Disclaimer: This OP might, in the eyes of some, make me look like a racist. I assure that is not the case. It’s just that something struck me as sort of odd, and I’m interested in an answer.
It occurs to me that the majority of this country is made up of caucasians (that came as a great shock, I tells ya!), primarily because we’ve had an influx of Europeans since the 17th century or before, and continue to do so today. We have a large population of people of African descent, because of a (mostly involuntary) influx from Africa. Jews and Hispanics as well. And while there is some so-called “race mixing”, these groups quite often retain their racial genes for many generations. A person might be black and be able to claim a black ancestry that dates back to, say, 1824 or something like that.
But I’ve met relatively few Chinese that are not 1st, 2nd, or at most 3rd generation. Most that I’ve met still have strong ties to China, often including close relatives that still live there.
I’ve always assumed that this was because immigration from China was a relatively recent thing. Obviously, though, it’s not. Doesn’t Chinese immigration predate Irish immigration by at least a couple of decades? I know that many went back home, but you’d think that a good number would have stayed or at least left offspring. Where are they all?
It may be that my social circles are too small (what else is new?), or that I don’t often ask people about that which is not my business, such as their ancestry.
But whatever happened to the Chinese Americans of the 19th century? Do they still have descendents among us? Do they still – you know – look Chinese?
Where do you live? There aren’t many nth generation Chinese immigrants here in South Carolina, but I assume there are a lot more on the west coast, descendants of railway workers and such.
Still, its an interesting question, since, yes, California & Hawaii have plenty of Chinese (and Japanese) citizens with Fong or Nokamura last names but Harry or Glenn first names denoting multi-generational assimilation.
However, between the 19th century and the 1980’s, emigration slowed to a trickle due to US restriction laws and the Cold War. So in between the Railroad workers & pineapple pickers of the 19th C., and the tech-surge workers & “yacht-people” of the least 20 years, there’s a big, empty trough between the waves.
That’s it, in a nutshell – mostly due to the restriction laws and not so much “the Cold War”. Laws and immigration policies with such explicit names as The Chinese Exclusion Act kind of puts a damper on immigration, especially since there was no simple way to get to this country except through a port.
Where are all the Chinese Americans? In Cupertino, of course. Inside joke for anyone living in the San Jose area.
I also think (and if someone can verify/refute this, please do) that the earlier immigrants were mainly Cantonese speaking people from Southern China whereas most of the recent immigrants are Mandarin speakers from Taiwan and the PRC. At least it seems that way in San Francisco.
That would seem to explain it, though I still wonder if there are descendants of the railroad workers here, and if their Chinese traits have been bred out by now.
Chinese were discriminated against in CA and the rest of the US for quite some time, and many lived in Chinatown areas with little social contact with European-Americans. Also, anti-miscegination laws were aimed not just at Whites and Blacks who wanted to marry, but any White/non-White couple. CA’s law, overturned in 1948 stated that “…no license may be issued authorizing the marriage of a white person with a Negro, mulatto, Mongolian or member of the Malay race.”
There are plenty of Chinese- and Japanese-Americans living in California, Washington, Hawaii (where I’m from), and in the northeast. Not all of them can trace their ancestors’ arrival in the US as far back, but both ethnic groups started arriving in the 18th and 19th centuries. In Hawaii, I believe the Chinese arrived third, after the Caucasians and Portuguese.
I’m not sure what your point is. Were there mixed race children born from people of Asian and European backgrounds? Of course. Was there a strong social as well as a legal prohibition that made such children rare? Yes.
Maybe it’s just a result of my own background - I grew up in Washington D.C. and currently live in Houston, and being part Asian, have always been very aware of that ethnic community - but it would never even occur to me to ask where all the Chinese Americans are.
I’m not calling you a racist or anything else. I’m just baffled.
My understanding, for which I have no cites, but based on what I learned about the history of the American West in high school and university, is this:
There were proportionally sizeable “Chinatown” communities in many of the Old West mining and railroad towns. The Chinese workers really did run the laundries, opened restaurants, and also provided much of a labor for the railroads.
But life out West was very tough for the Chinese. Due to both anti-miscegination laws and a cultural bias against marrying someone who was not Chinese, male workers from China had no brides. Laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act made even getting to America difficult, and once you arrived you had to stay since there was no right of re-entry if you tried to go back to China to “visit.” Discrimination and racism were rampant, and acts of economic and physical violence against Chinese were tolerated. Many Chinese who worked in the smaller towns and mining camps were forced out as more “white” labor from the East came to provide the laundry and restaurant services originally provided by the Chinese. Many of those displaced Chinese then moved to larger cities with sizeable Chinatowns (like San Francisco or Seattle) where they could work, socialize, and enjoy the comparative safety of their own communities.
Here is an interesting article on the Chinese in Butte, Montana, in the 19th century.
I do know that in my hometown, the Wong family ran a series of Chinese restaurants until the mid 1990s. And they were literally one of the first families of the town, since their great-whatever Grandfather was in the Gulch feeding Chinese food to the miners before 1870. So some of the descendants of the original Chinese do still live there.
Based on this comment and your original question “But whatever happened to the Chinese Americans of the 19th century? Do they still have descendents among us? Do they still – you know – look Chinese?” … it appears that your question was not so much about Chinese Americans, but about people who still look “Chinese” and living in the U.S. There are no stats for that. But as to where are all the Chinese Americans, the old Pareto rule applies – 80% of Chinese Americans live in only 10 states (and 70% in only 5). So if you’re not in one of those states, seeing a Chinese American might be a rare event. As for me, I’m blessed with living in a superbly diverse community.
There may be no concrete answer to my question, but that seems as close as I’m going to get. So yes, there are some known lineages that trace back that far.
nivlac, my community is pretty diverse, and I know a lot of Chinese people, but they all seem to be of recent arrival – a few generations at most. I was trying to account for the immigrants of the 18th century.
Mixed race children born in the mid 19th century would be the great-great-great grandparents of children born today. Why should those modern children be more obviously Chinese than they are, say, Irish, or Cherokee, or Black, or whatever else their other ancestors might have been?
The obvious answer to whether they still “look Chinese” would be whether their families made a point to remain racially and ethnically Chinese. The Wong family in Montana did so, adhering to the cultural preference that their Chinese-American sons (and daughters) should have Chinese (or Chinese-American) wives (and husbands). So yes, obviously, those kids (some of whom I went to school with) still “look Chinese,” even though their family had been in town longer than pretty much anyone else’s. But how “Chinese” any mixed-race Chinese-American person “looks” depends on the individual.
I don’t think you can assume that every Chinese-American kid you see today who IYO looks really Asian therefore must be the product of 1st or 2nd generation Chinese immigrants. Some are, probably most are. But, yes, the Chinese were active in building the West as early as the 1860s and, yes, they largely stayed in the States and, yes, (presumably) they had kids.
But why would you expect those kids to look one particular way?
Inside joke for anyone living in the San Jose area.
Mixed race children born in the mid 19th century would be the great-great-great grandparents of children born today. Why should those modern children be more obviously Chinese than they are, say, Irish, or Cherokee, or Black, or whatever else their other ancestors might have been?