“The Great Demoralization”: race, intimacy, and empire in the American West’s anti-Chinese movement, c. 1848–1892

ABSTRACT

This study examines the entanglement of empire and intimacy in the anti-Chinese movement of the late nineteenth-century American West. Situating this particular manifestation of race-making against the backdrop of nineteenth-century empire building, this article delineates how Euro-Americans pathologized Chinese migrants’ sexual practices as contradictory to settler colonial futurity. It reads across Asian American history, the study of American empire, and the history of sexuality, historiographies that have at times woven in and out of conversation with one another, but nonetheless remain discrete.

KEYWORDS:

• Empire
• race
• Asian American
• sexuality

Introduction

In 1848, upon hearing that gold had been struck in the West, New York physician Arthur B. Stout joined hordes of optimists to settle on the fringes of American empire. Fourteen years later, after gaining professional notoriety in San Francisco, Stout turned his attention to settlers he regarded as distinct from the “Caucasian Race of men” and published Chinese Immigration and the Physiological Causes of the Decay of a Nation, in which he asserted that the prolonged influx of Chinese migrants would inevitably result in sexual intimacy between superior and inferior races. Buttressed by his medical authority, Stout wrote, “By the adoption of bad blood we voluntarily introduce the deadliest foe to our existence … By intermarrying with Europeans, we are but reproducing our own Caucasian type; by commingling with the Eastern Asiatics, we are creating degenerate hybrids.”¹

The concerns raised in Chinese Immigration about preventing the “combination of distinct existing races” in the “new American embranchment” are emblematic of how the realm of intimacy structured racial hierarchies on the imagined frontier.² This article explores the entanglement of empire and intimacy in the anti-Chinese movement of the late nineteenth-century American West. In particular, it examines how exclusionary discourses pathologized the sexual practices of Chinese migrants as antithetical to the consolidation of the continental land empire and settler colonial futurity. The rhetorical construction of threatened white femininities and threatening Chinese femininities reflected anxieties over sexual relationships between Euro-American and Chinese settlers subverting the imperial racial taxonomy. Public interest coalesced around these anxieties and legitimized the surveillance, policing, and legal exclusion of Chinese subjects. Roughly bracketed by 1848 and 1892, years that respectively signify the initial large-scale Gold Rush migrations of Chinese workers to the West and the Geary Act’s extension of the original Chinese Exclusion Act, this study situates a particular manifestation of settler colonialism in the field of global imperialisms. In doing so, it reads across three historiographies – Asian American history, the study of American empire, and the history of sexuality – which have at times woven in and out of conversation with one another, but nonetheless remain discrete.

Stout’s diatribe was one nativist voice in a field of exclusionary discourses that informed the designation of “Chinese” as a racial category incommensurable with national membership. For Asian American historians, the advent of Chinese migration to what is now known as the American West represents a seminal moment in domestic race-making. They tell a familiar story of humble immigrants arriving in a new land only to be met with a campaign of racial violence, punctuated by hundreds of Western communities driving out Chinese residents in the 1870s and 1880s and the formal exclusion of practically all Chinese migrants in 1882. Informed by the rise of social history in the 1960s, scholarly explanations of the anti-Chinese movement are steeped in materialist critique. Historians typically emphasize the degradation of free white labor as the rhetorical linchpin of the crusade against Chinese migrants. Rallying for Chinese exclusion mobilized and helped produce a racialized class consciousness for white labor groups.³ Within this scholarly tradition, the cries of Stout, a prestigious middle-class doctor, are unheard. Unlike many similar anti-Chinese pamphlets of the late nineteenth century, Chinese Immigration’s primary concern was not that of a racial labor crisis. Stout rejected the importation of Chinese workers on the basis that they would dismantle the American “race” and Manifest Destiny; the maintenance of empire, rather than the sanctity of white labor, served as the fulcrum of his nativism. “Who,” Stout mused, “shall whiten the plains with their homesteads? Who shall form the families of the Republic?”⁴

While there is a distinct historiography of labor and Chinese exclusion, empire is a murkier concept in Asian American history. In 1993 cultural historian Amy Kaplan astutely argued that within American studies relations of race, gender, ethnicity, and class are understood as internal divisions within a monolithic nation, rather than through the logic of global empire-building.⁵ There is now a well-developed historiography of America as empire, but the tendency for historians of the continental United States to supplant discourses of empire with those of domestic history has not been entirely dismantled. Indigenous scholars have been instrumental in theorizing how the power differential between Indigenous nations and the United States has rhetorically remade white settlers as the so-called rightful inhabitants of the land. Taking American sovereignty for granted blurs the contours of settler colonial formation and even allows for the presumption that only extracontinental expansion “counts” as empire, or the exceptionalist refusal to accept that the United States was ever an empire.⁶ The discipline of Asian American studies emerged in the 1960s out of anti-colonial student movements, but the proclivity to, in Moon-Ho Jung’s words, “[posit] nation against empire” and favor the former has not escaped the field.⁷ In fact, the popular depiction of Asian subjects as “humble immigrants” seeking acceptance within an unaccepting nation state only reifies the assumption of a static United States with the power to incorporate so-called “foreigners” as “domestic” citizens.⁸

The racial antagonism in the lead-up to Chinese exclusion cannot be understood without reference to the United States’ cultural construction of Manifest Destiny and rapid empire-building in the West. The first Chinese migrants settled at the edge of the Turnerian frontier during the Mexican-American War and ongoing warfare with Indigenous nations, which violently facilitated the expansion of the United States. Moreover, the anti-Chinese movement temporally coincided with the Civil War and the ensuing period of Reconstruction, which heightened national hope for consolidation and the drive to conquer “virgin” territory in the West.⁹ Historians of the American West have recently expressed wariness over the frequent evocation of Manifest Destiny as a simplistic explanatory model in light of the “messy contingencies” of the nineteenth-century North American borderlands; powerful Indigenous empires and political disagreements over expansion ensured that American sovereignty in the West was not guaranteed.¹⁰

Nonetheless, there exists utility in the concept of Manifest Destiny, not as a monolithic discourse that drove the consolidation of empire but as a discursive field that flexibly employed racial logics to make legible the contradictions of empire, including the presence of Chinese settlers. While exclusionists believed that immigration restriction would protect settler colonial futurity, cosmopolitan capitalists intent on taking advantage of migrant labor, conducting economic imperialism in China, and gaining influence in Asia rejected exclusion.¹¹ Thus, both pro- and anti-exclusion ideologies rested upon imperial logics, but the former ultimately won out. This debate existed and was informed by the international “transimperial terrain.”¹² Manifest Destiny existed within a global network of ideas about how imperial power should be wielded. American settler colonialism took place alongside “high” European imperialism and preceded the United States’ own extracontinental excursion in the Philippines. Though these regimes exercised power in different ways, they shared interest in categorizing and controlling people through various measures of racial membership. As other colonial locales – such as Singapore, Australia, and South Africa – also grappled with the global “Chinese problem,” the American West produced specific racial “knowledge” on Chinese migrants to define them as inferior settlers.¹³

In spatially centering this study on the “West,” I refer less to a specific region – Western historians have frequently defined the West as the area west of the Mississippi River Valley for geographic clarity – than to an imagined space exceptionalized in American public consciousness by mythic metanarratives of territorial conquest.¹⁴ This is not to say that American empire only “happened” in the contact zone of the West, but to highlight its specificity as the center of nineteenth-century continental imperial desire. The majority of early Chinese migrants settled in California; the 1890 U.S. census recorded that 72,000 of the 107,000 “Chinese” people in the United States lived there.¹⁵ Nonetheless, by not limiting itself to California, this study highlights how parallel imperial discourses develop in diverse settler colonial formations. As sprawling metropolises like San Francisco contemplated the relationship between empire, intimacy, and Chinese migration, so too did small communities in the Washington and Oregon Territories. The legacies of these related but disparate colonial formations manifest in the current state of Asian American historiography.

Attempts to insert the history of the anti-Chinese movement into the historiography of empire must reckon with the analytic uncertainties produced by assumptions about how imperialism operates. Like white settlers, Asian migrants are not indigenous to North America, and have also contributed to the displacement of indigenous peoples.¹⁶ That their policing can be considered an element of American empire confuses the cherished dichotomies of metropole and colony and colonizer and colonized. Instead of “fitting” the experiences of Chinese Americans into these analytic categories, this study endeavors to understand how imperial power undergirds the development of a racial taxonomy of settlers. In other words, even as Asian Americans are settlers, they are subject to the imperial processes and ideas that defined racial membership. As Euro-American settlers posited themselves as the “true” inhabitants of North America, they made Asian settlers incongruous to the land; “mixing” between the two threatened the authority of racialized imperial rule. American empire is both unquestionable and precarious, and Asian migrants are treated both as an internally colonized people to be controlled and an alien people to be expelled. To understand these tensions is to see how strategies of empire shift to account for racial as well as gendered and sexual contours which defy dichotomization.

As the borders between the domestic and foreign were thrown into question, Euro-Americans raised alarm over the possibility of a reversed settler colonialism whereby Chinese migrants would overthrow white supremacy and conquer American territory.¹⁷ One California newspaper lamented that the numbers of Chinese would grow until “an army of half a million others … follow on and spread throughout the Middle and Southern States.”¹⁸ Stout too employed a metaphor of a Chinese attack, but saw an even greater danger:

Better would it be for our country that the hordes of Genghis Khan should overflow the land, and with armed hostility devastate our vallies with the sabre and the fire-brand than that those more pernicious hosts, in the garb of friends, should insidiously poison the well-springs of life, and spreading far and wide, gradually undermine and corrode the vitals of our strength and prosperity.¹⁹

For Stout, sexual relations between Chinese and white settlers were the utmost threat to American empire. Since Foucault’s assertion that sexuality is a function of power, scholars of colonialism have come to unpack how states are principally concerned with the management of sexual life.²⁰ Ann Stoler has been particularly influential in illustrating why and how imperial regimes attempt to police individual intimacies. Her work on French Indochina and the Netherlands Indies has elucidated how colonial officials understood métissage – mixing between Europeans and Indigenous peoples – as a point of imperial vulnerability.²¹ This example is anchored in a specific geography and temporality but, in line with the comparative ethos of colonial studies, the racial logics that Stoler excavates provide a fruitful backdrop for the contradictions that Chinese settlers posed to American Manifest Destiny. Stout argued that the preservation of American power was dependent on racial purity; this scientific ideal had to be sanctioned politically via Chinese exclusion. Thus, the maintenance of American empire required making public the ostensibly “private” matters of desire, sex, cohabitation, and child-rearing so that they could be known, classified as “proper” or “improper,” and controlled.

The concept of improper sexual intimacies is both familiar and elusive to the study of early Chinese settlers in the American West. Exclusionists argued that Chinese male laborers lived in “bachelor societies” – communities of male migrant workers without any women, namely wives – that defied the vision of normative Victorian domesticity. Chinese workers’ failure to establish nuclear heterosexual homes represented an innate cultural deviance. Anti-Chinese rhetoric contended that, without the civilizing influence of women, Chinese workers turned to “vice,” such as opium smoking, gambling, and criminal activity.²² In this formulation, expressions of racial difference were simultaneously reflections of gendered difference. Illicit Chinese masculinities were imbued with additional implications at the nascent edge of empire. Historians such as Amy Greenberg and Christopher Herbert have concluded that white settlers, mercenaries, and writers embraced varying visions of “frontier masculinity” to justify American expansionism. They named these visions “martial” and “restrained” masculinity; whereas the former stressed physical dominance and freedom, the latter underscored industriousness, prudence, and sexual repression.²³ By failing to comply with these racialized masculinities, Chinese men existed outside of the social norms associated with the maintenance of empire.

The dominance of the “bachelor society” thesis assumes that Chinese men formed a transient community segregated from Euro-American society. Such a focus on Chinese insularity has not accounted for fears of sexual liaisons between Chinese men and white women. U.S. historians attuned to gender will be familiar with the need to safeguard white womanhood as a recurring rationalization for violence against racialized men, especially African American men in the postbellum South.²⁴ Chinese men have largely been ignored as a sexual threat to white women, even though they were frequently deemed as such in public discourse about the so-called “Chinese problem.” Moreover, though men outnumbered women in the late nineteenth-century West, “frontier femininity” powerfully justified American settler colonial rule.²⁵ Amy Kaplan coined the term “manifest domesticity” to name the ways that ideas about women and domesticity become associated with the “civilized” nation, as opposed to the “savage” foreign sphere. In this framework, rather than operating within a separate “sphere” of domesticity, women and men were aligned in demarcating the national home against “the wild” in need of taming.²⁶ Middle-class white women upheld normative cultural practices of domesticity, including establishing nuclear families, caring for children, and keeping a clean home, against which non-white domestic arrangements were judged. Thus, when they developed intimate relationships with white women, Chinese men cast doubt on white femininity as a symbol of imperial prestige.

Euro-American womanhood defined itself in opposition to perceptions of Chinese femininity. While scholarly estimates put the population of Chinese women in the United States at 2,040 in 1870, exclusionists assumed that the vast majority of these women were prostitutes.²⁷ Newspapers often referred to all Chinese women simply as “lewd women,” “heathen harlots,” or “wretched creatures.”²⁸ Perhaps where the study of imperialism and sexuality is most developed across is in examinations of prostitution policy. Judith Walkowitz, Philippa Levine, Philip Howell, Alain Corbin, and Laura Briggs, among others, have argued that prostitution has been a historically ripe site for colonial surveillance, intervention, and regulation. They have emphasized how officials understood the prevalence of prostitution in non-white societies as evidence of primitivism, and colonized women as conduits of venereal disease.²⁹ White Westerners understood the phenomenon of Chinese prostitution with regard to its global racialization. The notion that the moral and medical deficiencies inscribed onto the figure of the Chinese prostitute could spread to Euro-American settlers, derailing white settler superiority, fueled anti-Chinese sentiment. Nayan Shah’s study of San Francisco’s Chinatown illuminates how public health officials demonized the neighborhood, including its prostitutes, as a medical threat to non-Chinese residents of the city. Though Shah’s research has been contributed immensely to the study of intimacies vis-à-vis American empire, his Contagious Divides is primarily a history of a local public health bureaucracy’s shifting conception of race over time.³⁰ Historicizing Chinese prostitution squarely through the culture of empire collapses the distinctions between “local,” “national,” and “global” issues.

Held to different codes of morality, Chinese men and women produced distinct discourses of aberrant intimacies. A variety of institutional strategies, such as vagrancy and miscegenation laws, developed to surveil and curb the “spread” of Chinese cultural deficiency. One of these strategies was government investigations, in which medical doctors attested to the scientific “fact” that interracial procreation produced racially inferior individuals. Medical testimonies also heavily featured in the imperial politics of Chinese prostitution. Doctors argued that Chinese women infected white society with venereal diseases, especially syphilis, and that their racial composition produced especially dangerous “strands” of disease. Public panic coalesced around the spread of disease to the white population, especially white boys, whose protection was central to imperial futurity. In turn, state and non-state authorities enforced regulatory measures to reform or exclude Chinese prostitution, including but not limited to the 1875 Page Act, which effectively barred Chinese women from the United States on the basis of their alleged sexual immorality.

Newspaper articles, medical periodicals, and government hearings are among the many discursive sites in which Chinese intimacies were publicly scrutinized. While the perspectives divulged in these documents are not monolithic, their intersections and contradictions generated authoritative, imperial “knowledge” on Chinese immigrants and their presumed intimate practices. From its inception, Asian American studies has strived to rescue previously “voiceless” historical actors from “the enormous condescension of posterity,” and emphasize Asian American agency.³¹ While there exists a handful of late nineteenth-century sources which illustrate Chinese American “resistance” to nativist discourses, they are nonetheless subsumed within archives produced by colonial imperatives. This article strives to make these imperatives legible even as they are masked by liberal narratives of national history. It does so with the recognition that Chinese settlers were not passive screens upon which colonial authorities projected their violent discourses, but also that reconstructing histories from below first requires discerning the archive’s codified dominance of colonial “knowledge.”

“Me Likee White Wife”: Chinese men, white women, and racial decline

Sociologist Mary Coolidge’s 1909 monograph Chinese Immigration is considered the first dedicated scholarly study of the anti-Chinese movement in the United States. Written in the midst of the exclusion era, it is an explicitly partisan critique of Western “race antipathy.” In her defense of Chinese migrants, Coolidge argues that Chinese men constituted ideal domestic workers since they posed no sexual threat to the women of the house:

There are thousands of families in California who have counted Chinese tradesmen and employees as friends; there are hundreds of women on lonely ranches who have been indebted to Chinamen for their safety, their comfort, even for nursing of themselves and their children when no other help was to be had … the only common man with whom as a class, a woman is perfectly safe, is the Chinaman.³²

Chinese Immigration both affirmed and confounded the popular nineteenth-century exclusionist rhetoric that Chinese men did not assimilate to American societal norms. Coolidge believed that they “assimilated” in so far as they were respectable workers who complemented and contributed to white middle-class livelihood, but did not embed themselves far enough into American life so as to form sexually intimate relationships with white women.

Over a century after the publication of Chinese Immigration, the notion that Chinese men lived within clannish communities and did not “physically assimilate” continues to be a main assumption within Asian American historiography.³³ Karen Leong’s study of “bachelor societies” argues that Euro-Americans cited the failure of Chinese men to “intermarry with the resident population” as a testament to abnormal gender relations and the incommensurability of Chinese settlership.³⁴ Indeed, exclusionist discourses consistently evoked the notion of immutable Chinese cultural difference. However, they rejected sexual relationships between Chinese men and white women on the basis that they would proliferate such cultural differences within white society. Periodicals, legal statutes, and government proceedings generated exclusionist fervor via sensationalized accounts of Chinese men, even domestic workers of the white women Coolidge deemed safe from improper sexual relations, living with, marrying, or rearing children with white women. Public interest centered on how white women in close proximity with Chinese men adopted vices specific to colonized peoples, particularly opium smoking. Police departments and local governments across the West surveilled Chinatowns to punish such cultural contagions, and these local efforts were situated within broader attempts to prevent racial degeneracy. Government inquiries into Chinese immigration, particularly the 1876 Congressional investigation into Chinese immigration and the 1878 California Constitutional Convention, informed the construction of miscegenation laws to curb the reproductive capacity of Chinese-white intimacies. Transnational eugenic discourses suffused the disparate strategies to guard white womanhood as a means of maintaining white settler rule. As the anti-Chinese movement mounted across the West, imperial power showed itself in the struggle to protect the moral guardians of the republic.

Publicizing and policing sexual-cultural contaminations

Mere days after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, newspapers across California printed the fictionalized musings of a “moon-eyed Celestial” relishing new-found freedoms: “Me votee, me swear, and do what I will, for such is the law of the Civil Rights Bill … Me likee be Judgee, me likee white wife; then Chinaman happee the rest of his life.”³⁵ Beneath its mockery, “John Chinaman’s Soliloquy” reveals the racial anxieties that gripped California and the West at large in the wake of Federal Reconstruction.³⁶ Post-emancipation, white workers raised alarm over contract Chinese laborers, dubbed “coolies,” whose ill-defined state of unfreedom incited panic over the nascent industrial capitalist order’s potential to degrade free labor.³⁷ Concurrently, mainstream political discourses, such as the “poem” above, warned that Reconstruction’s attempt to incorporate Black freedmen into nominal citizenship would mean the extension of excessive political freedoms to Chinese men.³⁸ Amidst concerns that the average “Joe Chinaman” would become a voter or judge, the idea that he would take a white wife animated the tension between local wishes and national Reconstruction policies.

The perceived crisis of Chinese men in the West forming erotic ties with white women reflected a broader equation of sex and political power in the post-bellum era. Across the United States and especially in the South, there was widespread intolerance among whites for liaisons between Black men and white women.³⁹ Transgressions across the color line came to represent a violent Black political takeover and were uniformly framed through the lens of rape. By the 1880s, public lynchings of Black “rapists” became commonplace performative reinforcements of the racial hierarchy.⁴⁰ Though the policing of Chinese-white intimacies paled in comparison to the reign of terror levied against Black men, Western anxieties at times coalesced around Chinese men’s supposed proclivity for sexual violence. The San Francisco Examiner suggested that Chinese men “outraged” white women in opium dens, and in 1887 a white mob in Colusa, California hanged seventeen-year-old Hong Di for killing a young woman out of “lust.”⁴¹ In general, however, anti-Chinese proponents were more preoccupied with delineating how Chinese men tainted the culture of white womanhood than they were with characterizing Chinese men as violent rapists.

News stories about transgressions between Chinese men and white women became constitutive of the regime of knowledge and documentation around Chinese migrants. One case of interracial intimacy in particular gripped public attention and generated infamy across partisan lines. The disproportionate newspaper coverage of the relationship between Wong Suey Wan and Sarah Burke in 1883 can potentially be attributed to the intrigue attached to certain elements of their story, such as their public displays of affection and the police hunt they incited. Despite their hyper-sensationalization, the archival remains of Wong and Burke typify how reporters narrated the extension of Chinese intimacies into white society as destructive to white womanhood, and how local institutions policed such intimacies to delimit the “foreign” within nominally “domestic” spaces.⁴²

The romance between Sarah Burke and Wong Suey Wan remained relatively consistent across news features. In January 1883 Burke was working as a “domestic” in Santa Cruz when she met Wong and immediately “became very much attached to him.” After being refused a marriage license and inflaming residents of Santa Cruz, the two fled the city. One article states that although the “citizens of Santa Cruz were hostile to such a marriage and drove out the moon-eyed Celestial from the town, she followed him to San Francisco.”⁴³ Upon hearing reports of Burke and Wong kissing at the San Francisco ferry terminal, journalists and the San Francisco police commenced an elaborate search for the couple across the city. Sergeant Bindsall, Corporal Avan, and Officer Travers soon found the two at 728 Jackson Street in Chinatown. There, Wong admitted that he had been “intimate” with Burke in Santa Cruz, and Burke told a journalist that she could smoke “two or three” pipes of opium. The police officers took the two to the station and charged them both with vagrancy, but the couple were ultimately released on bail. On 14 April, Wong and Burke were married under the legal provision allowing marriages to persons who have been living together as man and wife.⁴⁴

Coverage of the Wong and Burke chronicle underscored Burke’s adoption of racialized cultural deficiencies, especially opium smoking. As Chinatowns emerged in cities across the West, so too did anxieties around opium smoking, characterized as a specifically “Chinese” habit. Medical discourses concluded that the drug was associated with illnesses that deprived men of normative masculinity. Scribner’s Monthly contributor George Parsons Lathrop wrote that the opium addict “is no longer really a man but a malignant essence informing a cadaverous human shape.”⁴⁵ At odds with Victorian ideals of male industriousness, the supposed indifference caused by the drug pathologized Chinese men as socially dissolute. In addition, emboldened by the development of germ theory, public health officials saw “filthy” opium dens as indications that Chinese people were, by nature, unhygienic.⁴⁶ One journalist described Wong and Burke’s home as a “house of ill-fame … reeking with noisome smells, tobacco smoke, opium fumes.”⁴⁷ The spatial proximity of prostitution and opium in the couple’s lodgings linked depraved sexualities and inferior cultural habits. The most sensationalized “fact” about opium was that it functioned as an aphrodisiac. A Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel article on the couple describe “the opium debauch” as “the most seductive of all vices.”⁴⁸ Thus, opium smoking doubly imperilled the body politic through its degenerative effects and its instigation of corrupt sexual behaviors.

Controlling the racialized practice of opium smoking was a civilizing effort that justified imperial rule, but the racializing potential of opium to proliferate to white women endangered such rule. Though both white women and men in the United States partook in opium smoking, public attention to the former far eclipsed the latter. This discrepancy can be attributed to the associations of opium smoking with interracial sexual encounters. Journalists obsessively documented how white women living in close proximity to Chinese men adopted foreign cultural practices and what effects such practices had on them. In a Pacific Bee exposé on the white wives of Chinese men developing opium addictions it was stated of one woman: “Although there was no strain of Chinese blood in her veins, there was an odd expression in her face which made her look not unlike some of the Chinamen who flitted through the room.”⁴⁹ As white women literally began to turn Chinese, they abandoned the “conditions of domesticity … that distinguish civilization from savagery.”⁵⁰ These racial conditions were also subject to class logics. On their own, poor white women already signified the vulnerability of colonial difference, and their sexual relationships with Chinese men only affirmed their recalcitrance.⁵¹ However, women who “turned” from their “good homes” flouted the expectations of middle-class white femininity that upheld settler colonial rule. Not to be confused with Sarah Burke, in 1880, twenty-two-year-old Sarah Braun died from an opium overdose in Courtland, California. Like Burke, Braun was “seized with the romantic idea that the proper thing to do was wed … a moon-eyed son of the Orient,” and her story generated a similar news flurry.⁵² The Ventura Signal reported that Braun abandoned “all the usual blessings of home life” and was one of many young girls “of good families and occupying high positions in society, running off and marrying scapegraces and soon squandering whatever means as their wives possess, and then usually leave them to lead lives of shame or fill suicides’ graves.”⁵³ Rather than simply existing at the bottom of an imperial racial hierarchy reinforced by domesticity, Chinese men threatened to upturn that very hierarchy by imbuing white women, especially middle-class white women, with deviant practices contrary to normative domesticity.

Unease around Chinese-white intimacies manifested outside the realm of discussion through police interventions to reinforce racial boundaries. In the case of Burke and Wong, the San Francisco police attempted to suppress the couple’s relationship via a charge of vagrancy. Inherited from English laws that had persecuted the homeless for centuries, officials across nineteenth-century colonial geographies applied vagrancy charges to a host of practices, including but not limited to begging, dissent, and prostitution.⁵⁴ A month after the Burke and Wong case, another sensationalized news story about the relationship between a Chinese man and white woman broke. On 15 May 1883, the sight of “two white girls” in Sacramento Chinatown was enough to pique the suspicion of police officers on patrol. Upon being found in the home of Chinese resident Lee Yung, the police apprehended the women. At the station, one of the women, Pauline Fisher, told the officers that she wanted to marry Yung. The officers then charged her with vagrancy.⁵⁵ Understood in a global context, the application of vagrancy charges to Chinese-white intimacies in the American West were attempts to maintain social order in a diverse settler colonial contact zone.⁵⁶

The circumstances of Fisher’s arrest signify a climate of surveillance in which anyone suspected of racial transgressions came under close scrutiny. Citing their reputation for crime, local police officers maintained a consistent presence in Western Chinatowns; in the late nineteenth century the San Francisco police department had a designated “Chinatown Squad” to combat crime in the neighborhood.⁵⁷ Furthermore, public health officials frequently “raided” opium dens on the grounds that they were overcrowded and diseased.⁵⁸ The monitoring of Chinatowns constituted a surveillance modality to define the segregated neighborhood as a space beyond the borders of civil society.⁵⁹ Surveillance gave way to classification and documentation as a means to make populations governable. In 1885 the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco conducted an investigation that detailed the “mode of life of the Chinese.”⁶⁰ The resulting report listed nine addresses where there were “white women living and cohabiting with Chinamen in the relation of wives or mistresses.”⁶¹ As the geographies of civility became blurred, the state produced and published information to make public the “private” social arrangements that defied imperial norms of intimacy. The Board’s report concluded that “the Chinese at home are a race unfit in every aspect of life to mingle with and exist among a Christian community.”⁶² In the case of Chinese migrants, the desire to understand and control was also a settler colonial desire to expel undesirable racial others. However, Western governmental authorities perhaps best exemplified their investigative modality to contain Chinese-white intimacies through the regulation of racial mixing.

Legislating on racial mixture

More than fifteen years after his tenure as the Attorney General of California, Gold Rush settler and staunch exclusionist Frank M. Pixley found himself in a brief but fierce political quarrel with missionary Augustus Loomis. At a federal hearing on Chinese immigration in 1876 Loomis, who ran the First Chinese Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, testified that Chinese settlers on the West Coast had the same “God-gifted right to come to California as everybody has.” Pixley, who represented the city of San Francisco, retorted: “As an ethnological question, I believe that is the correct word, as a race question, do you think they can assimilate with our people by intermarriage?” Refusing to back down, Loomis responded, “Stock-breeders think stock is improved by mixing.” Pixley then asked respectively about whether the “Aryan” is improved by mixing the “American Indian” or the “African,” to which Loomis stated definitively that the “Chinese are immensely above the Indian” and “very far above the African.”⁶³

Pixley and Loomis’ exchange transpired as part of a congressional investigation into Chinese immigration. The hearing arose after the Senate of California evaluated the influence of Chinese settlers as “detrimental to the interests of the country” and sent a report stating such to the federal government.⁶⁴ Over 1876 and 1877 Congress formed a special committee whose members traveled to the West Coast to investigate Chinese immigration. Notably, the correspondence between western states and the federal government signifies the interplay of different forms and levels of rule in constructing universalizing racial categories. At over 1,200 pages, the resulting congressional report included 130 testimonies which spoke to well-documented exclusionist talking points, such as Chinese unfree labor practices, and significantly influenced the construction of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Yet senators, representatives, and prosecutors also concentrated their investigation on the comparatively overlooked reproductive potential of Chinese-white intimacies. Several doctors testified to the risks of “physical assimilation,” “hybrid creatures,” “amalgamation of races,” “half breed children,” and “mixture.”⁶⁵ These contrasting technical terms indicated that government deliberations on the “Chinese question” indexed a number of colonial lexicons of interracial reproduction.

Physicians and academics’ professional statuses legitimized their testimonies, but “non-experts” similarly contributed to imperial investigative modalities as racial mixing became a subject of popular study in the nineteenth century. Like Pixley, Serranus Clinton Hastings was a Gold Rush settler, former Attorney General of California, and strong supporter of Chinese exclusion. On 13 November 1876 he took the stand at the congressional hearing to express his views on racial mixing:

My opinion is, and I speak from the highest authority, first, that the Chinese are almost another species of the genus homo. I do not think that they are another species, but they are a very wide variety. They vary from the Aryan or European race; their divergence is very wide. I think they vary so much that the offspring of the Chinamen, united with the American race, would be unfertile, or it would be imperfectly fertile.⁶⁶

Both Loomis and Hastings discussed interracial intimacies through the lens of crossing animal species. Whereas Loomis saw that “stock is improved by mixing,” Hastings denounced the mixing of Chinese and European “species” since it would produce infertile offspring. The implication was that sexual intimacies between the growing Chinese migrant population and Euro-Americans would lead to white settlers dying out.

Hastings’ testimony can be situated within international debates on reproduction between white imperial agents and those subject to their rule. Nineteenth-century European ethnologists and anthropologists divided themselves into “monogenists” and “polygenists.” Whereas the former generally argued that all humans belonged to a single species, the latter advanced that there were a number of ancestral species from which different races descended, and believed that mixing such “species” would produce unhealthy and infertile beings.⁶⁷ Polygenism was exceptionally popular in the United States, where it featured heavily in antebellum pro-slavery discourses and persisted in mid- to late-nineteenth century concerns about a declining white settler population.⁶⁸ Hastings’ testimony bears much rhetorical similarity to the work of polygenist anthropologist Daniel Garrison Brinton, who wrote in 1890 that white women had “no more sacred mission, than that of transmitting in its integrity the heritage of ethnic endowment by the race.”⁶⁹ To Brinton, it was women’s responsibility to safeguard the race through reproduction; notwithstanding academic disagreements regarding the origins of races, this concept garnered global popularity.

Colonial regimes were deeply concerned with racial mixing, and consequently appropriated eugenics to differentiate who partook in proper versus improper intimacies. Eugenic theories of “cultural contamination” understood social maladies such as poverty, criminality, and promiscuity as inheritable traits. Middle-class whites topped the world’s “genetic” hierarchy and thus were the most vulnerable to “degeneration.” These ideas gave credence to the necessity of colonial discipline, but they also grounded fears surrounding interracial sex.⁷⁰ At the congressional hearing on Chinese immigration, prosecutor Pixley asked Dr. Stout about the result of “the race that has been produced in Mexico by the intermarriage, we will say, of the Aztec and the Spaniard.” Stout responded that there was a “degeneration of the Spaniard.” On “the crossing of the French, the early people … who went to Mackinaw and Canada, crossing with the American Indian,” he attested to the “improvement on the Indian.”⁷¹ This exchange demonstrates how racial encounters in diverse European colonial regimes served as explanatory models to understand Chinese-white intimacies. As an “inferior” race, Chinese migrants held the reproductive potential to excise the civility inscribed onto white settler bodies. Reproducing people was also a question of reproducing structures of rule, and mixed-race children represented the dilution of race as a mark of biopolitical power on the imagined frontier.⁷²

A year after the conclusion of the congressional hearing on Chinese immigration, the Second Constitutional Convention of California generated parallel discourses about Chinese-white racial mixing. Convened from March 1878 to March 1879 in Sacramento, the Convention updated the original state constitution devised at the first Convention in Monterey in 1849. The constitution refused Chinese settlers property rights, the right to vote, and the ability to work for private corporations or on public works. It also gave municipalities the authority to remove “Chinese without the limits of such cities and towns.”⁷³ Notably, the seizure of land and the implementation of property rights are primary features of American settler colonialism.⁷⁴ Excluding Chinese migrants from these rights was an attempt to deny them true “settlership.” The virulently exclusionist Workingmen’s Party, which secured a third of the delegates at the debates, was in part responsible for these measures, but anti-Chinese sentiment crossed party lines. Representing the First Congressional District, Republican John F. Miller declared that “Were the Chinese to amalgamate at all with our people it would be the lowest, most vile and degraded of our race, and the result of the amalgamation would be a hybrid of the most despicable, a mongrel of the most detestable that has ever afflicted the earth.”⁷⁵ While Miller believed that the Chinese were “an unassimilative population” – that is, unable to reproduce with white individuals – he also evinced the fear of cultural degradation through racial mixture to justify Chinese exclusion. His speech exhibited the tensions and affinities between biological and social constructions of racial categories. The presumed contradictions between Chinese settlership and the project of social modernity in the West provoked a proposed amendment of the state constitution. The first Constitution of California forbade marriages between “whites” and “negroes” or “mulattoes,” but representative John C. Stedman proposed a broader prohibition of “the intermarriage of white persons with Chinese, negroes, mulattoes, or persons of mixed blood, descended from a Chinaman or negro from the third generation, inclusive.”⁷⁶ In 1880 California’s legislature officially forbade the issuance of marriage license to “whites” and “Mongolians.”⁷⁷

Across the West, legislatures forbade interracial marriage to regulate intimacies between Chinese men and white women. Despite California’s dominant role in the anti-Chinese movement, the state was relatively late to outlaw Chinese-white marriages. In the 1860s, the legislatures of Oregon and the Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and Wyoming Territories enacted anti-miscegenation measures targeted at Chinese settlers, which passed by larger margins and with less debate than other anti-Chinese acts.⁷⁸ These laws frequently referred to the Chinese simply as “Chinamen.” Rather than simply a derogatory racial phrase or reflective of the gender imbalance between Chinese men and women in the West, the term “Chinamen” itself was a raced and gendered category whose invocation conjured images of racial decay. Western periodicals demanded stricter punishments for “Chinamen” and white women who facilitated the “mingling of Mongolian and Caucasian blood.”⁷⁹ Though anti-Chinese factions most commonly named Chinese men as the perpetrators of racial transgression, eugenic thought also categorized women who engaged in interracial intimacies as not “well bred.”⁸⁰ Well into the age of Chinese exclusion, this patriarchal conception manifested in the Expatriation Act of 1907, which stripped white women of citizenship if they married Asian men, literally shutting those engaged in interracial marriages out of the privileges of being an “American.”⁸¹ The Expatriation Act makes plain how regulatory strategies to prevent “Chinamen” and white women from subverting imperial sexual taxonomies were premised upon intertwined cultural, sexual, and racial standards of settler citizenship.

“Lewd and immoral purposes”: excluding the diseased Chinese prostitute

On 9 March 1877, in the Sacramento Valley farming town of Chico, members of the Supreme Order of Caucasians, one of many anti-Chinese clubs in the American West, set fire to a number of Chinese-occupied residences. Five days later, six white men murdered four Chinese farm hands in their bunkhouse.⁸² Late nineteenth-century historian Hubert Bancroft condemned the perpetrators’ “fanatical” nature.⁸³ Yet the ideological foundation of the Supreme Order rested upon the same discourses that legislators, missionaries, police, and other authorities produced around Chinese prostitution. The same year as the Chico Massacre, the Supreme Order wrote to Congress that white youth were “enticed thither by Chinese women … acquire a loathsome disease, ruin their constitutions and render themselves unfit to become the progenitors of a healthy and moral race.”⁸⁴ This is not to say that the Chinese “purges” of the 1870s and 1880s were explicitly in protest of Chinese prostitution; they largely targeted Chinese male laborers. Nonetheless, such extreme violence, in part motivated by racialized narratives about venereal disease, cannot be dismissed in a discussion of the regulation of Chinese prostitution. The Chico Massacre makes obvious how discipline is fundamental to the management of racial and gendered taxonomies.

White Westerners widely believed that most or even all Chinese women in the United States were prostitutes; one newspaper asserted that the Chinese female settler population consisted of 120 “respectable” women and 2,600 “enslaved prostitutes.”⁸⁵ While the spread of free labor justified American expansionism in the age of emancipation, prostitutes and Chinese “coolies” emerged as twin threats to liberty. In the West, the two were linked by nativist discourses which blamed the social crisis of “white slavery” on Chinese labor.⁸⁶ Exclusionists argued that the willingness of “coolies” to work for subsistence wages put white women’s jobs at risk, and thus pushed them into a life of unfree prostitution. Historian Martha Gardner contends that, in turn, white women in San Francisco united across class lines in the anti-Chinese movement.⁸⁷ Nonetheless, the figure of the middle-class white woman maintained authority to protect the realm of domesticity from cultural contamination, and there was perhaps no bigger contaminant than the Chinese prostitute. Like white prostitutes, Chinese women also provoked anxieties about the lingering specter of unfreedom, but narratives surrounding them were dominated not by misfortune but by disease, immorality, and degeneracy.

Scholarship on Chinese prostitution has largely sought to uncover the everyday realities of these women, but has neglected how their lives were underwritten by transnational epistemologies of race and the sale of sex.⁸⁸ Histories of nineteenth-century Chinese women often begin in southern China, and name the Opium Wars and European economic imperialism as “push factors” that led to the sale of women overseas.⁸⁹ However, in addition to forcing global migrations, the British instituted campaigns to construct prostitutes in Hong Kong as social horrors and subject Chinese women to venereal disease inspections.⁹⁰ The United States itself would take similar measures to categorize and control non-white women in its extracontinental imperial regime in the Philippines, among other outposts, at the turn of the century. Chinese prostitutes in the American West were part of the global project of marking non-white female bodies as the antithesis of respectable domesticity through both discourse and discipline. Popular, governmental, and scientific “knowledge” coalesced to characterize Chinese women as morally weak, racially predisposed to syphilis, and highly infectious. These linked deficiencies endangered Euro-American Westerners, especially white boys. Regulatory strategies reflected the need to protect settler colonial futurity; efforts to civilize Chinese women both contrasted with and complemented the much more popular “solution” of immigration restriction, which culminated in the seminal Page Act of 1875.

Venereal disease and the next generation of settlers

Well before the introduction of Chinese migrants to the West, venereal diseases, especially syphilis, became imbued with a gendered logic that colonial powers adapted to their regimes. For centuries, Western medical literature identified women, who were presumed to have inferior bodily composition, as carriers of venereal disease. In the early nineteenth century, the responsibility for spreading venereal disease became pinned specifically onto prostitutes, whose unrestrained sexual excess distinguished them from “upright women.”⁹¹ European colonial officials further differentiated white prostitutes at home from racialized prostitutes in the colonies. For instance, the 1867 Commission in Hong Kong stated that Chinese prostitutes were “not ‘abandoned women’ as the prostitutes of Europe only too frequently are.”⁹² Cultural difference, rather than economic misfortune, predisposed Chinese women to sexual immorality. Furthermore, British colonists believed that venereal diseases in non-white prostitutes took more vicious forms.⁹³ Colonial governments’ ideas about prostitution were not simple exports of gendered ideology from metropoles to colonies; rather, they were constructed to legitimize the power differentials that defined the relationship between those who administered and those who were subject to rule.⁹⁴

Mary Coolidge was the first to point out the disproportionate fixation on and condemnation of Chinese prostitutes, which she saw as illustrative of the journalistic bias applied to Chinese settlers in the West.⁹⁵ This asymmetry was not solely a matter of geographically isolated racial antipathy but symptomatic of the circulation of colonial medical knowledge. At the 1877 annual meeting of the American Medical Association, Dr. J. Marion Sims concentrated his presidential address on syphilis, which he described as “the great question of the day.”⁹⁶ Referencing the 25,000 cases of venereal disease supposedly registered annually at Guy’s Hospital in London, Sims warned that the disease had ravaged “British blood,” and if uncontained, would inflict the same harm to “English-speaking Americans.”⁹⁷ He specified the Burlingame Treaty of 1868, which protected the right of Chinese migrants to enter the United States, as the source of infection. Sims declared that

syphilis, unlike cholera, originating when and where it may, always fixes itself in great populous centres, taking up its abode in the haunts of ignorance, poverty, squalor, filth and vice … degraded women may transmit the disease not only to scores of men, but hundreds and thousands.⁹⁸

In this formulation, Chinese migrants’ unhygienic and debauched lifestyles fostered syphilis, which Chinese women then spread en masse. Public health authorities and the general public alike attributed a number of diseases including smallpox, leprosy, tuberculosis, and the plague, to the filthy habits of the Chinese population in the American West.⁹⁹ Syphilis was nonetheless distinct in its gendering and its absolute association with sexuality. The lifetime work of Sims, whose experimentation and research on enslaved women and Irish immigrants earned him the title “father of gynaecology,” is reflective of racial politics’ shifting entanglement with medical science.¹⁰⁰

In his address, Sims relied heavily on the findings of Dr. Hugh H. Toland, who gave practically identical testimonies on the spread of syphilis from Chinese brothels to young white boys to the California State Senate and Congress’ respective investigations into Chinese immigration. When state senator William Pierson inquired about the extent to which venereal diseases came from Chinese prostitutes, Toland answered that

I suppose nine-tenths. When these persons come to me I ask them where they got the diseases, and they generally tell me that they have been with Chinawomen. They think diseases contracted from Chinawomen are harder to cure than those contracted elsewhere, so they tell me as a matter of self-protection. I am satisfied, from my experience, that nearly all the boys in town, who have venereal disease, contracted it in Chinatown … The women do not care how old the boys are, whether five year old or more, as long as they have money.¹⁰¹

Perhaps the most prominent medical practitioner in the American West, Toland was certainly attuned to tropical medical discourses that claimed the predominance of venereal disease in non-white women. For instance, in his study of tropical medicine in the American-occupied Philippines, Warwick Anderson illustrates how colonial health authorities believed Filipinos to be “manifestly unwell” and developed deep anxieties that even apparently healthy prostitutes would spread venereal disease.¹⁰² Multiple witnesses corroborated Toland’s assertions. Superintendent of the Industrial School of San Francisco David C. Woods testified to the California Senate that the majority of boys who entered the school had contracted venereal diseases in Chinatown brothels.¹⁰³ Frederick A. Gibbs, San Francisco supervisor and chairman of the hospital committee, told Congress that there were many cases of “Chinese syphilis” in the hospital, including within “little boys who did not know in fact whether it was right or wrong.”¹⁰⁴ The term “Chinese syphilis” implied the existence of a specific racialized strand of disease. Woods and Gibbs affirmed that Chinese women lacked the moral standards to refuse children sexual services, while children were unaware that they were entrapped by dangerous vectors of disease. Scores of newspapers cited Toland’s testimonies and generated immense exclusionist fervour among the Western public.¹⁰⁵

Beyond its shock value, Toland’s specification of white boys as the victims of Chinese prostitution revealed prevailing concerns about American imperial futurity. In imperial contexts, the regulation of prostitution was often focused on the protection of metropolitan soldiers from venereal disease. The prospect of mass contagion amongst white soldiers cast doubt on the morality of imperial armies and raised the issue of men passing disease onto white women and children at home.¹⁰⁶ In the American West, where settlers rather than soldiers enforced imperial rule, children typified the maintenance of empire. The year that the Chinese Exclusion Act passed, the Workingmen’s Party of California paraded children on a float emblazoned with the slogan, “Shall our boys and girls, or Chinamen, have California?”¹⁰⁷ This rhetoric conceived of the exclusionist plight as a zero-sum game whereby either the Chinese or the next generation of white settlers would control the West. Proponents of the anti-Chinese movement contended that the accessibility of Chinese prostitution jeopardized white children’s moral and physical health and would damage their descendants. Toland told the California Senate that men and boys with secondary syphilis would pass these diseases onto their children.¹⁰⁸ Mirroring fears about the reproductive potential of Chinese men and white women, the hereditary nature of venereal disease threatened to uproot Manifest Destiny in the long term, except the white “agents” were not transgressive white women but blameless boys.

As keepers of normative American home life, middle-class white women integrated exclusionary discourses of domesticity into the medical field even as legislatures excluded them from state deliberations on Chinese immigration. In her publications, Oregonian suffragist Dr. Mary Sawtelle denounced Chinese prostitution with the same logic as Sims and Toland: “to-morrow they will be our equals, then our conquerors. Will we have that copper-colored, syphilitic skin when we have degenerated to meet their level?”¹⁰⁹ Editor of the Medico-Literary Journal from 1878 to 1885 and one of the first women to attain a medical degree in Oregon, Sawtelle emphasized the moral responsibility of white women to curb Chinese prostitution. The Medico-Literary Journal urged its middle-class female readership to watch over their husbands and sons “lest they become ruined in body and soul by contracting the foul contagion.”¹¹⁰ For Sawtelle, women were responsible for protecting their male family members from the “evil” of Chinese prostitution. By ensuring that households stayed free from “foreign” diseases, frontier femininity discursively defended frontier masculinity, but ultimately gave way to regulatory strategies to control Chinese prostitution.

Prostitution regulation on the frontier

Prostitution regulation was a vital feature of European colonial regimes. Historical geographer Philip Howell astutely points out how racialized women’s construed cultural propensity for prostitution justified the disturbance of “the supposed balance between liberalism and discipline that legitimated regulation at home.”¹¹¹ Despite the specter of disease, the notion that soldiers “needed” to satisfy their sexual needs mandated sanctioned prostitution in colonial outposts.¹¹² Different states adopted different regulatory practices, but they were entangled with and informed by one another. For instance, in France and its colonies, there existed a comprehensive system of maisons de tolérance, government-sanctioned brothels meant to control the movement of prostitutes.¹¹³ The British Contagious Diseases Acts, which became the primary means through which British officials controlled prostitution, drew in part from the French model. The Acts, which formalized an existing patchwork of regulatory measures, gave colonial officials power to register women, subject them to medical inspections, and confine them in special “lock” hospitals for treatment.¹¹⁴

These strategies served as context for authorities in the American West to produce a distinct regulatory framework around the “problem” of Chinese prostitution. To protect white settlers, especially white boys, from venereal disease, Western legislatures explicitly targeted Chinese prostitutes. In 1866 California passed “An Act for the Suppression of Chinese Houses of Ill Fame,” which criminalized Chinese brothels and prosecuted landlords who allowed their properties to be used for prostitution. Yet by the summer of that year, there had been a settlement between “the parties representing the women” and the Board of Health and Police Commissioners to limit Chinese prostitution to specific geographic areas.¹¹⁵ The law mimicked European policies to limit the mobility of prostitutes in order to maintain surveillance over them. This is not to say that the control of Chinese prostitutes directly mirrored other colonial policies; in fact, the absence of European-style prostitution regulation was often a point of American pride. Dr. Mary Sawtelle demanded that public health authorities crack down on Chinatowns and confine anyone found to have syphilis in isolation hospitals.¹¹⁶ However, cities across the United States, including San Francisco, did not implement inspection, registration, or forced hospitalization regimes for fear that they would condone the perpetuation of vice.¹¹⁷ This was the perspective of Sims, who declared to the American Medical Association that “we want no legislation that looks to licensing prostitution as in France, and we want no such partial legislation as we find in the ‘Contagious Diseases Act’ of England.”¹¹⁸ Instead, he advocated for a system of inspection that would prevent the very “importation of syphilis from abroad … stamping out the disease in towns and cities.”¹¹⁹

Sims’ proposal is representative of the unique goals of American settler colonialism in the broader field of imperial desires. The regulation of Chinese prostitutes, like that of non-white prostitutes in European colonies, was about affirming the moral and racial separation between ruler and ruled. In the American West, however, maintaining rule was also about ensuring Euro-American settler supremacy so that there was no meaningful distinction between metropole and colony. Chinese prostitutes typified a larger class of “aliens” whose cultural aberrations threatened the so-called “rightful” inhabitants of the land. In Sims’ words, they bred disease not only within the “nominal army … scattered over the frontier” but also in “whole communities.”¹²⁰ The solution was to completely eradicate the risk of contagion via exclusion. Prior to 1875, California passed a series of laws to restrict or ban the immigration of Chinese prostitutes. The most notable was the 1870 “Act to prevent the kidnapping and importation of Mongolian, Chinese and Japanese females for criminal or demoralizing purposes.”¹²¹ Under this law, the immigration commissioner for California detained twenty-two women who had sailed from Hong Kong on the steamer Japan in 1874.¹²² The women were ultimately acquitted, and the U.S. Circuit Court deemed the “Act unconstitutional. Yet a U.S. Circuit Court ruling judge remarked with foresight that “if their future immigration is to be stopped recourse must be had to the federal government.”¹²³

Though restrictive immigration legislation was the most popular regulatory strategy amongst the general public in the West, there too existed desires to reform prostitutes into respectable domestic subjects. The same year that the immigration commission detained the Japan women, female Presbyterian missionaries established a mission home in San Francisco to carry the gospel to “heathen women.”¹²⁴ By 1891 another such institution was opened in Portland. These homes sought to rehabilitate Chinese women from prostitution by teaching them the doctrines of Victorian womanhood, such as cleanliness and industry, as well as converting them to Christianity. Female reformers saw Chinese women as morally deviant but also “susceptible to kindly influence.”¹²⁵ The mission home’s techniques of reform exemplified how everyday practice, such as keeping homes “thoroughly cleaned, whitewashed and papered,” defined the normative white middle-class domesticity which “entitled” Euro-American settlers to imperial rule.¹²⁶

Missionary I.M. Condit described her efforts to reach secluded Chinese women as “the zenana work of San Francisco.” Zenanas referred to the inner rooms reserved for women in residential homes in India. By using this term, Condit “invoked a series of exotic images and evangelical narratives familiar to her readers of the missionary activity in India.”¹²⁷ This allusion also reflected the broader geographic scope of missionary activity to civilize women in colonial outposts. At the turn of the century, missionaries in the American-occupied Philippines joined “anti-imperialists” who attacked Major Owen Sweet’s venereal disease inspection program as an aberration of American exceptionalism. Suffragists also opposed inspection and argued that the policy illustrated the detriments of a military without the moral influence of women.¹²⁸ Suffragist and missionary objections were, in actuality, premised upon the logic of manifest domesticity, defining whiteness, civility, and authority through white womanhood. Imperial “anti-imperialisms” indicate how seemingly contradictory elements of regulation coexisted through shared racial ideologies.¹²⁹ Underscoring missionary reform as a form of non-state sanctioned regulation shows how the processes of imperialism involved a multitude of actors who often clashed with one another. Nor were all individuals within historical categories aligned in their goals and opinions; the majority of Protestant clergy and male missionaries in the West admonished female missionary efforts to reform Chinese prostitutes.¹³⁰ In fact, exclusionist missionaries’ testimonies featured prominently in Horace F. Page’s campaign for a federal bill that would entirely bar Chinese prostitutes from the country.¹³¹

Instituted on 3 March 1875, the Page Act was the first direct federal restriction on immigration, and the most sweeping measure taken against Chinese prostitutes in the United States. Framed as a measure to protect free labor, the law fined “coolies” and entirely banned “women for the purpose of prostitution” from “any Oriental country.”¹³² In practice, the flow of Chinese male laborers to the United States remained largely unperturbed, while Chinese women were denied entry or discouraged from settling on the so-called frontier. The number of Chinese women who entered the United States from 1876 to 1882 dropped by 68 percent from the previous seven-year period.¹³³ A year before he signed the Page Act into law, President Grant remarked on the necessity of controlling the settlement of prostitutes:

They are brought for shameful purposes, to the disgrace of the communities where settled and to the great demoralization of the youth of those localities. If this evil practice can be legislated against, it will be my pleasure as well as duty to enforce any regulation to secure so desirable an end.¹³⁴

Referencing the degradation of young boys, Grant made clear that legislating against prostitution was preventing the spread of degenerative and immoral foreign intimacies. Like its California antecedents, the Page Act gave immigration authorities the task of separating prostitutes from women who engaged in “moral” forms of sexuality. In addition to race, officials developed a set of individual characteristics that could distinguish respectable women from prostitutes at ports. Before sailing, upon boarding, aboard the ship, and upon arrival, authorities interrogated Chinese women with a standardized list of questions, including:

Have you entered into contract or agreement with any person or persons whomsoever, for a term of service within the United States for lewd and immoral purposes? Do you wish of your own free and voluntary will to go to the United States? Do you go to the United States for the purposes of prostitution? Are you married or single? … Are you a virtuous woman?¹³⁵

These questions formalized the criteria of normative intimacies and femininity: to not be a “prostitute” was to be free, to have a husband, and to be virtuous. Such grounds for exclusion illustrate how, for the purposes of regulation, “prostitutes” were a gendered moral category, rather than a professional one.

In 1876, only 0.7% of Chinese migrants admitted to the United States were female.¹³⁶ Asian American historians have cited the “shortage” of Chinese women produced by barriers to migration to rationalize why Chinese settler men did not form heterosexual conjugal nuclear households through the exclusion era.¹³⁷ Yet such revisionist impulses inadvertently verge on ahistoricism as they reinforce the norms created by imperial ideals of white domesticity. The tension between historical redress and pervasive imperial “knowledge” lasted as long as the visions of intimacy that justified Chinese settlers’ subjugation remained intact.

Conclusion

To garner support for the Page Act, Horace F. Page found no irony in imploring the House to protect Euro-American emigrants to the West who “staked everything upon the venture” and teach the Chinese that “in this land of ours … we will no longer submit to their infamous practices.”¹³⁸ For exclusionists in the late nineteenth-century American West, the distinctions between proper and improper settlers rested, in part, on the latter’s non-normative intimate practices. Discourses about the spread of such deviance to Euro-Americans via sexual encounters provoked fears about an inversion of the racial taxonomy that undergirded settler colonialism.

Constructions of Chinese deviance existed on a gendered binary. When Chinese men formed intimate relationships with white women, public opinion sounded the alarm about the spread of cultural deficiencies, such as opium smoking, to the moral guardians of the nation. The reproductive capacity of these relationships provoked medical authorities to denounce racial “hybridization” as a threat to the maintenance of white settlership. In addition to disparate informal strategies of policing and surveillance, the state enforced anti-miscegenation laws to prevent marriages between Chinese men and white women. In contrast, Chinese women, uniformly associated with prostitution, endangered the futurity of American empire through their “solicitation” of white men and boys. Anti-Chinese proponents in the West demanded that they be excluded on a medical basis since they bred syphilis, which, if left unregulated, would lead to the wholesale degradation of the next generation of Euro-Americans. After numerous attempts, these demands succeeded with the passage of the Page Act of 1875, which inscribed the incommensurability of Chinese intimacies into federal law. The construction and regulation of Chinese intimacies rested upon concepts of normative Euro-American femininity, which differentiated the “domestic” from the “foreign.” Perceptions of Chinese men and white women were also linked to broader conceptions about peoples subject to imperial rule. Chinese exclusion did not exist in a Western vacuum, but rather in a world system of imperialisms, including different iterations of ever-involving American imperialisms.

With few exceptions, the United States officially prohibited those racialized as Chinese from entering the United States in 1882; after ten years, Congress found virtue in its experiment in racialized immigration legislation and extended it with the Geary Act. In 1890, amongst warfare with Indigenous nations, the superintendent of the U.S. Census announced that the frontier was “closed”; on 29 December the U.S. army massacred 290 Lakota people at Wounded Knee South Dakota. Eight years later, the United States invaded and annexed the Philippines and Puerto Rico.¹³⁹ Violent expressions of U.S. empire continued into the twentieth century and beyond; imperialism is omnipresent in the history of the United States, including in the most “private” of spaces. Understanding how empire manifests through intimacies reveals the shifting meanings attached to class, gender, and race, and how they ordered individuals’ daily lives. Just as the frontier was not closed in 1890 when the Census Bureau declared it so, that produced by Chinese intimacies was not closed by exclusion. Even as the statuses of empire and intimacy remain contested within Asian American historiography, the entanglement of the two informed the shifting place of “Asians” in “America” from deviant others to so-called “model minorities.” Against the ever-present backdrop of indigenous dispossession, distinctions between “proper” and “improper” settlers needed to be continually redesigned, enforced, and maintained. The ongoing task of “finding” empire in Asian settler intimacies is that of understanding how “aliens,” “minorities,” “foreigners,” “immigrants,” “citizens,” and “Asian Americans” are made.

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This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Brianna Cheng

Brianna Cheng holds a BA from McGill University and an MSt from the University of Oxford.

Notes

1 Stout, Chinese Immigration and the Physiological Causes of the Decay of a Nation, 9.

2 Ibid., 7.

3 The seminal text on white labour unions’ role in the anti-Chinese movement is Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy. See also Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California; Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go.

4 Stout, Chinese Immigration and the Physiological Causes of the Decay of a Nation, 14.

5 Kaplan, “‘Left Alone with America,’” 3-21. See also Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties,” 829–65; Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire,” 1-22.

6 See Cobb, “Understanding Tribal Sovereignty,” 115-32.

7 Jung, “Empire,” 57-71.

8 See Ibid., 57-71; Lowe, “The International Within the National,” 29-47. On the formation of Asian American studies and its relationship to the Asian American movement, see Maeda, Rethinking the Asian American Movement.

9 On reconstruction in the West, see West, “Reconstructing Race,” 6–26; Paddison, American Heathens; Bottoms, An Aristocracy of Color; Smith, “Beyond North and South,” 566–91.

10 See Isenberg and Richards, “Alternative Wests,” 4–17.

11 See Chang, “China and the Pursuit of America’s Destiny,” 145-69; Urban, “The Advantages of Empire,” 185-207.

12 On this concept, see Hoganson and Sexton, “Introduction,” 1-24.

13 See Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny. On the global “Chinese problem,” see Ngai, “The Chinese Question,” 109-36.

14 On attempting to define the West vis-à-vis colonial desires, see Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination, 1-12; Deverell, “Fighting Words,” 29-55.

15 Pfaelzer, Driven Out, 330.

16 Scholars of Hawai’i have been instrumental in explaining this tension. See Fujikane and Okamura, Asian Settler Colonialism. Within the continental United States, Manu Karuka has explored how Chinese labor was an instrument of settler colonialism in the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad; See Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad.

17 Floyd Cheung briefly discusses these fears in relation to a Euro-American “masculinity crisis.” Cheung, “Anxious and Ambivalent Representations,” 293-309.

18 Bancroft Scraps, Chinese Clippings, vol. 6, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

19 Stout, Chinese Immigration, 14.

20 Foucault, The History of Sexuality vol 1. D’Emilio and Freedman’s Intimate Matters has deeply informed the history of sexuality in the United States. See also Winkelmann, “Colonial Intimacies in US Empire,” 498-520.

21 Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers,” 514–51.

22 See Ting, “Bachelor Society,” 270-9; Leong, “‘A Distinct and Antagonistic Race’,” 131–48.

23 Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire; Herbert, Gold Rush Manliness.

24 See, for example, Hodes, White Women, Black Men.

25 Jensen and Miller, “The Gentle Tamers Revisited.” 189.

26 Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity.”

27 Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here, 124.

28 See “Lying Correspondents,” Daily Appeal (Marysville, CA), 6 September, 1873; “Horrible Traffic,” Daily Record Union (Sacramento), 31 January 1885; “Chinese Prostitution,” Daily Record Union (Sacramento), 19 April 1876.

29 Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society; Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics; Howell, Geographies of Regulation; Corbin, Women for Hire; Briggs, Reproducing Empire.

30 Shah, Contagious Divides.

31 I draw here from Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 12-13.

32 Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, 455. Also see Ting, “Bachelor Society,” 273-4.

33 The few works that have written about intimacies between Chinese men and white women have been set outside of the West. Studies of the Midwest and the South argue that the smaller numbers of Chinese men and their dispersal allowed for more opportunities for interracial encounters. See Jew, “‘Chinese Demons,’” 389–410; Cohen, Chinese in the Post-Civil War South; Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery; Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 83. For an analysis of literary depictions of white-Asian miscegenation, see Koshy, Sexual Naturalization.

34 Leong, “‘A Distinct and Antagonistic Race.’”

35 “John Chinaman’s Soliloquy,” Placer Herald, 28 April 1866.

36 On “John Chinaman” as a popular minstrelsy character, see Lee, Orientals, 34-50.

37 See Jung, Coolies and Cane; Smith, Freedom’s Frontier, 80-108.

38 See Bottoms, An Aristocracy of Color; Wong, Racial Reconstruction.

39 Sexual encounters between Black men and white women incited controversy long before Reconstruction, as “mixed-race” children born to white mothers confused the association of Blackness with bondage. See Hall, “‘The Mind That Burns in Each Body,’” 328-49; Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 147-208.

40 Ida B. Wells wrote in 1895 that “with the Southern white man, any mesalliance existing between a white woman and a colored man is a sufficient foundation for the charge of rape.” Wells, A Red Record (1895), 7. See also Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown.

41 See “Chinese in New York,” San Francisco Examiner, 11 Mary 1883; Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West, 168-71.

42 See “Another Mixture of Races,” Weekly Bee (Sacramento), 3 February 1880. “Miscegenation,” Weekly Bee (Sacramento), 29 September 1871.

43 “Strange Infatuation,” Napa County Reporter, 13 April 1883.

44 See “A Girl’s Infatuation,” San Francisco Call, 07 April 1883; “The Santa Cruz Girl,” Evening Mail (Stockton, CA), 07 April 1883; “Sarah Isabella Burke,” Nevada State Journal (Reno), 14 April 1883; “Sarah Burke and Her Chinaman,” Daily Record Union (Sacramento), 18 April 1883; “The Disgusting White Girl who Mates with a Chinaman,” Reno Gazette-Journal, 18 April 1883; “Sarah Burke Again,” Daily Morning Times (San Jose) 9 May 1883; Nevada State Journal (Reno), 08 Mary 1883.

45 Quoted in Ahmad, “Opium Smoking, Anti-Chinese Attitudes, and the American Medical Community, 1850–1890,” 55.

46 See Shah, Contagious Divides, 91-7; Ahmad, “Opium Smoking,” 53–68; Light, “From Vice District to Tourist Attraction,” 367–94.

47 “A Girl’s Infatuation.”

48 “Sarah Burke and her Chinese Paramour,” Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel, 21 April 1883.

49 “Pipe-Hitters,” Weekly Bee (Sacramento), 3 December 1890.

50 Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 582.

51 See Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power.

52 See “Singular Case— Death of the White Wife of a Naturalized Chinaman,” Daily Record Union (Sacramento), 9 June 1880.

53 “A Chinaman’s White Wife,” Ventura Signal, 19 June 1880.

54 Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 101-33. For a study of American vagrancy laws and their relationship to the contract labour ideal, see Stanley, From Bondage to Contract, 98-137.

55 “Two Degraded Girls Arrested,” San Francisco Examiner, 17 May 1883.

56 I take here from Bernard Cohn’s idea of “surveillance modality” which marks geographies with colonial difference. See Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 11. On the use of vagrancy to police homosexual, racialized encounters in the early twentieth-century borderlands, see Shah, Stranger Intimacy.

57 Judy Yung, Images of America, 31.

58 Shah, Contagious Divides, 71-95.

59 See Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 3-15.

60 Willard B. Farwell, The Chinese at Home and Abroad. The Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco, on the Condition of the Chinese Quarter of that City. (San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft & Co., 1885), 15.

61 Farwell, The Chinese, 16.

62 Farwell, The Chinese, 4.

63 U.S. Congress, Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1877), 465-8.

64 California State Senate, Chinese Immigration: The Social, Moral, and Political Effect of Chinese Immigration. Testimony Taken Before a Committee of the Senate of the State of California (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1876).

65 U.S. Congress, Report of the Joint Special Committee, 241, 457, 867, 876, 1011.

66 U.S. Congress, Report of the Joint Special Committee, 586-7.

67 See Stocking Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution, 42-68; Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 3; Salesa, Racial Crossings, 133-70.

68 See, for example, Josiah Clark Nott, An Essay on the Natural History of Mankind: Viewed in Connection with Negro Slavery (Mobile: Dade, Thompson, 1851).

69 Daniel Garrison Brinton, Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography (New York: N.D.C. Hodges, 1890), 284-7.

70 See Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 41-78.

71 U.S. Congress, Report of the Joint Special Committee, 658.

72 See Cooper and Stoler, “Introduction,” 613.

73 E.B. Willis and P.K. Stockton, Debates and Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of California (Sacramento: State Office, 1880), 727. See also Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 12-13; Janisch, “The Chinese, the Courts, and the Constitution,” 360-71.

74 See Glenn, “Settler Colonialism as Structure,” 52–72.

75 Willis and Stockton, Debates and Proceedings, 632.

76 Willis and Stockton, Debates and Proceedings, 225.

77 Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 84.

78 Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 82.

79 “Miscegenation,” Daily Morning Times (San Jose), 25 May 1883.

80 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 103.

81 Koshy, Sexual Naturalization, 1-7.

82 On the Supreme Order of Caucasians and the Chico massacre, see Pfaelzer, Driven Out, 61-88; “The Chico Outrages,” San Francisco Examiner, 27 March 1877.

83 See Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, vol. 35 (San Francisco: A.L. Bancroft & Co., 1882), 570.

84 Quoted in Leong, “‘A Distinct and Antagonistic Race,’” 140-1.

85 Bancroft Scraps, Chinese Clippings, vol. 6.

86 On “white slavery” and the social purity movement surrounding it, see Keire, “The Vice Trust,” 5–41; Pivar, Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868-1900.

87 Gardner, “Working on White Womanhood,” 73–95.

88 The same can be said of histories of prostitution in the nineteenth-century West more generally. See Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery.

89 See Hirata, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved,” 3–29; Tong, Unsubmissive Women; Judy Yung, Unbound Feet.

90 Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics.

91 Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease, 1-14.

92 Quoted in Howell, “Prostitution and Racialised Sexuality,” 332.

93 See Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics.

94 Howell, “Prostitution and Racialised Sexuality.”

95 Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, 420.

96 J. Marion Sims, “Presidential Address,” Transactions of the American Medical Association 27 (1876): 102.

97 Sims, “Presidential Address,” 106.

98 Sims, “Presidential Address,” 108.

99 See Shah, Contagious Divides; Trauner, “The Chinese as Medical Scapegoats in San Francisco, 1870-1905,” 70–87; Kraut, Silent Travelers.

100 On Sims’ work on enslaved women, Owens, Medical Bondage.

101 California State Senate, Chinese Immigration, 104.

102 Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 90-1. See also Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene.

103 California State Senate, Chinese Immigration, 113.

104 U.S. Congress, Report of the Joint Special Committee, 202.

105 See, for example “The Worst Plague Cancer,” Contra Costa Gazette (Martinez, CA), 29 April 1876; “The Chinese,” Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel, 29 April, 1876; “San Francisco News,” Reno Gazette-Journal, 29 April, 1876; Dereset News (Salt Lake City), 03 May 1876.

106 See Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 21-45; Manderson, Sickness and the State.

107 Quoted in Cheung, “Anxious and Ambivalent Representations,” 298.

108 California State Senate, Chinese Immigration, 103.

109 Mary Sawtelle, “State Sanitation,” Medico-Literary Journal 2, no. 6 (1880): 3.

110 Quoted in Shah, “Cleansing Motherhood,” 22.

111 Howell, “Prostitution and Racialised Sexuality,” 331.

112 For example, see Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class under the Raj, 14.

113 See Corbin, Women for Hire.

114 See Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics; Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society; Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830-1930.

115 Quoted in Chan, “The Exclusion of Chinese Women,” 98.

116 Sawtelle, “State Sanitation,” 4.

117 Shah, “Cleansing Motherhood,” 21; Ryan, Women in Public, 124-5.

118 Sims, “Presidential Address,” 107.

119 Sims, “Presidential Address,” 108-9.

120 Sims, “Presidential Address,” 107.

121 See Luibhéid, Entry Denied, 33-4; Sae-Saue, "’Incalculable Evils,’” 257-70.

122 “The Chinese Maidens,” Daily Alta California (San Francisco), 29 August 1874.

123 Luibhéid, Entry Denied, 34.

124 Historical Sketches of the Missions Under the Care of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church (Philadelphia: Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Presbyterian Church, 1886), 27.

125 Historical Sketches of the Missions, 261. See Pascoe, Relations of Rescue.

126 Shah, “Cleansing Motherhood,” 24. See also Chang, “Women’s Mission in Historical Perspective,” 293-317; Tyrrell, “Women Missions and Empire,” 43-66.

127 Shah, “Cleansing Motherhood,” 24.

128 See Kramer, “The Darkness That Enters the Home,” 366–404.

129 See Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 156-79.

130 See Ryan, Women in Public, 121-2.

131 Sae-Saue, "‘Incalculable Evils,’” 258.

132 Page Act of 1875 (Immigration Act) 43rd Congress. Sess. II. Ch. 141. 1875.

133 Peffer, “Forbidden Families,” 28–46; Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 40; Lee, At America’s Gates, 109.

134 Grant, “Sixth Annual Message, December 7, 1874,” Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1876), XXIX.

135 Quoted in Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here, 45.

136 Lee, At America’s Gates, 109.

137 See, for example, Takaki, A Different Mirror, 210.

138 C. C. Williams, Congressional Career of the Hon. H. F. Page, Representative of the Second District of California and Renominated for a Fifth Term (San Francisco: Francis, Valentine & Co., 1880), 15.

139 See Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1894).