Misplaced Chinese Children in the 19th Century USA
A small but interesting population
Thanks for coming back for your weekly Asian Studies fix. For those who are new here, each Sunday for over a year I have been releasing an essay or column on Chinese, Asian, or Chinese-American history. Often, I release a second, much simpler piece on Thursdays or share something I have found related to these subjects. It does not happen always, but it usually does. And while this was originally intended to be a politics free zone, as an American, I am very concerned over the things that are happening in my nation since the last election and have been writing about those here on Tuesdays for the last few months. Those are clearly labelled as “politics” and if you need a break from the news, feel free to skip them.
While I am grateful to all my readers who spend time coming here and reading what I write, and I want as many people as possible to read it, this is a reader supported publication, which means the only source of income it provides is when readers pay me to do this. As these two things conflict, I have compromised by sharing a preview to all readers but only allowing paid subscribers to read the essays when released. For everyone else, they become available 10 days later.
While the bulk of what I am exploring now is the Chinese during the California gold rush and in the Old American West, I do try to mix things up. If you want to see what I have written in the past 14 months, there is a full archive of past pieces available.
Thanks.
Here’s an interesting picture of a Chinese cabin boy on an American ship that had sailed to the port of Calao, Peru in the 1860s. I’ve been unable to find more details or background. The original caption said “Figure 1.--This portrait shows a Chinese boy serving as a cabin boy on an American ship in the 1860s. The CDV was taken by Nobley Lopez at Callao.” This was port for Lima. A note on the back reads, "My father's Chinese cabin boy. "No. 1 Boy". 1 A “CDV” or “Carte de Visite” was a type of photographic postcard that became popular in the 1860s. 2
Trigger Warning: Contains period racism and descriptions of children in difficult circumstances in order to teach about actual historical conditions.
First, I’d like to take a moment to just apologize if the last two weeks’ pieces, the pieces on the first and second Chinese language newspapers in the USA, were disorganized and seemed badly written. The issue was that I was trying to write about something as I was learning about it for the first time. I simply did not have the time to do things in the proper sequence before deadline and kind of put them down as I found them, the whole time muttering “Wow. This is just so cool.” Those newspapers were something I had never stumbled across before, and the fascinating things I was learning invited digging in deeper and checking to see if connections with other things panned out or not. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they didn’t. One of the cool things about Chinese history, including Chinese American history, is that if you find one interesting thing it usually leads to a couple more equally fascinating things that you never knew anything about and the process never stops.
For instance, some might recall that last week I wrote that a man named Lee Kan (sometimes spelled Li Kan and written as 李根 in Chinese) was the Chinese language editor of both of the Chinese language newspapers I wrote about. 3 I wanted to know more about him, but very little seems to be known about his life. I’ve learned so far that he was born in 1825 in Quanzhou, Fujian, China on the Southeast China coast, was enrolled in a missionary school called “The Morrison School” in Macao in 1841 a little over 500 miles or 800 kilometers away at age 16, 4 and from 1854, at about age 20 until he was 22 in 1856, he was living in San Francisco, California where he was the Chinese language editor of the two papers I wrote about earlier this month. After that, he seems to have disappeared from the historical record. 5 So, basically, I have three points in this man’s life and nothing to connect them. I also have no idea if he had a family either as a child or as an adult, and no idea what became of him or how he became enrolled in a new missionary school hundreds of miles from home. But I have been trying to learn what I can about his life but, honestly, I don’t expect much success.
During this period, the days of the early China trade and the beginning of mid-nineteenth century East-West, Sino-American cultural mixing, it was not unknown for unwanted, discarded, or orphaned Chinese children who were found or otherwise acquired by missionaries, sailors, or sea captains to be brought back to the USA and came to live there. Sometimes, in the case of the missionaries, they were given a pretty good education in China beforehand.
So, either Lee Kan’s parents (Mr. and Mrs. Lee?) decided it would be a good idea to enroll him in a missionary school, or he had no parents and wound up there largely by chance when someone found him unattended and decided to bring him there.
There’s just no way for me to know at this point. But it got me digging deeper into trying to learn about the lives of these relocated Chinese children who came to the USA to live their lives. It’s a little studied subject, and I, for one, admit I don’t know terribly much about it. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone knows much about it.
Abandoned, Unwanted, and Sold Children in China in the Nineteenth Century
In China at this time, there were serious economic issues that affected many. These stemmed from political turmoil and ethnic strife, as well as rapid population growth that outstripped resources. Historians still debate the exact causes and the degree of effect each cause had on the problem. One tragic result of this is that many families had more children than they could feed or care for and the result was children being abandoned or sold.
American visions of China and Abandoned Chinese Children
This made an impact on visitors from the West and became part of many people’s vision of China. For instance, Peter Parley's Universal History: On the Basis of Geography, was a popular geography book of the period. It was first released in 1837, but reprinted many times over the next fifty years. “Peter Parley” was the pen-name of Samuel Griswold Goodrich, a Massachusetts author and politician, 6 although it is widely recognized that he did not write everything which was written under this name. While the book did try to share an introduction to the history and culture of China, including a list of “Chinese Manners.” It’s an interesting list although the bulk of it by today’s standards is quite offensive and racist. (I’ve scheduled the whole list and the chapter on Chinese history as well to be published on Thursday, June 5, the day after this piece becomes open to free subscribers. Please stay tuned.)
But item number four deals directly with the problem. It says “The Chinese are great fibbers, and are very much addicted to cheating, and there are some horrible customs among them. For instance, if parents have a greater number of children than they can conveniently support they are permitted to throw them into a river!”
An excerpted image from Peter Parley's Universal History: On the Basis of Geography, 1837. The statement is included in all images I have seen at least into the 1880s.
As for the statement, “The Chinese are great fibbers, and are very much addicted to cheating” I began to address it here, but it grew to over a thousand words and I simply decided that it would be best for everyone to remove it and use it as an entirely separate column. Stay tuned for that. It’s coming up. Like many things, the issue is, as they say “complicated,” and the Chinese and others often find Westerners phony and dishonest as well. It’s going to get a full treatment in these pages in the future.
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The idea that China was full of unwanted children seems to have made a strong impact on many Americans of the time. Let’s dig deeper.
Although it’s important to acknowledge and condemn the obvious period racism and gross simplification of a complex social issue in the original, over 180 year-old source, the statement that parents in China at this time were allowed to throw unwanted children in rivers and drown them is factually correct. It was observed and noted with horror by Westerners who visited China from the 16th Century on. 7 Among the people who witnessed and documented it was the 17th Century Catholic missionary and scientist, Matteo Ricci, a man who developed a very deep understanding and appreciation of Chinese culture and society. 8
In other cases, girls and boys were sold by their families, generally when the family had no food to feed them and no money with which to buy food. I wrote a bit about the way girls were sold into slavery in China and then some of these people were brought to the USA as slaves by other Chinese in a previous piece about a year ago. See CHINESE WOMEN IN EARLY SAN FRANCISCO and the Old American West, June 12, 20024 As explained in this piece, the horrible truth is that most of the Chinese women or girls who entered the USA during the gold rush era and later were enslaved people and most were brought to the USA by other Chinese who kept them as slaves. This practice continued for considerable time after the end of legal slavery in the USA 9 and was undoubtedly a factor, one of many, in the push by some for the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
While today, few would discuss the issue of Chinese infanticide or families selling their own children without at least attempting to put such a tragic event in some kind of economic context and making it clear that it was almost always done out of necessity, as seen above, in the past, infanticide and selling of children was often described with little or no context at all.
The impression was clearly that China was full of children that needed rescuing.10
According to author and historical researcher, Ruthanne Lum McCumm:
In the nineteenth century, Westerners viewed the removal of children from China as benevolent regardless of whether they were orphaned. 11
Therefore, it was not unknown for Americans and other Western people who travelled from China to bring small Chinese children home with them, and for the children to grow up and be settled here. How many? I have no idea. I am not aware of anyone else who has studied this although they could very well be out there. Furthermore, I have not yet framed a plan for proper investigation. But such children did exist, and I will provide specific examples next week if all goes to plan.
So what do we call these people?
The first question that needs to be asked before moving ahead further is “What do we call these people?” By which I mean, Chinese children who were either found or otherwise obtained by a Euro-American adult in China and brought to the USA to live and reside among the Euro-American community -how shall we refer to such people?
Quite honestly, there is no perfect term. Candidates for such a term could possibly include unnecessarily, emotionally charged terms such as “kidnapped children,” “enslaved children,” or “rescued children,” depending on one’s predisposition, but all of these seem unnecessarily emotionally charged and biased. “Found children” is possible but not always correct. Still, nothing seems quite right, and, while it’s far from perfect, here, at this moment, I will call them “nineteenth Century, Chinese adoptees” with the caveat that I very well might change it and use a new term in the future. Consider this an initial investigation.
If someone wishes to point out that some of these children never quite fit into their new families or culture, I will point out that believe me, sadly, this is not unknown in adoptions, especially those that happen across racial and cultural boundaries, even today. Therefore, I think the term fits, at least for the moment.
What was the motivation? Was this a humanitarian thing? Could pedophilia be part of the picture?
While we do not have much information or a large sample to work with, since we are discussing taking children from one side of the world to the other under the custody of a non-biologically related adult through a process that did not seem to be governed by any laws or at least any enforceable or enforced laws, as distasteful as it is, the question must be asked “Were the adults taking these children back home with them pedophiles? Was this perhaps a sexual relationship?”
While we have no way of knowing, it is quite possible that in some cases it was. While it needs to be stated that sexual relations between adults and minors is illegal, immoral, a violation of trust, and predatory, it also must be acknowledged that nevertheless it is a recurring behavior in human societies across many cultures and time periods. Second, it also needs to be acknowledged that same sex, sexual relationships and behavior was not uncommon among sailors in the nineteenth century. 12 Finally, some indication of how people of the time might have felt about such things can perhaps be gleaned from what is known about ages of marriage and consent at this time in the USA. Quite honestly, there do not seem to have been any age of consent laws in the mid-nineteenth century USA, at least I have not been able to find any, and when they were passed in the year 1880, the common age of consent and marriage was, disturbingly, 10 or 12. 13 Therefore, it could be implied that marriage and extramarital sexual relations were more common or accepted among people at younger ages than today.
But even if this were the case, it is very difficult to know today almost two centuries later what the motivations of the small sample of people we are dealing with was. There were, for instance, cases where New England ship captains purchased 11 year old boy from their family in Guangzhou (Canton), sailed home with them, probably using them as a cabin boy for two months or so on a crowded ship full of men and no recreational or entertainment facilities, something that sounds positively disturbing to my modern sensibilities, and then, upon arrival home, ensured the child had a good upbringing and education in New England for the rest of their childhood. While we only have a few examples of such people, I will share what I can soon, probably next week.
What about other Chinese adoptees?
So far, I have only found half a dozen such people, all males, all American civil war veterans. Why not more? Where are the others? It would seem logical that for every Chinese adoptee who was a US Civil War veteran, there must be at least one or more others who did not serve in the military during time of war. Why haven’t more been found?
Well, first, there probably never were that many nineteenth-century Chinese adoptees. Let’s just make that clear up front.
Second, it would be very difficult to find and identify them. For one thing, if one checks public records, few would be labelled as either “Chinese” or “Asian” in the public records. At this time in the USA, from 1850 to 1890, the normal demographic racial categorization categories that many sections of the US government used were “White,” “Black,” and “Mulatto” 14 and if someone who did not fit in these categories was encountered, the person recording the data was forced to create a solution on the spot. Common solutions, as we will see next week, were to simply choose one of the three categories and sometimes to make a mark after it to indicate it might not be right. Therefore, one can’t just scan military or census or other data and look for “Chinese” or “Asian” or “Asian American” people. It simply didn’t work that way at this time. And while I have found one example of such a person who did write his ethnicity as Chinese on official documents in Connecticut as an adult after the US Civil War, after 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, he began identifying himself falsely as “Japanese” on documents for obvious reasons. Which makes us wonder how many other Chinese adoptees in the USA were falsifying their ethnic and national origins when asked?
As for looking for Asian or Chinese names, again as we will see next week, few of these people kept their birth names in the USA and instead used a new, “American” name that sounded nothing like a Chinese name and often came from a strange, improvised, non-standard source, again created on the spot by whoever was caring for them or by the adoptee themself.
So where and how do we find such people in the historical record? One source of information is to examine what information is known on Chinese who served in the American Civil War. Next time Chinese Adoptees and the story of Chinese American Veterans of the US Civil War
Footnotes and References.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Bemis# “Polly Bemis” was the adopted name of a Chinese woman who was smuggled into the USA as a slave in the year 1872. She ultimately obtained her freedom, settled into a mostly White community in Idaho where she was called “Polly,” married a Euro-American with the last name Bemis and died and was buried in Idaho where her home is now a state historic site. A fictionalized biography was made about her called “A Thousand Pieces of Gold” and it was later made into a movie. Honestly, it’s not a bad movie, but not a great one either.
It would be fascinating to put this statement in the context of recently emerged scandals involving the muddled origins of many Korean adoptees and the widespread preference among White Americans to adopt foreign born, racially Asian children over African American children in need of homes. Alas, I just do not have the time to research it further. And, besides, it’s depressing stuff.
from McCunn, Ruthanne Lum ( 2014) Chinese Yankee. San Francisco CA: Design Enterprises of San Francisco, page 262.
See See https://glreview.org/article/men-at-sea-in-the-19th-c-the-case-of-fryer/
Men at Sea in the 19th C.: The Case of Fryer
