Chapter 1
Gold Mountain
Huie Kin grew up in Wing Ning, a tiny village of about seventy people, all from the same clan, tucked away in the hills of Taishan, an impoverished, mountainous county in the Pearl River Delta. At one end of the village was a bamboo grove; on the other was a fishpond; housewives gossiped at the communal well, near the entrance to the village. Huie’s house was a sturdy brick construction with a thatched roof. He lived in one room with his father and the family cow. His mother slept in the other room. They shared a compound with another family, separated by a courtyard. Because the space was so cramped, Huie’s two brothers stayed in the village shrine at night; his two sisters spent their nights at a home for unmarried girls. Rice fields surrounded the village. During harvest season, the men worked in the fields, while the women tended to the home. At the age of eleven, Huie started attending the village school but dropped out after a few years.
One day, a member of Huie’s clan returned from America with stories of gold found in riverbeds. Huie grew obsessed with traveling to Gold Mountain, as the faraway land was called. He and three cousins vowed to go to America together. To Huie’s surprise, his father readily agreed to their plan—he had also heard the tales of people who had returned from abroad with gold in their pockets. Huie’s father borrowed the money for his son’s passage from a wealthy neighbor, using their family farm as security on the loan. On a spring day in 1868, the cousins left their village before daybreak, each with just a bedroll and a bamboo basket carrying their belongings. Huie was in his early teens. His mother packed them biscuits for their journey. They caught a small boat to Hong Kong. While waiting for their ship to America to depart, Huie idled in Hong Kong, spending his days on the waterfront, where he saw his first Europeans, “strange people, with fiery hair and blue-grey eyes.” Finally, they set sail for America on a large ship with three heavy masts and billowing sails.
A vast majority of Chinese immigration to America in the nineteenth century would originate from just four counties, the Siyi, in the western part of the Pearl River Delta: Taishan, where a quarter of the population would ultimately leave for overseas; Kaiping; Enping; and Xinhui. The inhabitants of the Four Counties were mostly farmers, though the land was hilly and rocky. The climate was temperate all year round. The mountains that surrounded the Siyi on three sides meant its people were isolated from the rest of the country. Why this parcel of China, no bigger than the state of Connecticut, drove so much emigration to America remains the subject of some debate. When the people of Siyi began making their way to America, it was a time of upheaval in their homeland. The population of Guangdong had surged in the first half of the nineteenth century, making land increasingly scarce. Political tumult was also roiling China. The worst unrest came from the Taiping Rebellion, which killed at least ten million people between 1851 and 1864. In Guangdong province, an insurgency by a secret society, who became known as the “red turbans,” and a savage conflict between the native Punti population and the Hakka, a minority group, contributed to the turmoil. Yet these explanations alone seem inadequate. Other regions of China experienced greater economic privations that did not lead to widespread migration. The timing and geography of the political disturbances do not correspond neatly with the exodus overseas. A decisive factor seems to have been that the inhabitants of the Pearl River Delta were unusually familiar with the West. Some of the earliest Chinese writings about the United States, dating back to the early nineteenth century, came from the region. Guangzhou, the provincial capital (known then as Canton), had a long history as an important trading port and was a frequent destination for American merchants and missionaries. Hong Kong, a hub of trade and commerce, was just a few days’ journey away by boat.
Most of the vessels crisscrossing the Pacific early in the gold rush were cargo ships that lacked passenger quarters. Shipmasters stuffed the Chinese sojourners into overcrowded holds that lacked sanitation; food and water were usually meager. In 1854, a ship arrived in San Francisco harbor with a hundred dead Chinese passengers, a fifth of those on board. One captain contracted to carry Chinese to America aboard his ship, the Santa Teresa, encountered an epic storm. He rushed to lower the sails and seal all the openings to the hold where the Chinese were confined, so that the ship would not sink if it capsized. The ship lay helpless to the waves and the wind. After several days of this, the storm began to subside. A terrible odor, screaming, and wailing came from belowdecks. “The Chinese were scared, thirsty and hungry from the ordeal of several days of living in an inferno of darkness and agony, not knowing where they were and what would happen to them,” an account later said. Several people had died. The crew commenced feeding the Chinese rice, a process that took several hours. The dead below the hatches were brought up by the Chinese themselves, and after a prayer was read, they were slid into the sea. “There can be no excuse before God or man for the terrible mortality which has occurred on some of the vessels containing Chinese passengers,” William Speer, a Presbyterian missionary who cared for many Chinese after they disembarked in San Francisco, later wrote. During Huie Kin’s trip, his eldest cousin, Huie Ngou, the leader of their band of travelers, suddenly became feverish and struggled to breathe. He passed out and later died; his body was wrapped in a sheet and lowered into the ocean. Huie and his other cousins stood for hours staring out into the inky blackness of the sea, overwhelmed by grief. When the fog lifted, on a cool September morning, and they finally sighted land, Huie later wrote that the feeling was indescribable: “To be actually at the ‘Golden Gate’ of the land of our dreams!”
The individual stories of the earliest Chinese arrivals in America have mostly slipped through historians’ grasps. In 1878, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle set out to investigate how the “Mongolian octopus developed and fastened its tentacles upon the city.” The reporter’s first stop was the offices of the Sam Yup Company, one of the mutual aid associations that looked after the interests of Chinese immigrants, on Dupont Street, in the city’s Chinese quarter. (Sam Yup is the Cantonese romanization for Sanyi, the three counties that surround Guangzhou.) Interviews with an official there who spoke good English, as well as other “leading Chinamen,” yielded the account of the merchant Chum Ming, who they said had come to America in 1847.
On February 2, 1848, a pioneering merchant named Charles V. Gillespie arrived in San Francisco aboard the American brigantine Eagle. Several years earlier, in 1841, Gillespie had become the first American resident in Hong Kong. He traveled frequently between Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Macau, and had made a trip to California the year before to sell Chinese goods. On this trip, he brought with him a cargo of silk handkerchiefs, velvet slippers, rhubarb, and tea. Two Chinese men and one woman accompanied Gillespie. He later described them as “the first Chinese who came here.” After the discovery of gold, the two men went off to the mines; Gillespie himself became a gold dealer, choosing to remain in America. The Chinese woman, who went by the name Maria Seise, stayed on as a servant with his family for more than thirty years, joining the Trinity Episcopal Church and becoming a close companion of Gillespie’s wife. Seise’s story was unusual. She had run away from her home in Guangzhou and made her way to Macau, where she worked for a Portuguese family. She later married a Portuguese sailor, who never returned from a sea voyage. Seise traveled to the Sandwich Islands as a servant with another American family, before returning to China and eventually finding employment with the Gillespies.
In July 1849, the manifest of a British sailing vessel, the Swallow, recorded that an elderly Chinese merchant named Yuan Sheng arrived in San Francisco, along with two other Chinese passengers. Notably, this was not Yuan’s first trip across the Pacific. He had previously spent time in New York and then gone on to Charleston, South Carolina, before returning to China. In America, he went by the name Norman Assing—also spelled, variously, Ah-Sing and Asing. He spoke fluent English and wore a stovepipe hat atop his queue. In San Francisco, he opened a restaurant and trading company.
By the beginning of 1850, there were about eight hundred Chinese in San Francisco. In the fall, three hundred of them had gathered at the Canton restaurant on Jackson Street and appointed Selim E. Woodworth, a former naval commander and businessman, as their adviser. They adopted a resolution acknowledging their vulnerable position: “strangers as we are, in a strange land, unacquainted with the language and customs of this, our adopted country,” the Chinese needed a counselor “in the event of any unforeseen difficulties arising.” For the new arrivals from China, America was a foreboding place. In 1850, a Chinese merchant named Luchong sailed through the Golden Gate, the narrow strait that marks the entrance of San Francisco Bay. Luchong reflected later in a letter to a cousin about his soaring optimism after glimpsing land. Soon after dropping anchor, however, a fleet of pirates on boats scrambled aboard, intent on robbing the passengers. They hurled Luchong into a dinghy, where an oarsman tried to rob him. After a struggle, his attacker tied him to a post on the wharf by his long braid. Luchong managed to cut himself loose with a small blade from his pouch. He wandered along the streets of San Francisco, marveling at the entertaining costumes of the people. Luchong later, however, found himself being summoned by a distinguished-looking man, whom he followed, only to find himself under arrest, suspected of being an accomplice in a robbery. “I was seized by the nape of the neck and hurried down a dark staircase and thrown like a sack into a dirty, dingy cell.” He ended his first day’s adventures in California on the floor of a jail cell.
Notwithstanding Luchong’s experience, at least initially, the reception for the Chinese was generally positive. In the summer of 1850, city leaders in San Francisco held a public ceremony to welcome them. On August 28, the Chinese assembled in Portsmouth Square, in front of other residents, and were presented with Chinese books, Bibles, and religious tracts that had been printed in Guangzhou. Frederick Woodworth, the vice consul of the San Francisco port, Mayor John Geary, and two pastors, the Rev. Albert Williams, of the First Presbyterian Church, and the Rev. Timothy Dwight Hunt, the moderator of the Presbytery of San Francisco, delivered remarks. Norman Assing, the merchant who had arrived on the Swallow, translated the speeches into Cantonese. Williams later wrote that the speakers were united in conveying “the pleasure shared in common by the citizens of San Francisco, at their presence” and the hope that more of their brethren would cross the ocean to join them in America, where they would enjoy “welcome and protection.” Geary, the city’s mayor, invited them to join a funeral procession the next day honoring President Zachary Taylor, who had died seven weeks earlier. The news had only just arrived in California.
At eleven in the morning the following day, a procession of city personages escorted a funeral hearse pulled by four white horses. A band played a solemn dirge as the procession wound its way through streets crowded with mourners. Bringing up the rear of the procession were the Chinese, dressed in their native finery. The next day, Assing delivered a formal message to Geary, thanking him for his invitation to take part in the ceremony: “The China Boys feel proud of the distinction you have shown them, and will always endeavor to merit your good opinion and the good opinion of the citizens of their adopted country.”
In January 1852, during his state of the state address, Governor John McDougal called for more Chinese to come to California. McDougal, a Democrat, had advocated at the state’s constitutional convention for excluding from California certain classes of Black people. He also supported a fugitive slave law, which the legislature later enacted, ensuring that formerly enslaved Africans who escaped in California could be reclaimed by their masters. But he believed the Chinese could be a source of cheap labor for white Americans. He urged the legislature to focus on the issue of land reclamation and the drainage of swampland, suggesting the Chinese, “one of the most worthy classes of our new adopted citizens,” could help with this work.
Many California businessmen envisioned a golden age of trade between China and the United States and embraced Chinese immigration as part of that interchange. A few months after McDougal’s address, the Alta California, the first daily newspaper in California, took note of the growing number of “Celestials,” as the Chinese were often called, arriving in the city. “Scarcely a ship arrives here that does not bring an increase to this worthy integer of our population,” the article said. “They are among the most industrious, quiet, patient people among us.” The article predicted that one day the halls of Congress would be “graced by the presence of a long-queued Mandarin sitting, voting, and speaking,” and that “China Boys will yet vote at the same polls, study at the same schools and bow at the same Altar as our own countrymen.”
Copyright © 2025 by Michael Luo. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
