As A Chinaman Saw Us: Passages from His Letters to a Friend at Home
General
As A Chinaman Saw Us: Passages from His Letters to a Friend at Home
United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs
The average Irishman whom one meets in America, and he is legion, is a
very different person from the polished gentleman I have met in Belfast,
Dublin, and other cities in Ireland; but I never heard that the American
Irishman, the product of an ignorant peasantry crowded out of Ireland,
had been accepted as a type of the race. Peculiar discrimination is made
in America against the Chinese. Our lower classes, "coolies" from the
Cantonese districts, have flocked to America. Americans "lump" all
Chinese under this head, and can not conceive that in China there are
cultivated men, just as there are cultivated men in Ireland, the
antipodes of the grotesque Irish types seen in America.
I believe there are seventy-five or eighty thousand Chinamen in America.
They do not assimilate with the Americans. Many are common laborers,
laundrymen, and small merchants. In New York, Chicago, San Francisco,
and other cities there are large settlements of them. In San Francisco
many have acquired wealth. The Chinese quarter is to all intents and
purposes a Chinese city. None of these people, or very few, are
Americanized in the sense of taking an active part in the government;
Americans do not permit it. I was told that the Chinese were among the
best citizens, the percentage of criminals being very small. They are
honest, frugal, and industrious--too industrious, in fact, and for this
very reason the ban has been placed upon them. Red-handed members of the
Italian Mafia--a society of murderers--the most ignorant class in
Ireland, Wales, and England, the scum of Russia, and the human dregs of
Europe generally are welcome, but the clean, hard-working Chinaman is
excluded.
Millions are spent yearly in keeping him out after he had been invited
to come. He built many American railroads; he opened the door between
the Atlantic and the Pacific; he worked in the mines; he did work that
no one else would or could do, and when it was completed the American
laborer, the product of this scum of all nations, demanded that the
Chinaman be "thrown out" and kept out. America listened to the blatant
demagogues, the "sand-lot orators," and excluded the Chinese. To-day it
is almost impossible for a Chinese gentleman to send his son to America
to travel or study. He will not be distinguished from laundryman
"John," and is thrown back in the teeth of his countrymen; meanwhile
China continues to be raided by American missionaries. The insult is
rarely resented. In the treaty ratified by the United States Senate in
1868 we read:
"The United States of America and the Empire of China cordially
recognize the inherent right of man to change his home and allegiance,
and also the mutual advantage of the free immigration and emigration of
their citizens and subjects respectively from the one country to the
other for purposes of curiosity, of trade or as permanent residents."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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