Notably, four were in "Collapsible C," a backup escape vessel with canvas siding that was one of the last lifeboats to be lowered from the ship. Ismay, who was later pilloried for saving himself instead of going down with the ship despite being such a high-ranking official, testified in official inquiries that "four Chinamen were in the boat" in which he had escaped.
The ship's quartermaster, George T. Rowe, was on "Collapsible C" as well and also testified to the presence of the Chinese passengers, though he suggested they had "found" the four men "between the seats" only at daybreak. Schwankert noted that the official testimony was instrumental in getting their research started on the Chinese survivors. But they pop up at really opportune moments in the story In the beginning, Ismay's testimony was really some of the only information that we had that even verified that they even existed.
Even after the Carpathia arrived in New York on April 18, , the troubles for the six Chinese men were not over. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in , the group of survivors was not permitted to enter the United States. They were instead forced to board the Annetta, their intended ship of transfer, and the next day departed the country, bound for fruit ships in the Caribbean. This is where Jones and Schwankert diverge slightly in their interpretation of how the Chinese survivors were treated. However, Jones pointed out that other survivors were allowed to bypass screening at Ellis Island or received medical aid because of the trauma they had just experienced.
The Chinese men were not. We know they lost close friends on board. And yet they weren't given the option of staying.
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Not only did they have to leave in 24 hours on board [the Annetta], they were held overnight in custody. Both agree that the attitude toward Chinese and other Asian minorities then was hostile, as evidenced in the tone of the few newspaper articles that mention them at the time.
For instance, in an unsourced April 19, , Brooklyn Daily Eagle article headlined "Heroism of Anglo-Saxon Sailors Stands Out in Disaster", the Chinese passengers are described as almost inhuman and regarded with the utmost suspicion. They were trampled upon by the women who were lowered into the boats later, and two of them crushed to death.
The questionable passenger count notwithstanding, Schwankert said there is no evidence that the men stowed away or took the place of women and children on "Collapsible C", which was not filled when it was discovered. In fact, the documentary team's efforts include building a life-size replica of "Collapsible C" to prove that it would have been impossible for four men to hide at all, let alone overnight.
But there was another first-class gentleman in collapsible lifeboat C He gets in the boat and he basically gets off scot-free. No one ever criticises him for surviving. It has taken more than two years for Jones and Schwankert, with a team of about a half-dozen researchers, to fact-check every detail they can find about the lives of the six survivors.
Against the odds, they have been able to track down several descendants of the six men - many of whom had never connected their relatives to the historic disaster. Physical Description vi, p. Check copyright status Cite this Title Running over a Chinaman: Subjects Psychic trauma -- Fiction. View online Borrow Buy Freely available Show 0 more links Set up My libraries How do I set up "My libraries"?
These 4 locations in All: Open to the public ; N A Open to the public M University of Sydney Library. Open to the public. This single location in Australian Capital Territory: These 2 locations in New South Wales: America came from European colonization — from the fascination that explorers like Christopher Columbus had with China, And with the inception of the United States, our birth as a republic, one of the fascinating things is how important the China trade was for that revolutionary generation.
After political independence one of the first things that the British did was to cut off our ability to trade within the British Commonwealth.
Running Over a Chinaman : a Tale About Surviving in the Web of Trauma
China was among the few countries in the world not yet colonized by anybody and so we saw our opportunity to become economically independent linked to our trade with China. China really didn't want to buy much from the United States or from England. So in the early 19 th century they began to import opium into China, against Chinese law, as a way of addressing their own balance of trade deficits. Millions of Chinese were addicted to this Of course, this provoked the British gunships, and the Americans came in with them, because the Americans were also involved in the opium trade.
They did it under the banner of free trade; free trade as the core expression of liberty. And how dare the Chinese say they can't trade opium into China? The first Opium War ended in with the Treaty of Nanking. In one stroke, the canton system used to manage trade with Europeans was destroyed. China was forced into this new international system. And gradually, in the Pearl River Delta the foreign intrusion really became disruptive to the local economy. By the 's, what was happening in China is dire. The Qing Dynasty — the Chinese government — is falling apart.
Taiping Rebellion begins about , And this goes on for fifteen years. Approximately 30 million people are slaughtered. It's not just this millenarian rebellion. It's this dissatisfaction with the corruption of the Manchu government. The economy is faltering. And the opium trade is all part of this, too.
And this takes place right above Southern China, so that all this farmland is trampled. So when the Chinese hear of gold being discovered in California, U. The Gold Rush was a global event. It brought, obviously, Anglo-Americans from the East Coast; it brought Mexicans from Sonora; it brought French mining groups; it brought English mining groups. But it also brought Chinese to California. They arrived in the midst of one of the most dramatic and tumultuous decades of expansion and change in American history. America went to war with Mexico And maybe a hundred men, just walked up the hill from Montgomery Street — arrested the Mexican customs officer, raised the U.
California had a relatively small population in ; Americanized through conquest in ; occupied enemy territory from to '48; militarily administered United States territory of California from to '50; and then instant statehood, with full participation. Almost at the same time, really — — you have the Gold Rush in California. And you have the opening of California to people from not just the Eastern United States, but from all over the world. The Chinese who came in the early years of the Gold Rush were mostly rural people.
They're not the poorest of the population. The wealthy don't migrate, because they don't need to. And they've heard, like everybody else around the world, of this opportunity. The first named Chinese immigrant to arrive in California was an enterprising merchant from the Pearl River Delta named Yuan Sheng — who years earlier, on a previous trip to South Carolina, had acquired U.
On July 13 th , , he entered San Francisco harbor on a ship called the Swallow , with two other Chinese sojourners on board. By the end of , more than 4, Chinese immigrants had arrived in San Francisco harbor. Two years later, the number had swelled to 20, — the vast majority from the impoverished port cities and ravaged countryside of the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. We know the Chinese coming over for the Gold Rush — including someone like my great-great-great-grandfather would have docked into San Francisco — would have just disembarked like any other passenger.
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There's no inspector; there's no customs official; there's no medical examination — there are no papers Now the California that they came to was a rough-and-tumble place. It was multinational and very unsettled, and most people were going straight to the hills to try to strike it rich in the goldfields.
And in their wake, come merchants, who also smell opportunity. Not in the gold itself, but to sell things to the miners. So you begin to have the emergence of communities. San Francisco develops a small Chinese quarter. Initially the Chinese were tolerated. But the tide really turns up in the goldfield. By , the American miners have pretty much driven out most foreign miners.
And as soon as the Chinese get to the goldfields, immediately there are purges. And they meet in the rough, they meet in a field -- and they very deliberately talked about: How do we purge the Chinese?
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Many gold-mining camps, which made their own laws, passed resolutions that no Chinese could mine in their area. As surface gold in the river beds became scarcer — hydraulic mining run by companies increasingly displaced the lone prospector panning for gold. A lot of white independent prospector went bankrupt and became unemployed. But instead of turning their anger against the gold-mining company and the water company for exploiting them, they turned against the Chinese. They take away our jobs.
In , a calculating year-old lawyer named John Bigler was elected governor of California — by what remains to this day the narrowest margin in state history — carried into office in part by the rising tide of anti-Chinese sentiment amongst white Californians. Governor Bigler is brought into office at a time when the republic is first beginning to show serious signs of falling apart.
Out here on the West Coast you have deep division growing between the pro-Southern, pro-slavery Californians and those who are from Northern states and are anti-slavery. California had come in as a free state to Missouri's slave state and the question automatically comes up with the arrival of Chinese immigrants in California. Are they another race problem?
Can we afford to include another race problem? Could they even become American? And so Bigler wants certain legislation passed. He wants a heavy tax on the Chinese, which he thinks will drive them away. And he wants a law passed that will prohibit anyone from China who comes under a contract to engage in mining. Now most of the Chinese who came in the s came on their own account -- they came as independent prospectors. But Bigler raises this spectre of the coolie.
And he cites the figures of: And then he asks for these measures to exclude the Chinese. So now everybody has a kind of official license to go attack Chinese. To His Excellency Governor Bigler. I am a Chinaman, a republican, and a lover of free institutions; and am much attached to the principles of the government of the United States. The effect of your late message has been to prejudice the public mind against my people, and to enable those who wait the opportunity to hunt them down, and rob them of the rewards of their toil.
I am not much acquainted with your logic — that by excluding population from this State you enhance its wealth. Immigration has made you what you are and your nation what it is. But your further logic is more reprehensible. You argue that the Constitution of the United States admits of no asylum to any other than the pale face.
This proposition is false in the extreme, and you know it. The declaration of your independence, and all the acts of your government, your people, and your history are all against you. You have no right to propose a measure for checking immigration. As regards the color and complexion of our race, we are perfectly aware that our population are a little more tan than yours.
Your very obedient servant,. But try as he might, Governor Bigler could never realize his ultimate ambition — outright legal exclusion of the Chinese from California.
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In the weeks to come, crowds of pro-Union supporters thronged into the streets — to express solidarity with the embattled U. For the 35, Chinese immigrants who by were struggling to make a life for themselves in California, the war would bring new challenges, new dangers — and new opportunities.
Californians are still agitating for national legislation to exclude Chinese. But in Washington, this is seen as kind of a West Coast, local political question. In June , Abraham Lincoln sent a one-time Massachusetts congressman named Anson Burlingame to Beijing — to improve relations with China — promote friendship and commerce — and to repair diplomatic ties damaged by the opium wars.
And to establish American businesses, so that they can do business with Asia. You need a very large labor force to build a railroad operation across the entire nation. The Central Pacific on West Coast looked at the Union Pacific building from the East and saw that it was employing recent Irish immigrants in large numbers. And there wasn't that kind of population in California. There are a lot of unemployed Chinese miners out there. And there are a lot of unemployed Chinese miners out there. So Central Pacific has this idea to use Chinese.
And they found out very quickly, the Chinese are very diligent; very reliable; very hardworking. And so immediately decided to massively recruit Chinese — including going all the way to China, to encourage more of them to come here. Between and , nearly 30, Chinese immigrants would come to the United States — nearly doubling the Chinese population, to 63, Between ten and fifteen thousand of them would find work on the Central Pacific Rail Road. Eventually, they would make up four-fifths of the workforce for the Central Pacific. And they have the hardest jobs — they go through the Sierras; over the Sierras; they work under the snow in the winter.
They build vast tunnel systems, in which they keep chipping away at the rock. They organized themselves; they were capable of hard work; they took great chances; and they were physically strong.
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They could do the labor. The Chinese could not have been able to come to the United States, to help build the transcendental railroad, had it not been for Anson Burlingame — the first American ambassador to China, because China prohibited Chinese people from going abroad. And so what Burlingame did is commit the Chinese government to allow free immigration between China and the United States. Less than a year before the railroad itself was completed, Anson Burlingame concluded an historic treaty between the United States and China — explicitly guaranteeing the free flow of people and trade between the two nations.
The Burlingame Treaty had a structure of reciprocity. Americans can freely enter China, and Chinese can freely enter the United States. Trade goes both ways — people can go both ways. And so this treaty is a huge obstacle — a huge set back — to the exclusionists. And, finally, the railroads meet in Utah, at Promontory Point — that famous picture of the two iron horses there — but the Chinese are not allowed to be in the picture.
They're there, but they're not. And so they're erased from that history. And then once that railroad's done, then what happens to these Chinese? The paychecks end — they have to come down from the mountains. And most of them go west — toward the coast, toward Chinatowns across the state of California — and suddenly there's a big influx along the coast of Chinese people who have to create a new life outside of the railroads.
The treaty and the railroad were triumphs of connection in an increasingly global world — tying America itself more closely together — accelerating trade with China — and bringing more Chinese immigrants to American shores. This is an era when all of the promises of the Civil War are going to start falling apart. After the Civil War , we had the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. Those are all civil-rights amendments. The 13th abolishes slavery, the 15th gives black men the right to vote.
But the 14th Amendment, grants all civil rights to all persons. On July 9 th , — just three weeks before the Burlingame Treaty was concluded — the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was formally adopted — despite bitter opposition from most states of the fallen Confederacy, which were forced to ratify it to regain representation in Congress. In the decades to come , the spare eighty-word text would form a last slender line of defense for the Chinese in America — as the country began a long slow descent — into an abyss of hatred and violence — directed against all people of color.
Voice The Workingman's Advocate: February 6 th , We warn workingmen that a new and dangerous foe looms up in the far west. Already our brothers of the Pacific have to meet it, and just as soon as the Pacific railroad is completed, these Chinamen will begin to swarm through the rocky mountains, like devouring locusts and spread out over the country this side. Men who can work for a dollar a day are a dangerous element in our country. We must not sleep until the foe is upon us, but commence to fight him now.
In the name of the workingmen of our common country, we demand that our government forbid another Chinaman to set foot upon our shores. After the Civil War, one of the first developments is that with the emancipation of African slaves and their descendants you get the demise of the plantation system in the South. The plantation owners in places like Mississippi and Louisiana still need work. In — faced with a severe labor shortage and rising costs — plantation owners from across the south gathered in Memphis to find a solution to the problem.
Mary Ting Yi Lui, Historian: We have abolished the slavery of the black men, but these capitalists are endeavoring to resurrect it. The workingmen throughout the country should rise in a body and raise such a shout that its echo will reach Washington. And they actually ride the transcontinental railroad, and various other connections, and get off the train in North Adams, Massachusetts. And for this brief moment of time, there are more Chinese in North Adams, than anywhere east of the Mississippi. But once that happens — once you get Chinese in North Adams — then you begin to see Chinese in Pennsylvania, working in various factories.
So not just the plantations in the South, but the Northeast, with their factories, are actually also experiencing this. In all cases we're talking about small numbers. This becomes huge news. The Chinese in America numbered fewer than 64, in — and were never paid anything close to the starvation wages they were accused of settling for.
If you look at the political cartoons, in something like Harper's Weekly , you suddenly see these concerns about. Coolie laborers , who are going to march across the nation and take over every single job. So what happens is that class and racialization converge — get confused. Can the American man compete with this degraded Asian male form of labor? They don't eat as much; their nerves are farther away from the surface of the skin, so they don't feel as much; they eat rats. The Chinese male is inferior — is not the same as white manhood, right.
And, of course, the Asian male is inferior — but tenacious, because there are a lot of them. So they're dangerous because they're so many of them, right. Not because they really rival the actually superior white male. It was only a matter of time before the anti-Chinese feelings erupted into violence. It connects California as part of a national market — but that also means that cheap manufactured goods from the East now flood the Western market; prices and wages are depressed; there's actually more unemployment than there was previously in California; and in fact, the depression of the s in the East will be brought by the railroad to the west a few years later.
So now you have a large unemployed population.
And in the cities, then, you have a much more explosive kind of racial dynamic. Where the ideas that targeted Chinese in the gold fields are refashioned for this urban context — and they get a new lease on life. And this is really where it becomes incendiary — where there are race riots in the streets.
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On the night of October 24 th , , hundreds of enraged white and Mexican Angelinos descended on Chinatown in Los Angeles — allegedly in response to the killing of a white man — caught in the cross-fire when a gunfight broke out between two Chinese immigrants. White people and Mexicans flock down to Chinatown.
And as they capture Chinese people, they lynch them. They hang them from a church steeple; they hang them from the top of a covered wagon; from a gatepost. They cut off the finger of one of the Chinese men. One of those lynched is a child, and two Chinese women are lynched. And then they torch Chinatown. The Chinese people fight back. One Chinese woman picks up a rifle that one of the vigilantes drops and starts shooting at the mob. But the mob cuts holes in the roofs of the houses in Chinatown and drops flaming torches into these holes on the roof.
Voice Daily Alta California: Eighteen Chinamen were buried yesterday. They presented a most ghastly and horrible sight. Witnesses are very careful in giving their testimony, fearing to name individuals whom they know to have taken an active part in the lynching, lest they may be similarly dealt with themselves. There seems to be but one sentiment expressed by the better class of our citizens; that a great wrong has been done, which years may not efface; that the scenes of Tuesday night are a disgrace to our city.
We often think that this must have happened in the South somewhere, but it actually happened in L. And not with African-Americans but with Chinese-Americans. That lynching was a horrible overture to a decade of projecting the difficulties of the s onto the Chinese — suggesting a deep, sub-evil looking for a victim in the California psyche.
By the early 70's, the failure of banks; the great depression that hit California; had filled San Francisco with unemployed, single white males. Looking for work and not being able to find it. The city passed numerous ordinances to harass the Chinese, thinking that if you made life miserable enough for people, they would leave. So there was an ordinance that you couldn't walk on a sidewalk with a pole on your shoulder.