The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream Read Online Free PDF Page B

rail network, constructing the Central Pacific Railroad to connect the Union Pacific with the existing eastern lines, Chinese workers dynamited the tunnels and laid the rails. Charlie Crocker, the chief contractor for the Central Pacific, was a big believer in Chinese labor and deployed recruiters to Canton, observing that a race of people who had managed to build the Great Wall could certainly build a railroad. It was thankless work. The Chinese were paid a pittance, less even than their Irish counterparts, and many died from accidental blasts, disease, abuse at the hands of their employers, or attacks from Native Americans, who may have recognized the railroad for what it was: an incursion upon their homeland that once established would be impossible to undo. More than one of the great fortunes of the Gilded Age was built on Chinese labor. But the endeavor took a devastating toll on the Chinese. Over a thousand Chinese workers perished while building the railroad. Twenty thousand pounds of bones were shipped back to China.
    If analogies to slave labor spring to mind, they were hardly lost on Americans at the time. When the Civil War ended, some southern newspapers began explicitly editorializing that one way to compensatefor the emancipation of black slaves was to shift agricultural work to imported “coolies” from China. “Emancipation has spoiled the Negro,” the Vicksburg Times remarked. “We therefore say let the Coolies come.” The demand for Chinese laborers was so intense that it gave rise to a highly efficient apparatus for importing them. Chinese “travel agencies,” some of them affiliated with triads, the secret societies that dominated organized crime in China, sprang up in San Francisco and went into business securing transportation to America for migrant workers. Penniless gold rushers could book passage on American ships bound for California without putting any money down. In lieu of a fee they simply pledged a portion of their income once they arrived. The means of conveyance was so-called coolie clippers, which bore more than a passing resemblance to slave ships and confined their Chinese cargo to the hold, occasionally in chains or bamboo cages. Once they arrived, the workers paid their dues to the travel agencies, and when debtors failed to pay, the Chinese brokers sometimes arranged to hold their families hostage, as a form of human security.
    One sorry irony of the early Chinese experience in America was the unintended consequences of the trans-American railroad the Cantonese laborers helped to construct. The euphoria of the gold rush began to dissipate almost as quickly as it had begun, when what surface gold could be easily snatched had already been snatched and what was left proved difficult to retrieve. Taxed as “foreign miners” and then driven out of the mining business altogether, and cut loose by the railroad once the golden spike joined the Central Pacific and Union Pacific lines in Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1863, the Chinese took up menial jobs in settlements throughout the West. But the very railroad tracks the Chinese had built enabled white homesteaders to traverse the continent in a mere eight days. As the post–Civil War recession set in, easterners began crossing the country in greater and greater numbers, arriving on the West Coast in search of work. Often willing to take any job and work for meager wages, largely unintegrated into frontier society, and present in daunting numbers, the Chinese were almost tooeasy a scapegoat for West Coast labor leaders and politicians and the embittered unemployed of the white working class. Before long, resentment blossomed into violence. “In San Francisco, some boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death,” Mark Twain wrote in 1872. “Although a large crowd witnessed the shameful deed, no one interfered.” Bloody anti-Chinese purges began occurring in settlements throughout the West.
    On May 6, 1882, the anti-Chinese animus