Free The Chinese in America by Iris Chang

curiosity about new ideas and experiences on the other—that the first wave of Chinese made their appearance in the American West. If San Francisco did not initially resist their arrival, perhaps it was because almost everyone in San Francisco had come from somewhere else. By 1853, more than half of the San Francisco population was foreign-born, and in a city united by the single, driving obsession to make money, only one color seemed to matter: gold.
    This would change.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Gold Rushers on Gold Mountain
    T he gold rush was born out of the sense among people living bleak lives of interminable desperation, Chinese or otherwise, that here at last was a chance to change the unchangeable—to wrench themselves out of the endless and demeaning routine of their daily existence and maybe catapult themselves into another class entirely. People more conservative in outlook might regard with contempt those who would invest all they had in such pie-in-the-sky hopes, and China had always been a land where the conservative outlook—respect for one’s elders, one’s betters, one’s rulers—was highly revered. But wherever the future was the dimmest, there, too, would be found people most eager to grab at this last chance at a better life, a chance that according to rumor had already led some few to great riches.
    Like the thousands of others who had come to San Francisco to find their fortunes, the Chinese quickly set out for the gold fields. During the early 1850s, some 85 percent of the Chinese in California were engaged in placer mining. Over the next months and years, they wandered the western wilderness, sometimes walking hundreds of miles in response to news of fresh discoveries. They soon replaced their Chinese silk caps or straw hats with cowboy hats and their hand-stitched cotton shoes for sturdy American boots. But along with their blue cotton shirt and broad trousers, they retained one vestige of Qing tradition: a long, jet-black queue that swayed gleaming down their backs.
    The daylight hours of a gold miner’s life were spent bent over a stream panning for gold. He might live in a primitive tent, a brush hut, an abandoned cabin, or a shack hastily slapped together from scrap lumber and flattened kerosene cans. The Chinese gold miners, not surprisingly, stayed to themselves, even when it meant that twenty to thirty Chinese miners had to cram themselves into a space hardly large enough to “allow a couple of Americans to breathe in it,” as one San Francisco Herald correspondent reported. Then again, another contemporary writer, J. D. Borthwick, described a Chinese mining camp he visited as “wonderfully clean.” After glimpsing the evening rituals of the Chinese, he wrote, “a great many of them [are] at their toilet, getting their head shaved, or plaiting pigtails.” In a hectic time and place, on an almost mad mission, when most men had neither time nor energy to spare for the threshold requirements of civil society, many Chinese maintained strict standards of personal hygiene.
    The Chinese also established a reputation for hard work. “They are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness,” Mark Twain wrote in admiration. “A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist.” They further astounded white observers with their creative use of nature’s laws of physics, particularly their astonishing ability to balance heavy burdens on long poles. Describing one miner’s descent into a gulch with a sack of rice, two large rolls of blankets, two hogsheads, several heavy mining tools, a wheelbarrow, and a hand-rocker all swinging from his pack-pole, the editor of the Madisonian wrote, “It was a mystery how that Chinaman managed to tote that weary load along so gracefully, and not grunt a groan.”
    A few Chinese prospered through sheer luck, finding enough gold in a single day to last them a lifetime. When one group discovered a forty-pound nugget, they prudently chiseled it into