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We
are pleased to present the following
excerpt from the book
Driven Out: The
Forgotten War Against Chinese
Americans
by Jean Pfaelzer
Random House - May
2007
The
Chinese Called it Pai Hua, or
The Driven Out
At nine o'clock on the morning of
November 3, 1885, steam whistles blew at
the foundries and mills across Tacoma, to
announce the start of the purge of all the
Chinese people from the town. Saloons
closed and police stood by as five hundred
men, brandishing clubs and pistols, went
from house to house in the downtown
Chinese quarter and through the Chinese
tenements along the city's wharf. Sensing
the storm ahead, earlier in the week,
about five hundred Chinese people had fled
from Tacoma. Now the rest were given four
hours to be ready to leave. They
desperately stuffed years of life into
sacks, shawls, and baskets hung from
shoulder poles -- bedding, clothing, pots,
some food. At midday, the mob began to
drag Chinese laborers from their homes,
pillage their laundries, and throw their
furniture into the streets. Chinese
merchants pleaded with the mayor and the
sheriff for an extra twenty-four hours to
pack up their shops.
Early on that cold Tuesday afternoon,
armed vigilantes corralled two hundred
Chinese men and women at the docks. The
governor of the Washington Territory,
Watson C. Squire, ignored telegrams from
Chinese across the Pacific Northwest
urging him to intervene. The mayor and the
sheriff hid out at city hall as the mob
marched the Chinese through heavy rain to
a muddy railroad crossing nine miles from
town. The merchants' wives, unable to walk
on their tiny bound feet, were tossed into
wagons.
Lake View Junction was a stop on the
Northern Pacific Railroad, which had been
built by Chinese laborers. A few of the
evicted Chinese found damp shelter in
abandoned storage sheds, in stables, or
inside the small station house. Most
huddled outside. During the cold and rainy
night, two or three trains stopped at the
station. People with cash paid six dollars
to board the overnight train to Portland,
Oregon. Others crammed onto a passing
freight train. The rest began the
hundred-mile trek south to the Chinatown
in Portland, where they hoped to find
sanctuary in a community that had just
refused the town's orders to leave. For
days they were seen following the tracks
south. Others fled the country for
Canada.
Two days later, Tacoma's Chinatown was
destroyed by fire.
Lum
May
Territory of Washington
County of King
June 3, 1886
Lum May being duly sworn on his oath
said:
I was born in Canton, China, and am
a subject of the Chinese Empire. I am aged
about 51 years. Have been in America about
eleven years and have been doing business
in Tacoma for ten years. My business there
was that of keeping dry goods, provisions,
medicines and general merchandize
store.
On the third day of November I
resided with my family in Tacoma on the
corner of Railroad Street some little
distance from Chinatown. At that time I
would say there were eight hundred or nine
hundred Chinese persons in and about
Tacoma who . . . were forcibly expelled by
the white people of Tacoma. Twenty days
previously to the 3rd of November, a
committee of white persons waited upon the
Chinese at their residences and ordered
them to leave the city before the 3rd of
November. I do not know the names of
[the] white persons but would
recognize their faces. The Committee
consisted of 15 or 20 persons . . . who
notified the Chinese to leave.
I asked General Sprague and other
citizens for protection for myself and the
Chinese people. The General said he would
see and do what he could. All the Chinese
after receiving notice to leave were
frightened lest their houses should be
blown up and destroyed. A rumour to that
effect was in circulation. Many of them
shut up their houses and tried to keep on
the look out.
About half past 9 o'clock in the
morning of November 3, 1885, a large crowd
of citizens of Tacoma marched down to
Chinatown and told all the Chinese that
the whole Chinese population of Tacoma
must leave town by half past one o'clock
in the afternoon of that day. There must
have been in the neighborhood of 1000
people in the crowd of white people though
I cannot tell how many. They went to all
the Chinese houses and establishments and
notified the Chinese to leave. Where the
doors were locked they broke forcibly into
the houses smashing in doors and breaking
in windows. Some of the crowd was armed
with pistols, some with clubs. They acted
in a rude boisterous and threatening
manner, dragging and kicking the Chinese
out of their houses.
My wife refused to go and some of
the white persons dragged her out of the
house. From the excitement, the fright and
the losses we sustained through the riot
she lost her reason, and has ever since
been hopelessly insane. She threatens to
kill people with a hatchet or any other
weapon she can get hold of. The outrages I
and my family suffered at the hands of the
mob has utterly ruined me. I make no
claim, however, for my wife's insanity or
the anguish I have suffered. My wife was
perfectly sane before the riot.
I saw my countrymen marched out of
Tacoma on November 3rd. They presented a
sad spectacle. Some had lost their trunks,
some their blankets, some were crying for
their things.
Armed white men were behind the
Chinese, on horseback sternly urging them
on. It was raining and blowing hard. On
the 5th of November all the Chinese houses
situated on the wharf were burnt down by
incendiaries.
I sustained the following losses
through the riot, to wit: 2 pieces silk
crape trowsers female, 2 pieces black
silk, 6 silk handkerchiefs, 2 crape
jackets, 10 blue cotton shirts, 8 pieces
black cotton trowsers, 12 Pairs Chinese
Cotton Stockings, 2 Leather trunks
(Chinese), wool great dress female, 4
flannel jackets, 3 pairs embroidered
shoes, 1 dressing case, 6 white cotton
shirts, 1 carpet bag, 2 white woolen
blankets, 2 red woolen bed covers, 1
feather mattress, 1 spring bed, 2 tables,
6 chairs, 2 stoves, 4 pictures and frames,
1 large mirror, 2 woolen trowsers (male)
and solvent debtors (Chinaman), 1 business
and good will, loss of perishable goods,
total $45,532.
A few of the Chinese merchants I
among them were suffered to remain in
Tacoma for two days in order to pack up
our goods or what was left of them. On the
5th of November, after the burning of the
Chinese houses on the wharf I left Tacoma
for Victoria where I have since resided .
. . No Chinaman has been allowed to reside
in Tacoma since November 3rd.
Mayor Weisbach appeared to be one of
the leaders of the mob on the 3rd of
November. I spoke to him and told him that
Mr. Sprague had said the Chinese had a
right to stay and would be protected. He
answered me: "General Sprague has nothing
to say. If he says anything we will hang
him or kick him. You get out of here." I
cried. He said I was a baby because I
cried over the loss of my property. He
said, "I told you before you must go, and
I mean my word shall be kept
good."
I desire to add to this that . . .
it is ten years since we began business
there.
Lum May
Tacoma's Chinese residents did not go
quietly. On November 5, 1885, aided by
China's consul in San Francisco, they
compelled the U.S. attorney to arrest the
mayor of Tacoma, the chief of police, two
councilmen, a probate court judge, and the
president of the YMCA. Then they filed
seventeen civil claims against the U.S.
government, for a total of $103,365.
The Tacoma roundup was one of a hundred
Chinese pogroms that raged across the
Pacific Northwest in the late nineteenth
century. In the winter of 1885-86, the
raids and arson in Chinatowns reached
Portland, and the Chinese refugees from
Tacoma fled again -- some to San
Francisco, some back to rural hamlets in
the Washington Territory closer to their
old homes, some to the East Coast, and
some to work on plantations in the
South.
Word of the raids resounded in
newspapers, in state capitals, in the
boardrooms of railroad companies and
lumber mills, in Congress, and across the
Pacific Ocean. Defying protests from both
Republicans and Democrats, President
Grover Cleveland decided to accede to the
refugees' demands for reparation, with the
hope that this might cause China to revive
trade talks with the United States.
China's population of four hundred million
people, he believed, could purchase
America out of its deep economic
depression, and China's government might
open trade routes for a nation come lately
to foreign expansion.
Congress was ambivalent. It understood
that whichever party controlled California
would likely control the House of
Representatives, the Senate, and the next
presidency. The firestorm of roundups in
California was compelling evidence of the
sentiments in the golden state.
The violent raids were bannered in the
press -- in the local Tacoma
Register and the Eureka
Times-Telephone, and nationwide in
The New York Times and Harpers
Weekly. Most Americans knew of the
Chinese purges in California, Oregon,
Washington, Wyoming, Nevada, and Colorado.
But before Congress complied with
Cleveland's request, it wanted to know the
economic value of a Chinese life.
In 1886, at the order of Congress,
Governor Watson Squire desperately sought
to track down the two hundred Chinese men
and women who had been driven out of
Tacoma so that they could bear witness to
the public violence done against them in
his name. Ultimately, he could locate only
a few. Most were unable or unwilling to be
found.
Lum May had fled to Victoria, Canada.
He and his wife had legally entered the
United States in 1874, before the Page Act
of 1875 banned the entry of almost all
Chinese women and before the Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882 -- the first
immigration law to exclude people based on
their race -- banned the thousands of
immigrants who crisscrossed the Pacific
each year from reentering the United
States.
Governor Squire found Lum May, but as a
subject of the Chinese Empire, he was
barred from testifying in a U.S. court.
Through his written affidavit, Lum's is
one of the Chinese voices that speaks
across the silent years since being Driven
Out.
Copyright
© 2007 by Jean Pfaelzer and published
with permission.
Jean
Pfaelzer is professor of English and
American Studies at the University of
Delaware, and director of the University
Honors Writing Fellowship Program. The
writer of numerous articles on nineteenth
century women's literature, feminist
theory, and cultural theory, she has been
appointed to the Washington D.C.
Commission for Women. She lives near
Washington, DC. Visit www.udel.edu/PR/drivenout/
for more information.
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