Sometimes I stare at Chinese grandmothers
Getting on the 30 Stockton with
shopping bags
Japanese women tourists in European hats
Middle-aged mothers with laundry carts
Young wives holding hands with their
husbands
Lesbian women holding hands in coffee-
houses
Smiling debutantes with bouquets of yellow
daffodils
. . . . I look at them and wonder if
They are a part of me . . . . (1)

Genny Lim ends with a paean to the diverse origins but shared experiences of women, in “Samarkand, in San Francisco/ Along the Mekong.” But the question lingers. Are these Chinese grandmothers part of me? Are all these women a part of every American woman’s history? Where are the histories of grandmothers, of their mothers and sisters and friends? Or have they all been lost because nobody thought of them as part of their own histories?

The history of those who are not rich and famous often gets written by the numbers. Library shelves groan under the weight of books on European migration to the United States. Until very recently, there were no more than a handful of books about Asian immigrants to the U.S. A minority within a minority, the story of Asian American women has barely begun to be told. For the almost two hundred years that have lapsed since Asians first came to the United States, women have come in large numbers only in the last fifty years. Nineteenth-century Asian immigration was primarily Chinese and predominantly male. As Judy Yung’s major new study points out, by 1900 there were just around 4,500 women as compared to almost 90,000 Chinese men on the mainland (2). In Hawaii in 1900, the ratio of men to women was only slightly better; of the 25,767 Chinese, 3,471 or 13.5 percent were women (3). Were there few women emigrating because anti-Chinese prejudice and violence—combined with discriminatory laws proliferating from the 1850s onwards—curtailed both male and female Chinese immigration to the United States? The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act allowed only merchants, their wives and daughters, students, and diplomats to enter the country; laborers were excluded. Chinese immigrants, like other Asian immigrants after them, were also denied rights to citizenship through naturalization. Those ineligible for citizenship could not legally own land. To what extent did these measures passed by the U.S. federal government, indicative of the hostility with which Asian immigration was received, encourage men not to bring their families?

For the first half of the twentieth century, immigrants from Japan were the largest group among the Asians. Japanese women accounted for only 4 percent of the Japanese population on the U.S. mainland in 1900 and 12.6 percent in 1910 (4). Though the number of Japanese women emigrating was to rise after this—and by 1920, 35 percent of the Japanese population on the mainland consisted of women, a percentage similar to that of the Korean community—in other Asian immigrant communities like the Filipino and the Asian Indian, the numbers of women emigrating remained few and far between. The writing of Asian American history has focused on those who were here: the “bachelor communities” of Chinatowns; the Punjabi farmworkers from India; and the pinoy [Filipino immigrants] working in salmon canning industries of the Northwest. Why did so few women emigrate from Asian countries? Let us begin with the question of whether the limited migration of Asian women prior to World War II was a particular and unique feature of Asian immigration to the United States, or whether it was due to Asian social and cultural practices that women stayed at home?

A pattern emerges when we look at Asia and the regions from which the immigrants came. Asian out-migration during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was regionally specific. For example, Chinese migrants going overseas overwhelmingly came from a group of counties clustered around the Pearl River in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. The vast majority of immigrants from Japan came from only four counties in southwestern Japan. The immigrants from India came from the northwestern province of Punjab. The immigrants from the Philippines came from northwestern corner of Luzon, the Ilocos. These regions, scattered through the vast continent of Asia, had some features in common. All of these areas were densely populated, peasant-holdings were reduced to minuscule plots of land, and the regional agrarian economy was undergoing a rapid transformation (5). Sending young men abroad, to earn and send back remittances to supplement the meager resources of the family, while allowing the family to hold on to their land, was one strategy adopted by these communities in their quest for survival. And what better way of ensuring that the young man sent a portion of his income back than having him leave his wife behind? Patriarchal ideology and concepts of marriage, that did not preclude romantic love but considered the interests of the patriliny more important than the individual interests of a man and wife, did not make these arrangements for long separation seem extraordinary.

Whenever Chan Sam wrote to his wife [Huangbo], he had but one thought in his mind: to bridge the distance between himself and the village. He asked after her and his kinfolk, about the house, about the security of the village. Had the bandits been kept away? How much grain did she have in reserve? Has water been draining from the dirt floor? Had termites come back into the house? . . .

Her letters would append at most a line or two to the receipt [for money] she sent back. She’d tell him she was fine, that he shouldn’t worry about her, and then pass on news of any births or deaths or marriages in the village (6).

The relationship between the men who came to America and the women who stayed behind was complex. The many songs and poems of the young brides left behind in the villages of Guangdong tell of dust covering one side of the conjugal bed, the loneliness of cold pillows, and of longing for their husbands. Songs from Punjab echo these sentiments. This was one part of the lives of women left behind. But as wives of men who were abroad, the women also had higher social status in the village. They enjoyed a modicum of economic security compared to their neighbors. For within the range of limited possibilities and options available to rural women in particular, marrying a man going abroad was not the worst scenario. Rape, enserfment, robbery, kidnaping, and sale into prostitution were very real, everyday dangers facing women as the dual thrust of colonialism and capitalism ripped asunder pre-industrial social and economic modalities.

History often gets written not only by numbers but also by conventions of national mythologies. One of the basic myths of American immigration history is that those who came never went back. “America was believed to be the haven for Europe’s oppressed; immigrants were expected to stay once they arrived. To leave again implied that the migrant came only for money; was too crass to appreciate America as a noble experiment in democracy; and spurned American good will and helping hands. . . . [There was] ‘scornful denunciation’ of migrants for accumulating American money for the subsequent consumption of ‘porridge, bloaters, maccaroni [sic] and sauerkraut’ on the other side of the Atlantic” (7). One can add rice and noodles and chapatis to this list for many Chinese, Indians, and Filipinos—like many Italians, Greeks, Croatians, Serbians, Slovenians, Hungarians, Poles, Finns, and Canadians—who came to work, returned home. For the Europeans, who did have rights to naturalized citizenship and who faced far fewer discriminatory measures, in 1908, a randomly chosen year, the return rate ranged between twenty to sixty percent (8). Insisting on writing the history of only those who continued to live within the territorial boundaries of the U.S. tells only half the story. Migration and remigration are part of a global process that began with the advent of the steamship and has continued apace with the transportation revolution of the twentieth century. Rather than cutting off Asian American history from its roots in Asia, a global perspective which links the men and women on both sides of the Pacific allows us to reclaim histories of those women who never managed to cross the seas.

When these migrant husbands returned, they took back a bit of America with them and transformed their own cultural and social worlds. When Chan Sam went back to the village in Guangdong, Huangbo, who had never been to North America, opened a can of sweetened condensed milk and a box of crackers. The meal celebrating his return ended with a sweet soup of steaming milk with saltine crackers floating on top (9). In the dream house Chan Sam built in his village for his family, the main sitting room was decorated by local craftsmen with scenes of the Golden Gate Bridge and life in Gold Mountain: a couple in a roadster, its top folded down, motoring by a coral mansion on a wide, palm tree-lined boulevard (10). The money for the house came from the wages of Chan Sam’s second wife (concubine) earned in Vancouver by waitressing and sex-work. This brings us to the other side of the story.

The extensive literature about Chinese women with bound feet has obscured our understanding of the extent to which daily life in the Chinese countryside involved hard physical labor and the extent to which Chinese women contributed to the family economy (11). Apart from the very wealthy, most women worked. The daily chores of hauling water, cutting and gathering fuel, threshing grain, feeding the pigs and chickens, raising vegetables, cooking, and taking care of the feeding, clothing, and laundry for the family defined a woman’s everyday life in all peasant societies. In South China many women worked in the fields planting and harvesting rice and sweet-potatoes. Yet others worked raising silkworms and spinning silk. Redefining the immigrant experience not in terms of male or female, but in terms of the experience of workers would allow us to centrally relocate women. For above all, all Asian immigrant women worked in the U.S. Even Great-Grandmother Leong Shee, married to Chin Lung, one of the richest Chinese men in the U.S., who had bound feet and arrived in San Francisco in 1893, worked. “Ying,” she told her daughter, “when you go to America, don’t be lazy. Work hard and you will become rich. Your grandfather grew potatoes, and although I was busy at home, I sewed on foot-treadle machine, made buttons, and weaved loose threads [did finishing work]” (12).

For nineteenth-century Chinese women immigrants, there were few opportunities for wage work. Some worked as fisher women in Monterey Bay in California, a handful as miners and railroad workers. But the vast majority of Chinese women immigrants in the nineteenth century were sex-workers. Much has been written about the history of prostitution in nineteenth-century America, but the focus has been on issues of crime, morality, victimization, and Christian missionary rescue (13). But the political economy of sex-work under capitalism, involving women globally, has received much less attention (14). Asian women sex-workers were an integral part of this expanding nexus between urbanization, industrialization, and male migration on the one hand and militarism and tourism on the other.

Other women, arriving in the U.S. after the turn of the century, found work in the cane fields of Hawai’i, and in the fields of California, Oregon, and Washington. In the sugar plantations of Hawai’i, work began at an early age. The plantation foremen gave no breaks; they hired teenagers like thirteen-year old Haruno Sato to deliver water and lunch to hundreds of workers in the fields (15). The mothers raised children, did the laundry, cooked, sewed, and worked in the fields. Others took in laundry, cooked, and ran boarding houses for unmarried agricultural workers. Mrs. Tai Yoo Kim, who had just turned eighteen in 1905, ran a plantation boarding house at Honokaa and prepared three meals a day for twenty-one men, including her husband (16). Others, living in urban centers, ran grocery stores and fruit and vegetable stands, and worked as domestic servants and factory workers. The divide between public and private, between housekeeping and wage-work, so neatly laying out a paradigm for women’s lives prior to World War II, does not apply to the lives of women of color who have always worked. Formal definitions of work have however often left out these activities in the enumeration of census categories of work.

The centrality of women’s work as the defining core of the Asian American experience is even more evident in the history of the post-1965 period. Well over sixty-percent of the Asian American population, with the exception of the Japanese Americans, continues to be foreign born, the immigrant family starting all over again in a new country typically relies on at least two adult wage-workers to make ends meet. Asian American women are going to work in unprecedented numbers. In some communities, such as the Filipino community, female immigration has outnumbered male immigration and already by 1980 close to 70 percent of Filipinas were part of the labor force (17). At one end of the scale, the emphasis of U.S. immigration legislation favoring those with professional degrees has resulted in a highly qualified cohort of Asian American women who work as doctors, lawyers, and businesswomen. Some 3.9 percent of Asian American women earn more than $75,000 a year. But almost nine percent of Asian American women working full-time make less than $10,000 per year, and another 28 percent of the Asian American women working full-time make only between $10,000-$20,000 per year (18). The vast majority of them work in restaurants and garment factories and in the hotel-motel service sector. Many work 15 hour days. Over 20,000 Chinese women work in the garment industry of New York. Of the estimated 120,000 garment workers in Los Angeles, well over 20 percent are Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, and Cambodian (19).

The women seated at the table are all veterans of garment factories so-called sweatshops in Oakland’s Chinatown. They will gladly tell you how it is to work in places without minimum wage or overtime or any other numerous workplace protections American workers take for granted.

They form a group portrait of a grand American institution, one grander to contemplate than actually to experience. They are pioneer women. Instead of investing money they are investing suffering (20).

Endnotes

1. Genny Lim, “Wonder Woman,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Watertown: Persephone Press, 1981), 25-6.

2. Judy Yung, Unbound Feet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 243.

3. Ronald Takaki, “They Also Came: The Migration of Chinese and Japanese Women to Hawaii and the Continental United States,” Chinese America: History and Perspectives 1990, 3.

4. Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 67.

5. These case studies are detailed in Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, eds., Labor Immigration Under Capitalism (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984).

6. Denise Chong, The Concubine’s Children (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 38.

7. Walter Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870-1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 158-60.

8. Nugent, Crossings, 160.

9. Chong, Concubine’s, 68.

10. Chong, Concubine’s, 86.

11. A number of essays in Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers, eds., Women and Chinese Patriarchy (Hong Kong: Zed Books, 1994) give background information on women’s work in the Pearl River Delta.

12. Yung, Unbound, 16.

13. See, for example, Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Anne M. Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in the American West, 1865-90 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985).

14. Thanh-dam Truong, Sex, Money and Morality (New York: Zed Books, 1990) looks at Asian prostitution and tourism, particularly in the contemporary period, but does not discuss sex-work as part of the development of capitalism.

15. Gary Y. Okihiro, Cane Fires (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 31.

16. Brett Melendy, Asians in America: Filipinos, Koreans and East Indians (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), 162.

17. Teresa Amott and Julie Matthaei, eds., Race, Gender and Work (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 305.

18. Susan B. Gall and Timothy Gall, eds., Statistical Record of Asian Americans (Detroit: Gale Research Center, 1993), 501.

19. Edna Bonacich et al., eds., Global Production (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 346.

20. Michael Robertson, “Empowering the Women of the Sweatshops,” San Francisco Chronicle, 24 April 1990.

Sucheta Mazumdar is a professor of history at Duke University.