In Wing-Wa Village, Moon Chin grew up with his mother, sister, and brother behind the dingy, sun-seared, windowless exterior walls of a single-story, mud-brick house slowly crumbling back into the earth from which it had been raised. Crunchy lichens sprouted from the roof tiles. The interior was much more cheery, built around a large cistern in an open courtyard, and aunts and cousins inhabited adjacent houses. A few elderly men lazed about the village, whiling away their retirements, but the village was almost entirely devoid of adult, working-age men. For several generations, “old” and “new” Wing-Wa villages had subsisted largely on money sent home by men who worked in Hong Kong, Macau, Canton, or the United States.

The clayey soil around the village wasn’t particularly fertile. Families raised vegetables in small, carefully cultivated plots worked by women and children wearing conical sun hats of woven bamboo, and they manufactured their growing soil by mixing sand and “night soil” fertilizer – human excrement they assiduously refused to let go to waste. A low mud brick wall surrounded the village, built more to pen in pigs and chickens than it was to keep bandits or wild animals at bay, and a small tree- and weed- covered hillock rose behind the hamlet. It was a thoroughly unremarkable place.

Moon Chin started school at age nine, attending class in a one-room building. He studied Chinese characters and began learning to read, but halfway through the year, Moon’s mother received a letter from her husband that changed Moon’s landscape entirely. Penned by a Chinese scribe in America since Joe Chin could neither read nor write, and read aloud by one in China since Moon’s mother was similarly illiterate, the letter announced that Joe Chin would come home in the spring of 1923, and that Moon Chin would return with him to the United States the following year.

Day after day, Moon Chin asked when Father would arrive. Mother had no idea. She only knew he was coming, the letter hadn’t said when. Moon Chin wondered what his father would be like, and what it would be like to cross an ocean. Time stretched into weeks, then months, but one day Moon Chin’s father was home, a grown man leaving large footfalls on the tile floors and basking in the glory of being home from Gum Shan, the Gold Mountain. Moon spent the next year pleading for stories about the strange land peopled with red-haired foreign barbarians. His father waxed on and on about the economic opportunities he’d discovered in a place called Baltimore.

Next: Moon Chin goes to America — and the country welcomes him by putting him in jail.

Continued from yesterday, part 3 of 3…

At 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, the San Andreas Fault ruptured off the coast southwest of San Francisco, triggering a monstrous earthquake that hammered the city for 45 seconds, collapsing and toppling buildings. Fires sprang up in the wreckage, and the many small conflagrations burned together until they’d merged into a massive flaming maelstrom that raged for three days, devoured 490 city blocks and left 225,000 people homeless. As many as 3,000 people died in the twinned catastrophes.[1]

Chinatown was devastated. Most Chinese survived the disaster with nothing besides what they’d physically carried from the flames, but the apocalyptic devastation held a surprise benefit for poor, working-class Chinese who’d been denied the opportunity to naturalize by the Exclusion Acts of the last three decades – among the 28,188 destroyed buildings were San Francisco’s City Hall and the Hall of Records. The quake-sprung fire had incinerated the city’s birth and its citizenship documentation. Like thousands of Chinese all over the United States, Joe Chin swore he’d been born in the ruined city. The immigration service couldn’t prove otherwise, and United States v. Wong Kim Ark made them all American citizens.[2]

Thus minted a citizen, Joe Chin worked in the United States for another six years, sending money to his family in China all the while. In 1912, he returned to Wing-Wa village to see his wife, daughter, and the nine-year old son he’d never met. His wife became pregnant again during his visit, and 9 months later, under mosquito netting attended by a midwife, she gave birth to a third child, a son they named him Moon Fun Chin.

Soon after the birth, Joe Chin returned alone to the United States. He couldn’t take his family because his two older children would destroy the post-earthquake fiction he’d built with the U.S. immigration. However, when he reached U.S. soil, Joe Chin announced to American authorities that he’d married and fathered a son while in China. Joe Chin was an American citizen, and any child he fathered, anywhere in the world, automatically qualified for citizenship. Moon Fun Chin may have been born in an obscure South China village, and he may have learned Cantonese ten years before he ever heard English spoken, but he was born an American citizen  – courtesy of the San Francisco earthquake.[3]

Tomorrow: Moon Chin finally meets his father — at age ten.

[1] Chang, Iris, The Chinese in America, footnote to page 146: “Between 1855 and 1934, a child born abroad legally gained U.S. citizenship if his father was a U.S. citizen at the time of the birth, and had lived in the United States before the birth.”

[2] SF earthquake; also, Winchester, Simon, A Crack at the Edge of the World.

[3] Moon Chin’s story of his father obtaining U.S. citizenship in the earthquake: author’s interviews with Moon Chin; Chang, Iris, The Chinese in America, pp. 145-147, corroborates the fact that many Chinese obtained American citizenship after the San Francisco Earthquake; as does Winchester, Simon, A Crack at the Edge of the World, pp. 343-350.

(Winchester is a superb writer, I highly recommend his books, particularly The Map that Changed the World and The Professor and the Madman, both bestsellers. A little more obscure, but relevant to my work on China’s Wings, is The River at the Center of the World, about the Yangtze. Iris Chang is also good, and I suggest both The Chinese in America and her Rape of Nanking.)

Continued from yesterday.

Predictably, the Chinese suffered a backlash. Working-class whites felt that disciplined Chinese toil forced them to work harder for less pay. In 1871, a dozen Chinese were killed in a Los Angeles race riot – including a 12 year-old boy hanged by a Caucasian mob; in 1877, ten thousand disgruntled whites laid siege to San Francisco’s Chinatown in a three-day orgy of hatred, arson, looting, and assault. Fear of the “Yellow Peril” led President Arthur to sign the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which imposed a ten-year ban on the immigration of Chinese laborers and denied Chinese persons the right to naturalize as U.S. citizens. Congress made the Exclusion Act even more onerous in 1884, amending it to allow only those Chinese persons who had been in the United States prior to 1880 the right to travel freely between the two countries. The legislation seemed to legitimize anti-Chinese pogroms. Twenty-eight Chinese were murdered in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885. An indemnity was paid, but there were no prosecutions – the Federal government told Chinese diplomats that it wasn’t responsible for crimes committed in a territory that wasn’t yet a state. In February, 1886, President Grover Cleveland declared martial law and sent Federal troops to Seattle to quell a series of anti-Chinese riots. The following year, 31 Chinese miners were murdered and robbed in Hell’s Canyon, Oregon. The Chinese Exclusion Act expired in 1892, but Congress passed the Geary Act to extend the ban for another ten years. When the Geary Act expired, Congress made the ban permanent.[1]

Despite the egregious persecution, the Chinese in America continued to work hard at difficult, low-paying jobs, saving money and improving their lives. They formed legal associations to protect themselves and seek redress from some of the systemic ills. In 1895, U.S. immigration officials detained Wong Kim Ark, a 21-year old man who had been born in San Francisco, and denied him the right to reenter the United States on the grounds that he was an unwanted person of Chinese blood. Wong Kim Ark counter-claimed that his birth on U.S. soil granted him the full rights of American citizenship, regardless of his racial ancestry. United States v. Wong Kim Ark went to the United States Supreme Court, and on March 28, 1898, the court ruled in Mr. Wong’s favor. Article I of the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War, was quite explicit on the subject – “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”[2] The decision would have far-reaching consequences in the lives of Joe Chin and that of his son.

Joe Chin came to the United States at a time when immigration policy made it very difficult for Chinese laborers to enter the country. In 1903, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) rejected one-quarter of the Chinese trying to enter the United States.[3] But somehow, it isn’t known how, Joe Chin did manage to enter. He might have succeeded in classifying himself as a merchant or a student and thereby eluded the Chinese labor ban. He may have bribed a corrupt immigration official, of which there were many. He might have slipped into the United States surreptitiously. Possibly, he was accepted through proper channels. Once on American soil, like many other Chinese immigrants, Joe Chin gravitated to San Francisco. He took lodgings in Chinatown, found a job, and began sending money home to his family. Three years after Joe Chin’s arrival, the San Francisco earthquake made him an American citizen.

Part two of three, continued tomorrow… Part III

[1] Los Angeles riot of 1871: Chang, Iris, The Chinese in America, pp. 121; pillage of Chinatown in 1877: Ibid., pp. 127; Chinese Exclusion Laws: Ibid., pp. 132-156; Rock Springs massacre: Ibid. , pp. 133-134; Seattle anti-Chinese pogram: Ibid., pp. 133; Hell’s Canyon massacre: Ibid., pp. 134-135; the Geary Act, its expiration, and the extension of the ban on Chinese immigration: Ibid. , pp. 136.

[2]United States V. Wong Kim Ark, one of the great civil rights decisions.

[3] The one-quarter rejection rate is the statistic for 1903: Chang, Iris, The Chinese in America, pp. 142.

Moon Chin was born on April 13, 1914 in Wing-Wa Village, a tiny hamlet in the undulating coastal lowlands of Kwangtung Province about 60 miles up the Pearl River from Macau and a half a day’s walk west of the riverbank — a place so obscure that it didn’t have its own store. Moon wouldn’t hear English spoken until he was ten years old, but he was born an American citizen courtesy of the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

In order to understand how that came to pass, one has to jump back a generation to Chin Kwok-tung, Moon Chin’s father, who was born in 1880. Around the turn of the 20^th Century, Chin Kwok-tung married a young woman from the nearby Toi clan, the result of a rigorous inter-family negotiation mediated by a professional matchmaker. As was customary, he didn’t lay eyes on his bride until the wedding. In 1902 or 1903, Chin Kwok-tung anglicized his name to Joe Chin, left his infant daughter and pregnant wife, and crossed the Pacific Ocean crammed into the steerage hold of a side-wheel steamer, one of the tens of thousands of impoverished Chinese men who had left South China in the last fifty years and sailed to the United States, lured to Gum Shan, the “Gold Mountain,” by stories of easy-made wealth and wide-open opportunity. Some of which were actually true. A few Chinese had struck riches in the California Gold Rush; others staked land and made money in agriculture; some began successful business ventures. The vast majority didn’t enjoy such good fortune, however, but the United States did afford them opportunity to work hard, and for the most part, to retain their earnings.[i]

In harsh western conditions, Chinese labor had proved to be a foreman’s dream. Between 1864 and 1869, more than ten thousand Chinese men worked sunrise to sunset, six days a week, braving landslides, blizzards, and avalanches in the Sierra Nevada and withering heat in the Great Basin deserts to hack, shovel, chisel, drill, blast, and carry the hundreds of thousands of tons of earth and rock necessary to build the western half of the transcontinental railroad, 690 miles of Central Pacific track laid east from Sacramento, California to Promontory Point, Utah. From 1870 to 1885, thousands of Chinese men mucked through thigh-deep tule swamps constructing the levees, dikes, and drainage ditches that converted five million acres of the Sacramento River Delta into productive farmland. In other parts of the country, Chinese immigrants worked in mines, canned salmon, opened shops, restaurants, and laundries . Chinese labor contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the economic development of the United States and they did it for wages their Caucasian counterparts considered unacceptable.[ii] The Chinese are “quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and as industrious as the day is long,” wrote Mark Twain in Roughing It in 1872. “A disorderly Chinaman is rare,” he continued, “and a lazy one does not exist.”[iii]

Part one of three, to be continued tomorrow… Here’s Part II

[i] Joe Chin’s history and details of Moon Chin’s early life: Moon Chin’s Oral History; author interviews with Moon Chin, September 10, 2004, September 17, 2004, July 15, 2005; telephone follow-ups in the summer of 2005; Moon Chin isn’t sure exactly when his father first came to the United States. He thinks 1902 or 1903 is most likely. The majority of overseas Chinese hailed from South China: Bixby, Harold M., Topside Rickshaw, Chapter VI, pp. 59; author’s interview with Moon Chin, September 17, 2004

[ii] Transcontinental Railroad statistics: Chang, Iris, The Chinese in America, pp. 53-64; five million acres reclaimed in the Sacramento River delta: Chang, Iris, The Chinese in America, pp. 72-73. Chang’s book is excellent. I also highly recommend her Rape of Nanking, an important but extraordinarily disturbing book. Chang’s website.

[iii] Twain, Mark, Roughing It.