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Title: The Chinese Called it Pai Hua, or The Driven Out
Author: Jean Pfaelzer
Article:
At nine o'clock on the morning of November 3, 1885, steam
whistles blew at the foundries and mills across Tacoma, to
announce the start of the purge of all the Chinese people from
the town. Saloons closed and police stood by as five hundred
men, brandishing clubs and pistols, went from house to house in
the downtown Chinese quarter and through the Chinese tenements
along the city's wharf. Sensing the storm ahead, earlier in the
week, about five hundred Chinese people had fled from Tacoma.
Now the rest were given four hours to be ready to leave. They
desperately stuffed years of life into sacks, shawls, and
baskets hung from shoulder poles -- bedding, clothing, pots,
some food. At midday, the mob began to drag Chinese laborers
from their homes, pillage their laundries, and throw their
furniture into the streets. Chinese merchants pleaded with the
mayor and the sheriff for an extra twenty-four hours to pack up
their shops.
Early on that cold Tuesday afternoon, armed vigilantes corralled
two hundred Chinese men and women at the docks. The governor of
the Washington Territory, Watson C. Squire, ignored telegrams
from Chinese across the Pacific Northwest urging him to
intervene. The mayor and the sheriff hid out at city hall as the
mob marched the Chinese through heavy rain to a muddy railroad
crossing nine miles from town. The merchants' wives, unable to
walk on their tiny bound feet, were tossed into wagons.
Lake View Junction was a stop on the Northern Pacific Railroad,
which had been built by Chinese laborers. A few of the evicted
Chinese found damp shelter in abandoned storage sheds, in
stables, or inside the small station house. Most huddled
outside. During the cold and rainy night, two or three trains
stopped at the station. People with cash paid six dollars to
board the overnight train to Portland, Oregon. Others crammed
onto a passing freight train. The rest began the hundred-mile
trek south to the Chinatown in Portland, where they hoped to
find sanctuary in a community that had just refused the town's
orders to leave. For days they were seen following the tracks
south. Others fled the country for Canada.
Two days later, Tacoma's Chinatown was destroyed by fire.
Lum May
Territory of Washington County of King June 3, 1886
Lum May being duly sworn on his oath said:
I was born in Canton, China, and am a subject of the Chinese
Empire. I am aged about 51 years. Have been in America about
eleven years and have been doing business in Tacoma for ten
years. My business there was that of keeping dry goods,
provisions, medicines and general merchandize store.
On the third day of November I resided with my family in Tacoma
on the corner of Railroad Street some little distance from
Chinatown. At that time I would say there were eight hundred or
nine hundred Chinese persons in and about Tacoma who . . . were
forcibly expelled by the white people of Tacoma. Twenty days
previously to the 3rd of November, a committee of white persons
waited upon the Chinese at their residences and ordered them to
leave the city before the 3rd of November. I do not know the
names of [the] white persons but would recognize their faces.
The Committee consisted of 15 or 20 persons . . . who notified
the Chinese to leave.
I asked General Sprague and other citizens for protection for
myself and the Chinese people. The General said he would see and
do what he could. All the Chinese after receiving notice to
leave were frightened lest their houses should be blown up and
destroyed. A rumour to that effect was in circulation. Many of
them shut up their houses and tried to keep on the look out.
About half past 9 o'clock in the morning of November 3, 1885, a
large crowd of citizens of Tacoma marched down to Chinatown and
told all the Chinese that the whole Chinese population of Tacoma
must leave town by half past one o'clock in the afternoon of
that day. There must have been in the neighborhood of 1000
people in the crowd of white people though I cannot tell how
many. They went to all the Chinese houses and establishments and
notified the Chinese to leave. Where the doors were locked they
broke forcibly into the houses smashing in doors and breaking in
windows. Some of the crowd was armed with pistols, some with
clubs. They acted in a rude boisterous and threatening manner,
dragging and kicking the Chinese out of their houses.
My wife refused to go and some of the white persons dragged her
out of the house. From the excitement, the fright and the losses
we sustained through the riot she lost her reason, and has ever
since been hopelessly insane. She threatens to kill people with
a hatchet or any other weapon she can get hold of. The outrages
I and my family suffered at the hands of the mob has utterly
ruined me. I make no claim, however, for my wife's insanity or
the anguish I have suffered. My wife was perfectly sane before
the riot.
I saw my countrymen marched out of Tacoma on November 3rd. They
presented a sad spectacle. Some had lost their trunks, some
their blankets, some were crying for their things.
Armed white men were behind the Chinese, on horseback sternly
urging them on. It was raining and blowing hard. On the 5th of
November all the Chinese houses situated on the wharf were burnt
down by incendiaries.
I sustained the following losses through the riot, to wit: 2
pieces silk crape trowsers female, 2 pieces black silk, 6 silk
handkerchiefs, 2 crape jackets, 10 blue cotton shirts, 8 pieces
black cotton trowsers, 12 Pairs Chinese Cotton Stockings, 2
Leather trunks (Chinese), wool great dress female, 4 flannel
jackets, 3 pairs embroidered shoes, 1 dressing case, 6 white
cotton shirts, 1 carpet bag, 2 white woolen blankets, 2 red
woolen bed covers, 1 feather mattress, 1 spring bed, 2 tables, 6
chairs, 2 stoves, 4 pictures and frames, 1 large mirror, 2
woolen trowsers (male) and solvent debtors (Chinaman), 1
business and good will, loss of perishable goods, total $45,532.
A few of the Chinese merchants I among them were suffered to
remain in Tacoma for two days in order to pack up our goods or
what was left of them. On the 5th of November, after the burning
of the Chinese houses on the wharf I left Tacoma for Victoria
where I have since resided . . . No Chinaman has been allowed to
reside in Tacoma since November 3rd.
Mayor Weisbach appeared to be one of the leaders of the mob on
the 3rd of November. I spoke to him and told him that Mr.
Sprague had said the Chinese had a right to stay and would be
protected. He answered me: "General Sprague has nothing to say.
If he says anything we will hang him or kick him. You get out of
here." I cried. He said I was a baby because I cried over the
loss of my property. He said, "I told you before you must go,
and I mean my word shall be kept good."
I desire to add to this that . . . it is ten years since we
began business there.
Lum May
Tacoma's Chinese residents did not go quietly. On November 5,
1885, aided by China's consul in San Francisco, they compelled
the U.S. attorney to arrest the mayor of Tacoma, the chief of
police, two councilmen, a probate court judge, and the president
of the YMCA. Then they filed seventeen civil claims against the
U.S. government, for a total of $103,365.
The Tacoma roundup was one of a hundred Chinese pogroms that
raged across the Pacific Northwest in the late nineteenth
century. In the winter of 1885-86, the raids and arson in
Chinatowns reached Portland, and the Chinese refugees from
Tacoma fled again -- some to San Francisco, some back to rural
hamlets in the Washington Territory closer to their old homes,
some to the East Coast, and some to work on plantations in the
South.
Word of the raids resounded in newspapers, in state capitals, in
the boardrooms of railroad companies and lumber mills, in
Congress, and across the Pacific Ocean. Defying protests from
both Republicans and Democrats, President Grover Cleveland
decided to accede to the refugees' demands for reparation, with
the hope that this might cause China to revive trade talks with
the United States. China's population of four hundred million
people, he believed, could purchase America out of its deep
economic depression, and China's government might open trade
routes for a nation come lately to foreign expansion.
Congress was ambivalent. It understood that whichever party
controlled California would likely control the House of
Representatives, the Senate, and the next presidency. The
firestorm of roundups in California was compelling evidence of
the sentiments in the golden state.
The violent raids were bannered in the press -- in the local
Tacoma Register and the Eureka Times-Telephone, and nationwide
in The New York Times and Harpers Weekly. Most Americans knew of
the Chinese purges in California, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming,
Nevada, and Colorado. But before Congress complied with
Cleveland's request, it wanted to know the economic value of a
Chinese life.
In 1886, at the order of Congress, Governor Watson Squire
desperately sought to track down the two hundred Chinese men and
women who had been driven out of Tacoma so that they could bear
witness to the public violence done against them in his name.
Ultimately, he could locate only a few. Most were unable or
unwilling to be found.
Lum May had fled to Victoria, Canada. He and his wife had
legally entered the United States in 1874, before the Page Act
of 1875 banned the entry of almost all Chinese women and before
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 -- the first immigration law
to exclude people based on their race -- banned the thousands of
immigrants who crisscrossed the Pacific each year from
reentering the United States.
Governor Squire found Lum May, but as a subject of the Chinese
Empire, he was barred from testifying in a U.S. court. Through
his written affidavit, Lum's is one of the Chinese voices that
speaks across the silent years since being Driven Out.
Copyright © 2007 Jean Pfaelzer from the book Driven Out
Published by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of The
Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc;
May 2007;$27.95US/$34.95CAN; 978-1-4000-6134-1
About the author:
Jean Pfaelzer is professor of English and American Studies at
the University of Delaware, and director of the University
Honors Writing Fellowship Program. The writer of numerous
articles on nineteenth century women's literature, feminist
theory, and cultural theory, she has been appointed to the
Washington D.C. Commission for Women. She lives near Washington,
DC.
Visit www.udel.edu/PR/drivenout/ for more info.
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