Chinese team who sort of basically lived in an enclosed sphere in Beijing, and all they did was played table tennis and study Mao’s thoughts. And then here–

BRIAN: This odd mixture in the United States. Yeah.

All right, so there they are in Japan. Now it’s what, 1970, now?

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: It’s 1971.

BRIAN: 1971. So what happens there in Japan?

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: Well, the Americans are sort of going about their business of– they’re not a very good table tennis team. They’re losing very quickly in the world championships, as the Chinese who have now returned to the sport, are rolling on they always did.

And then there’s a very odd incident where Glenn Cowan, the American hippie, misses the team bus and he’s sort of hanging back and he comes out of a training session, and there’s a bus waiting there. And the people on it wave him on. He goes on, and who is it? It’s the Chinese team’s bus. So there he is, the first American in 20, 24 years to be dealing with a Chinese delegation.

BRIAN: And what an American to be dealing with it.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: Of all the Americans, yeah? It’s the 19-year-old Californian hippie.

BRIAN: So what did he say, far out?

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: Pretty much. He’s sort of made sort of revolutionary overtures, as one would. There are people who believed in revolution in our country, too. This was California, early 1970s.

BRIAN: You bet. Right.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: And you know, who comes to greet him from the back of the bus but the greatest table tennis player of all time, a man called Zhuang Zedong, who is very much working hand in hand with his sporting authority and the government. And he gives Cowan this elaborate present.

Now, no one gave anyone presents. At a sporting level, you’re only allowed to give tiny pins to one another. So the fact that he gave him this silkscreen of mountains was–

BRIAN: Which he just happened to have on him.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: Which he just happened to have on him. So this is a moment that had been highly orchestrated by the Chinese to look spontaneous. And sure enough, the American ping pong team was invited immediately to Beijing.

BRIAN: On the spot.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: On the spot. And they left within– they left Japan within 48 hours, and landed for this remarkable week that’s known as Ping Pong Diplomacy.

WALTER CRONKITE: Good evening. The Bamboo Curtain has been cracked by a ping pong ball. For some time, there have been indications of a potential thaw in the more than two decades of–

BRIAN: And were the diplomats back in the United States a little worried about this? Did they– were they concerned that this was some kind of set up?

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: They were very worried, but they– Kissinger and Nixon understood immediately that this policy had nothing to do with ping pong, and everything to do with geopolitics. The big worry was, who are these people who are representing America? There were some very odd moments. Cowan the hippie thought, well, surely if it’s a Communist country I could pretty much use whatever I want. So he went out one morning a 4:00 and just stole a bicycle, thinking every bicycle’s a bicycle, right? And suddenly he’s–

BRIAN: It’s owned by the people.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: Yeah, he was being sort of followed down the street by sort of a mob of Chinese. Cowan undoubtedly carried drugs into Communist China, which was a mixture of marijuana and hallucinogens.

BRIAN: Hm, interesting.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: It was a very bizarre time. But the number one thing was that the Chinese weren’t going to let anything happen to the Americans, and the idea was to get through this week because what happened– the brilliance of using something cultural in a circumstance like that is it carried with it and– or rather, changed what the people of the respective countries thought of one another.

So if you look at opinion polls at the end of 1970, they’re still very much against the Red Chinese. They basically haven’t budged. But suddenly, in the spring of ’71, the Chinese are humanized through ping pong and their good treatment of the American team. And you suddenly get a majority of Americans who want to invite Red China into the United Nations.

BRIAN: And how does this lead to Nixon’s famous trip to China in 1972?

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: It all happens very quickly. So you get the spring of ’71 is when the ping pong team arrive. By July, you have Kissinger going on his secret mission to figure out if the Chinese would like to invite Nixon. And Nixon– Nixon arrives in February the next year. So it’s really 1, 2, 3.

I think from a Chinese point of view, it’s fantastic. If you think of any negotiation, the first thing you want to secure is home court advantage. The Chinese did that with the ping pong team. They did it with the arrival of Kissinger, and then they did it again when Nixon arrived.

BRIAN: Do you play ping pong?

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: I play a little. I’m not particularly good.

BRIAN: Is there anything about the game itself that you think lends itself to diplomacy? I understand now that there was this long history of the internationalization of the sport that allowed the Chinese to get involved. But what about the game itself? Do you think it’s particularly conducive to diplomacy?

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: I think– I’ll tell you the experts will tell you. It sets off the same part of the brain as chess does, which is your strategy and diplomacy. But the difference is of course, the ball’s coming towards you at 70 miles an hour again, and again, and again. So you’re thinking on your feet. The other big difference is, of course, how close you are to your opponent. It’s remarkably close. You can actually read human emotions on your opponent’s face.

BRIAN: Absolutely. And that net can look awfully low, especially against a good opponent.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: Especially after a beer or two. Yeah.

BRIAN: Well, thank you so much for joining us on BackStory.

NICHOLAS GRIFFIN: Thank you so much for having me.

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BRIAN: Nicholas Griffin is the author of Ping Pong Diplomacy, the Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World.

PETER: Even after Richard Nixon resigned from office in 1974, he took several more trips to China to cement economic ties. We wanted to end the show today in the streets of Shanghai, to hear from Chinese citizens who remember Nixon and his first historic visit.

[SPEAKING CHINESE]

INTERPRETER: We knew about him in the village. It was a big deal. Everyone in the country listened to the radio, the National People’s Radio.

INTERPRETER: Back then, we were a closed society. We didn’t know about foreigners. If we saw one, it was like seeing an exotic animal.

INTERPRETER: Nixon the person didn’t leave much of an impression on Chinese, but his actions affected us greatly.

INTERPRETER: We thought Nixon was a great man for coming to China, and allowing the US and China to be able to communicate. I think he is one of America’s greatest politicians.

INTERPRETER: He was like the first person who dared to eat a crab. He was so brave to come to China and build relations between the two countries. Chinese people won’t forget this.
PETER: These were the voices of Ching Ye, Yao Jintao, and Long Ray Shang on the streets of Shanghai. Thanks to reporter and translator Rebecca [INAUDIBLE] in Shanghai for that snapshot.

ED: This is BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today on the show, we’re reflecting on stories from the American past that take place on islands.

ED: Our next story is set on Angel Island, a small island in the chilly waters of San Francisco Bay, not too far from its more famous cousin, Alcatraz. But Angel Island is more often compared to an island on the other coast– Ellis Island. That’s because from of 1910 to 1940, it was the sight of a US immigration station that processed more than a million travelers crossing the Pacific.

ED: Now, throughout this period, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was still the law of the land. That act made it illegal for Chinese laborers to enter the country, but did include a few exceptions– teachers, diplomats, some merchants, and the families of US citizens.

And that last category, Families of citizens, resulted in an elaborate cat and mouse game with young would-be migrants– most of them men– attempting to bluff their way past immigration officials on Angel Island by claiming kinship with Chinese Americans in the US. ED: Immigration officials did their best to ferret out these so-called paper sons, subjecting Chinese immigrants to extensive interrogations and checking to make sure all their claims held up. And while they did, the [? markers ?] were held captive in a kind of purgatory.

Whereas the average immigrant on Ellis Island spent about five hours being processed, Chinese immigrants passing through Angel Island often found themselves detained in crowded wooden barracks for days, weeks, and months on end.

ED: Judy Young is a historian in Santa Cruz whose father was among those processed at Angel Island. A few years ago, she co-authored a book about the immigrant experience there that included some remarkable documents– poems written on the walls of those wooden barracks by the Chinese men who waited there for processing. JUDY YOUNG: Immigration officials– they saw this as graffiti. They then painted over the writing. And after they started painting over, then the Chinese would brush the characters onto the wall. And then they would carve the outline of the characters and scoop out the wood so that youwill have these impressions of the characters. And when you paint over them, then you could still see the words.

I remember making my first trip to Angel Island to see these poems. It was dark, it was dingy, it was smelly. There was trash all over the grounds. I could still make out the impressions of Chinese words all over the walls. I could even read some of the words.

MALE SPEAKER: This place is called an island of immortals, when, in fact, this mountain wilderness is a prison. Once you see the open net, why throw yourself in? It is only because of empty pockets. I can do nothing else.

JUDY YOUNG: They’re locked up on this lonely island in the wooden building, waiting to be admitted into the country, seeing the skyline, the buildings, across the bay, knowing that Oakland or San Francisco, whichever way they were facing, was that close, and yet not being able to reach there, and not knowing how long it would be before they might beadmitted, or, heavens forbid, that they may be turned back and deported in the end. MALE SPEAKER: I used to admire the land of America as a country of abundance. Now, on an extended sojourn in jail, I am subject to the ordeals of prison life. I look up and see Oakland so close by. I wish to go back to my motherland to carry the farmer’s ho. Discontent fills my belly, and it is difficult for me to sleep. I just write these few lines to express what is on my mind. MALE SPEAKER: It is noisy because of the many countryfolk. And there are watchmen guarding during the night. I gaze to the south at the hospital and look to the west at the Army camp.What happiness is there in this?

JUDY YOUNG: A lot of poems also complained about the mistreatment that they felt, the harsh laws, the discrimination, the physical exam and the whole interrogation process, and the feeling of being treated as criminals– that you had to prove that you are innocent rather than the other way around.

MALE SPEAKER: America has power, but not justice. In prison, we were victimized as if we were guilty, given no opportunity to explain. It was really brutal. I bow my head in reflection, but there is nothing I can do.

JUDY YOUNG: They understood that because China was a weak country and did not have good diplomatic relations with US, that they were unable to stop the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, that that was the reason why they were being subjected to the discriminatory harsher treatment at Angel Island.

MALE SPEAKER: How was I to know that the Western barbarians hadlost their hearts and reason? With 100 kinds of oppressive laws, they mistreat us Chinese. It is still not enough. After being interrogated and investigated several times, we also have to have our chests examined while naked. Our countrymen suffer this treatment all because our country’s power cannot yet expand. If there comes a day when China will be united, I will surely cut out the heart and bowels of the Western barbarian.

MALE SPEAKER: The ocean encircles a lone peak. Rough terrain surround its prison. There are few birds flying over the cold hills. The wild goose messenger cannot find its way. I have been detained by obstacles that have been put in my way for half a year. Melancholy and hate gather on my face. Now that I must return to my country, I have toiled, like the Jingwei bird, in vain. JUDY YOUNG: I think if it wasn’t for the poems and the discovery of the poems, this history about immigration through AngelIsland would be lost. I say this because if the buildings had been destroyed, the poetry had been lost, we would have no record of what happened at Angel Island and what people felt about that experience.

MALE SPEAKER: Over 100 poems are on the walls. Looking at them, they are all pining at the delayed progress. What can one sad person say to another? Unfortunate travelers everywhere wish to commiserate. Gain or lose, how is one to know what is pre-destined? Rich or poor, who is to say it is not the will of heaven? Why should one complain if he is detained and imprisoned here? From ancient times, heroes often were the first ones to face adversity.

ED: Judy Young is Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz, and author of Island– Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island.Today, the immigration station is a national historic landmark open to visitors. You can still see the poetry of Chinese detainees on the walls.

PETER: In the spring of 1906, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake set off a fire that engulfed San Francisco, and reduced much of it to ashes. As that inferno bore down on the city’s Chinatown neighborhood, there was no question what Lee Yoke Suey had to save. It was the one position that proved his US citizenship, his birth certificate.

CONNIE YOUNG YU: That birth certificate was so important to the Chinese. You always save everything, you have to save everything, or else the immigration authorities will always question why you’re here. Why you, as a Chinese person, are here.

PETER: This is Connie Young Yu, Lee Yoke Suey’s granddaughter. At the time that Lee and hundreds of thousands of others fled their homes, the City by the Bay was deeply divided. It’s steep hills and sand dunes marked the boundaries of race, class, and ethnicity. Everyone knew their place. And for around 25,000 residents of Chinese origin, stepping out of bounds was especially dangerous.

ED: The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 placed Chinese immigrants on the margins. Acts of racial terror were a daily threat. While Chinatown was a segregated ghetto, it provided its residents with 15 blocks of desperately needed refuge. The devastation the great fire of 1906 brought to Chinatown would change that reality in surprising ways. Producer Chelsea Davis takes the story from here.

CHELSEA DAVIS: It was around 5:00 in the morning on April 18 when the ground begin to shake under Lee Yoke Suey, a shop owner in Chinatown. He glanced out his kitchen window to see houses collapsing, and terrified people rushing through the streets. So Lee gathered his wife and newborn daughter, and together they fled the house. Calls of, the earth dragon is stirring, echoed around them as rumors spread of a fire heading for the neighborhood. Here’s Lee’s granddaughter again, Connie Young Yu.

CONNIE YOUNG YU: It was chaotic. Probably he felt like he was in a war.

CHELSEA DAVIS: Yu says her grandfather put his family onto a wagon headed for the bay. Then he went back for that birth certificate. Lee quickly ducked into his store and rustled up what he needed. But as he emerged into the street again, Yu says, a white soldier caught sight of him, and assumed he was a looter.

CONNIE YOUNG YU: And the soldier stabs him with his bayonet. And my grandfather, he crumpled to the ground, and he played dead. He just lay there.

CHELSEA DAVIS: Lee escaped with a flesh wound. But as his run-in with a soldier suggests, the fires engulfing the city that day left Chinese residents exposed to all kinds of social dangers as they fled through unfamiliar neighborhoods.

ANDREA DAVIES: The built environment keeps everyone in their place. So if you’re an elite leak white synthesis can you don’t have to see the presence of Trento as you go there.

CHELSEA DAVIS: This is Andrea Davies, a historian at the Stanford Humanities Center, and herself a former firefighter in San Francisco.

ANDREA DAVIES: And so with everything gone, they’re watching all these people rush through the city. As the Chinese are leaving their homes in desperation, they’re being yelled at to get out, and don’t turn back. I call it heightened post-disaster racism.

CHELSEA DAVIS: And according to Davies, it wasn’t just private citizens. She says increased racism during a catastrophe can influence city officials’ responses, too. Think of the soldier who mistook Lee Yoke Suey for a looter, or the responders tasked with extinguishing the flames.

ANDREA DAVIES: The fire department did very little to stop the fires in Chinatown. And, in fact, made it worse. If you look at Chinatown, which is nestled right against Nob Hill where all the elite mansions are, all the water goes directed by the mayor to save Nob Hill. And all the dynamite goes into Chinatown.

CHELSEA DAVIS: Yeah, dynamite. It was a last ditch effort to stop the fire from reaching the richest, whitest district. The effort failed. And thanks to the explosives, Chinatown burned all the faster. In the following days, as the embers of Chinatown cooled, the Chinese residents found themselves homeless and newly vulnerable in hostile streets. But things were about to get worse.

ANDREA DAVIES: So many of the city’s political and business leaders were actually excited about this social equalizing disaster, because it eliminated Chinatown, and they thought, we’ll never rebuild it.

CHELSEA DAVIS: Many whites had seen the neighborhood as a Gamorrah of opium dens, prostitution, and disease. But Chinatown also occupied prime downtown real estate. Real estate that the city’s power brokers had long been eyeing. In 1904, two years before the fire, then mayor James Phelan had asked architect Daniel Burnham to draw some sketches of a new downtown. And in those sketches, there simply is no Chinatown.

ANDREA DAVIES: And so the minute the city goes up in flames, I’m not kidding, I don’t think the city’s finished burning. And James Phelan is telegraphing Daniel Burnham, send a more reports immediately. Get them in the hands of the city leaders and business leaders. Here’s the perfect city.

CHELSEA DAVIS: In the days after the fire, the current mayor, Eugene Schmitz, worked fast to make that perfect city a reality. He appointed James Phelan and other powerful leaders to a committee entirely dedicated to relocating Chinatown. The leading proposal punted Chinese residents to the outskirts of town, among the city’s slaughterhouses. Davies says the beleaguered Chinese community soon caught wind of the plan.

ANDREA DAVIES: And they fought back, and I think they fought back very intelligently.

CHELSEA DAVIS: The Chinese launched their self defense on multiple fronts. First, they simply started rebuilding in Chinatown before others got there. One Chinese language newspaper, the Chung Sai Yat Po, made sure Chinese refugees knew their land rights.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

MALE SPEAKER: According to US laws, if the land belongs to the building owner, the landlord has the right to build on his land. Local officials have no right to stop him.

CHELSEA DAVIS: Even China’s Empress Dowager, Tzu-hsi, got involved, sending consul general from Washington to meet with San Francisco officials. But the most significant move was economic. For decades, San Francisco had been a key hub for lucrative trade with China. So a group of the city’s top Chinese merchants wrote to Mayor Schmitz in a language city officials easily understood.

ANDREA DAVIES: And so the negotiation was, OK, you don’t want us to come back? We can go to Tacoma, we can go to Portland. So there’s a panic of a loss of revenue for the city.

CHELSEA DAVIS: By May 10, less than a month after the fire, the mayor dissolved his committee to relocate Chinatown. Filmmaker Felicia Lowe says it was a political victory on an unprecedented scale.

FELICIA LOWE: They outsmarted, and they outplayed the city fathers to fight fire with fire.

CHELSEA DAVIS: But the Chinese community took their victory one step further. San Francisco was a blank slate after the fire. So instead of letting the city draw up new architecture, an American-born Chinese merchant named Look Tin Eli had a plan.

FELICIA LOWE: The word was build me a pagoda.

CHELSEA DAVIS: Before the fire, Chinatown’s architecture had blended in with the rest of San Francisco’s Italian buildings. But Look Tin Eli’s blueprint would make the rebuilt Chinatown into what he described as a new oriental city.

FELICIA LOWE: He was able to pull together the resources and a committee of like-minded Chinese merchants to hire white architects to create a Chinatown that looked the way white people imagined Chinatown to look. Even though he knew in his own mind that the buildings in China didn’t look like this.

CHELSEA DAVIS: The result was a Chinatown that Lo calls a Disneyland vision of China. Pagoda-topped buildings, bright reds and golds, and dragon symbols everywhere. It used Western stereotypes to rake in tourist dollars, and to give the district a new reputation for cleanliness and safety. Consider it a sort of architectural revenge. Today, Chinatown remains one of San Francisco’s most visited neighborhoods.

Of course, this makeover didn’t change everything. Sinophobia persisted for decades, and Chinese immigrants couldn’t even become naturalized citizens until 1943. But even the 1882 nationalization ban had a lot less bite after the fire, because there was one final ironic boon from the 1906 catastrophe that created an influx of immigrants.

FELICIA LOWE: The fire destroyed the City Hall, which maintained all the vital records. Births, deaths, marriages. So what happened was that some of the Chinese went to City Hall claiming that they were, in fact, citizens. And there was no way to disprove it.

CHELSEA DAVIS: On one level many see Chinatown’s story as grim. It took a natural disaster, a devastating fire, to give the Chinese a political voice in the city where they’d lived for more than 50 years. But Lee Yoke Suey, the merchant stabbed as he fled, refused to be bitter. If anything, his granddaughter says, the great fire and the fierce fight for Chinatown, gave the Lee family a greater sense of belonging in their country, the United States.

FELICIA LOWE: And they felt that somehow being in the earthquake and coming back made them part of the city, that they felt they had a stake in, look, we were here, and we survived.

PETER: Reporter Chelsea Davis brought us that story. We’ll have a link on our website to Felicia Lowe’s films about Chinatown, and to Andrea Davies’ book, Saving San Francisco, Relief and Recovery After the 1906 Disaster. Just head to backstoryradio.org.

ED: It’s time for us to take another break. When we return, a battle between fire’s timeless mystique and the science behind the flames.

BRIAN: More BackStory coming up in a minute.

BRIAN: Seventy years after William Cooper’s failed experiment, virtually all the sugar Americans consumed was still being produced by slaves, but now these were American slaves. And they were working in the cane fields of Louisiana. On the eve of the Civil War, Louisiana’s sugar industry was booming.

It was an industrial power that in today’s terms was worth $4 billion, but by the end of the war, its value had plummeted to just a small fraction of that amount. Plantations were devastated. And the enslaved workers who’d driven the sugar economy were now free to escape from the cane fields. Few had any desire to stay there.

MOON-HO JUNG: So Louisiana planters begin thinking about other possibilities.

ED: This is Moon-Ho Jung, a historian at the University of Washington. He says these planters were especially interested in what had already happened in the British West Indies. Slavery there had been abolished in 1838, and so Caribbean sugar planters had imported indentured servants from Asia to take the place of their former slaves. The laborers were known as coolies, and the Americans thought coolies might be the solution to their labor problems as well.

MOON-HO JUNG: So in 1869, there was a fairly big convention in Memphis organized to try to set up a company to recruit workers directly from southern China to Louisiana. They are very explicit in terms of what kind of labor they want. One of the persons at the convention is Nathan Bedford Forrest, a founder of the Ku Klux Klan.

And he is arguing for a new South which is very much related to the old South. It’s about the resurgence of white supremacy. It’s about the resurgence of the plantation economy. And the call for Chinese workers becomes a part of this movement in terms of what kind of labor they want.

So if I could give you a quote. This is one of the speakers in Memphis in 1869. This person says the West Indian plantations quote, “Now employee a coerce labor and again blossom like the rose. Who’s labor is it that has done this? India and China answers. Asiatic labor supply in place of that stricken down by emancipation. Shall we not profit by its for example?”

ED: You can’t really believe that people just say so explicitly what they me. Would it be great if we had coerced labor?

MOON-HO JUNG: Yeah.

ED: 1869, a quick calculations suggests it’s not that far from when slavery had been declared illegal in the United States. How did they navigate that legal landscape as well as that vast geographic landscape?

MOON-HO JUNG: In 1862, right in the middle of the Civil War, the US Congress passed a law prohibiting Americans from participating in the so-called coolie trade. US consuls supposedly would be able to tell the difference between a coolie who represented slavery and a voluntary Chinese immigrant. But the problem was all Chinese workers were represented as coolies.

So they became very confused as to whether to certify these shipments of recruits, Chinese labor recruits to Louisiana as either voluntary or as coolies. And so some of these consuls wrote to their superiors in Washington, DC, to ask very explicitly, what it is a coolie? How do you define a coolie.

And when southern recruiters end up in China, they begin arguing these are voluntary immigrants. These are not coolie. And by and large, federal officials allow them to recruit these workers.

ED: Does this Asian labor then become an enduring part of Louisiana sugar plantation society?

MOON-HO JUNG: Not to a great extent. I would say that many of these Chinese workers in Louisiana decide that this is not the life that they had hoped for, and they escape Louisiana as fast as they can.

ED: So it sounds as if the larger political consequence of this importation of Asian labor into the sugar districts may have lain elsewhere because I think a lot of people would know that in the 20 years after this that the United States as a whole begins to exclude immigrants from China to the United States. Can you explain what connection there might be between these two episodes?

MOON-HO JUNG: Yes. There is a deep connection that really goes back to the 1830s when American newspapers began writing about Chinese and Indian workers in the Caribbean as a new form of slavery. And so in the debates over Chinese exclusion in the 1870s and 1880s, many of the folks behind the exclusion movement begin proclaiming that excluding the Chinese would be an anti-slavery measure. That is it would be a vote for freedom.

So in the debates leading up to the exclusion of the Chinese, this is what a California senator said, a vote against Chinese exclusion quote, “Is to commission under the broad seal of the United States all the speculators in human labor, all of the traffickers in human flesh to ply their infamous trade without impediment under the protection of the American flag and empty but teeming, seething slave pens of China up on the soil of California.”

And so the people that really pressed for Chinese exclusion begin arguing that this is not an anti-immigration measure, but in fact it’s a pro-immigration measure. It’s an anti-slavery measure because they were not prohibiting real immigrants from the United States they were prohibiting coolie or slaves, whereas legitimate immigrants came from Europe and they were white.

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BRIAN: Moon-Ho Jung is a historian at the University of Washington. His book is Coolie and Cane, Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation. It’s time for another quick break. When we get back, an illicit trade in molasses fuels colonial New England’s economy and its revolutionary furor.

ED: You’re listening to BackStory story. We’ll be back in a minute.