Jump to content

Talk:Chinaman/Skookum1's sources

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

These items are reference resources for content discussion/development at Talk:Chinaman (racial term) and Talk:Chinaman.Skookum1 01:04, 27 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Items from BC Archives

[edit]

Main search is here, searching all indexes. From the Textual Records section only so far:

These are north-of-the-border equivalents of the US census material from genealogy.com; perhaps archival US court records may yield similar results to the Canadian ones above; I expect in photo captions you'll find it, also, fairly commonplace in various archival materials, i.e. the original title not the p.c.-ized one (on different pages Onderdonk's Way has the same image with the original caption on the one and the modernized one on another...).Skookum1 05:59, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

More from further indexes of the BC Archives, this the only one from Visual Records:

From the Moving Image Records Index:

  • Film summary: The Black Robe: Secrets of Chinatown:
    • Although Harry Hastings, the actor who played the head of the smuggling gang Chan Tow Ling, prefaced each showing in Victoria with the reminder that the film was purely fictional, the picture was not released again until one section showing a 'Chinaman with knife in back' was cut. Apparently no material which might be considered offensive to the Chinese community was discovered or eliminated by the censor. The Consul's reaction to this is not known."
    • "The rest of the film's history, of which that is a passage, is worth reading, and it seems this film could probably use an article, if there isn't one already - The Black Robe (1934 film) I guess, since that was its release title (Secrets of Chinatown was a working title)
  • Claire McAllister interview, summary:
    • "Clare McAllister was born in Nelson in 1906. She discusses her family background, her mother and father (McQuarrie). Father the mayor of Nelson, also in real estate, and with a physical handicap. Brother 12 years older. She discusses the winters in Nelson, deliveries and transportation by sleigh. "Our Chinaman", old Charlie and his duties. Her family's position in society in Nelson, the "Merchant" class of the town." etc.
    • "Christmases during the 1930s. Christmas morning routine. Finding the tree. Christmas decorations. The Victoria consumers' co-operative, measures of saving and conserving during the 1930s. "The vegetable Chinaman", lychee nuts just before Christmas, with lily and ginger. Chinese coconut lady. More on the vegetable man. Mrs. McAllister's education. Stores in Vancouver at Christmas in the 1920s." etc.
  • Harmony house, 1946-04-15. Call Number: T4237:0005 track 2 item 02 Summary:
    • "A program sponsored by Nabob Foods and featuring the Ricky Hyslop Orchestra, with Ross Mortimer as MC, from the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver. The songs featured are "S-M-I-L-E", "Day By Day", "I Like Girls", "You Tell Me Your Dreams, I'll Tell You Mine", "Chin Chin Chinaman", "Dancing In The Dark", "You Won't Be Satisfied", "Give Me The Simple Life", and "If I Had A Dozen Hearts".
  • Marjory Holmes interview, Behind the Kitchen Door, oral history project BC Archives Call Number: T4088:0034:
    • "Marjory Holmes' family moved to Victoria in 1907. She describes home in Esquimalt. Bought coal for the winter but used driftwood from the beach in the summer. Bought vegetables from the "Chinaman at the door". Family had occasional help and a Chinese cook who did a lot of things. The cook taught her some things about cooking, making bread. She describes diet. Used Girls Home Manual and Mrs. Beaton's." etc.
  • Combined Genealogy Indexes Index

There are five records on the Combined Genealogy Indexes Index, all of them death records and four of them either Chinaman Unknown or Unknown Chinaman; the fifth is Watux Chinaman, one of those applications where the Chinese name is used as the personal name and Chinaman assigned as an unofficial/quasi-official surname for documentation purposes, as also in the genealogy.com indexes already cited. There was no point in linking each of these, as their titles are enough; they're the last section at the bottom of the main search page. The most recent, Watux, is from 1929.

End of BC Archives materials with Chinaman in title or commentary/texts, some indexes had no entries.Skookum1 06:51, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

    • Suggest California, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska etc archives, if online. Also Indiana or wherever it was with the eminence grise meaning from politics, which might turn up some interesting materials, no? Or Indiana news archives that might be online, perhaps.Skookum1 06:57, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

A second search of the BC Archives for "Chinamen" (pl.) produced:

  • Textual Records:
    • GR-1327 Inquisitions/inquests conducted by coroners 1872-1937
      • from Reel B2372, first figure is Inquest No. (commas between fields added)
        • 3/79, 14 Jun 1879, Unknown Chinaman, Found dead in the Fraser
        • 7/79, 8 Apr 1879, Louis, a Chinaman, Accidental drowning
        • 8/79, 26 Dec 1879, Yong Grattat, a Chinaman, Suffocated from fumes of a charcoal stove
        • 15/83, 9 Sep 1883, Chinamen, Burnt in fire
        • 13/85, 1 Jun 1885, Unknown Chinaman, Drowned (item is followed by "Unknown White Man", indicating parallel usage]
        • 26/85, 1 Sep 1885, A Chinaman (Sung Kee), Tree fell on him
        • 27/85, 1 Sep 1885, Sung Kee, Tree fell on him
This is included as it's the same entry, two different inquest files, this one naming him without the Chinaman designation; not sure why there's two, maybe would be clear from a read of the inquest files.
        • 14/86, 13 May 1886, Unknown Chinaman, Drowned
        • 41/86, Nov 22, 1886, Chung, a Chinaman, Hung himself
Just to note the two entries after this are Su Duck and Quong Lu, who are named without the Chinaman generic usage; it would seem when someone's fullname was known the generic would not generally be appended (exceptions include Sung Kee)

Lucie Raumatsine], Date: 1878/6/2 (Yr/Mo/Day) Place: Sainte Marie Mission (a ref to St. Mary's to St. Mary's in Mission although there was another St. Mary's near Cranbrook). Raumatsine would appear to be an anglicization of a native placename, hard to say what language it's from though (St. Mary's had students from all over BC; no "tribal affiliation" is given on the record other than "TSIAM" whatever that means).

Keefer4 Sources/usage area

[edit]

At this point, I'm going to simply scour for sources where the term appears and start listing them all here. Hopefully this'll help navigate the maze of wording and NPOV concerns with the article, as well as with the history of the term, which it seems everybody could glean from. The more sources we get, the better. --Keefer4 05:40, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks; see above, so we don't duplicate our steps; I'll finish BC Archives, and was going to go througth my local histories, as well as see what else is online (1,080,000 googles).Skookum1 06:01, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Ok. I've got a few old copies of the Province from 1903 with some refs. I'll try and squeeze in a few minutes next time I'm at the library too for dictionary refs.

  • "70 Chinese taken in gambling raid". Vancouver Daily Province. September 28, 1903. Page 1

Excerpts where the term is mentioned:
"The officers carried armfuls of the yelling Chinamen back with them"
"He was a young Chinaman who leaped off the front veranda to avoid arrest"
"In court this afternoon, the Chinamen and their counsel, together with the managers of the house, had apparently decided to fight the case."--Keefer4 06:06, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Voltaire
Selected and Translated by H.I. Woolf
New York: Knopf, 1924
. Passage: "A friend sacrifices his life for his friend; a son for his father. . . . The Algonquin, the Frenchman, the Chinaman, will all say that that is very beautiful, that these actions give them pleasure, that they admire them."--Keefer4 06:10, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, we all know what a racist bastard Voltaire was, huh? :-| Equality of humanity bedamned, it's clear from that quote that he wantonly used offensive language. Now the truth can be known...(where's that Mark Twain quote? - oh in the archives at Talk:Chinaman probably, if that's archived.Skookum1 06:16, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Passage: but he deducted between 50 cents and one dollar per month from “each Chinaman working in and around the mines . . . to cover part of the costs of carrying the Chinese case” to this highest court of appeal.--Keefer4 06:17, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Passage: Playing to the racism of the miners, he demanded that “every Chinaman be brought out of . . . the mines.”--Keefer4 06:21, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"The Dude: Walter, the chinaman who peed on my rug, I can't go give him a bill, so what the fuck are you talking about?
Walter Sobchak: What the fuck are you talking about? The chinaman is not the issue here, Dude. I'm talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line, you DO NOT... Also, Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please." --Keefer4 06:30, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, I don't have either the Barman or Bowering books anymore (sold 'em, couldn't stand 'em) but I know they discuss use of the term in there, in typical p.c.-pronouncement style, but they do provide some quotes here and there as examples; probably not in the index though, so hard to find (?). If you happen to have them, that is, or The Pacific Province (MacLennan?) or Ormsby or other main histories; there are probably bits in the second volume of the Akriggs (nothing in the 1st volume, which only mentions the Chinese craftsmen hired by Meares to build the North West America at Nootka Sound and ends at 1846, 12 years before the first Chinese since arrived in BC; I haven't browsed Morton lately but I know there's quite a bit in there, including lots of the "John Chinaman" derisive usage, so I'll browse it again another time; I think archives and local histories and older newspapers/articles may be richer sources overall, though.Skookum1 06:31, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"Casual" or "common" historic usage of the term is easy enough to find, but please keep in mind, what would be very helpful are sources that specifically discuss whether or not historic usage of the term was considered offensive. Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 06:36, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yup. Looking for that. That part of it is not easy to find, as we are all aware. As with any research, what you are seeking may take time to find and involves going through a lot of information which might not be considered as useful. Eventually historical debates may present themselves with time and effort. But these usage sources are still relevant in terms of contextualizing the issue and term. There are already sources in the article in a similar vein to the ones I am researching here, so this isn't strictly for the historical usage aspect of the article. If you'd like me to stop finding contemporary usage sources for whatever reason, just ask. But in the meantime...
Just had a look at that; check out from its review/summary:
The prose is frequently difficult and idiosyncratic in its attempt to convey the exotic diction of an ethnic minority; only a motivated reader will find it rewarding to navigate endless faux Faulknerian sentences.
Makes ya wonder about usages that are probably in it, prob. by "both sides", or even more casually maybe...or not. Doesn't strike me as a tight-ass read, that's for sure. Chin is also the author of:
  • Canadian Press. Caps and Spelling. (Canadian Press, 1992). Advises usage to be "Chinese (never Chinaman)"
  • Webster's New Compact Dictionary, 1986. Chinaman: A native of China (slightly derogatory).

(Another dictionary definition source for UncleG to refuse acknowledgement of, due to conflicts with his omni-historical POV on the word.)

Items from the Chinook Listserve

[edit]

Online book this is sourced from is Roper, Edward. "On the Fraser." By track and trail : a journey through Canada. London, England: W.H. Allen, 1891. 325.

    • "Then there was Charlie, the cook, so called because his Chinese name was unpronounceable. He was a capital cook, indeed, and a most attentive servant; as clean a Chinaman as I ever met. His bed, as I have mentioned, was in the cook-house. We used to go and look at it. He always kept it in perfect order; had a feather pillow with him, and a looking-glass, and much more toilet apparatus than any of us considered necessary for ourselves. He was particularly nice in dress and person, and he always came up to the mark with a smile, though his language was mysterious; for he had thrown over "pigeon English" as low, and now spoke what he called "ploppa Inglis." It was a mixture of certain words of our tongue, mispronounced, and "Chinook Jargon." But he well understood what we said to him, rarely made a mistake, and was a favorite with all of us."
  • Pasage from Kamloops Wawa of August 1895, page 115 (see Kamloops Wawa:
    • "A plain illustration of the usefulness of shorthand for Chinese, as well as for any other language, was given last winter in a Chinese store at Kamloops, where half-a-dozen Indian boys, conversant with the 'Wawa' shorthand, happened to be present at the same time. The merchant was asked to name the numbers from one to ten in the Chinese language, which he did very willingly. The mames were at once written in short-hand characters, which the Indian boys read plainly and readily, to the admiration of the Chinese present. The exercise was found so interesting, that the numeration in Chinese words was carried on from ten to one hundred. Nicola Auxime, one of the boys, can now repeat the numbers as well as a Chinaman."
      • NB this boy was named after Chief Nicola, father or grandfather of the then-chief Chilliheetza, and may have been Nicola's grandchild or great-nephew or some such relation. The author of the passage above would be Father Lejeune, who popularized the shorthand system used in the Kamloops Wawa, which was a diocesal/community newsletter for the aboriginal Catholic flock centred on the Kamloops diocese. Most of the Wawa is in shorthand; this would appear to have been written in English but I don't have a copy around here (there's some up at SFU, near me) to look up the edition and see if this might originally have been in Lejeune's fluent Chinook; but it does look more like something original English, as there's things there that would be hard to say in Chinook; although the original story recounted here was probably told to Lejeune in Chinook. This is an example of "complimentary usage", like Twain's flattering mentions and also those from the personal interviews and travel diary cited so far.
  • verses from period doggerel, partly in Chinook, CHINOOK AND CHINEE, An Alaskan Idyll By John S. Bugbee. Appeared in the Alaska Searchlight, Juneau, AK, Saturday, Sept. 21, 1895, Chinook translations gratis by yours truly:
        • "Nika hy-as sick tum-tum," Ket slowly replied. ["I have a huge stomach ache, I feel really sick"]
            • "Nika mamook row skookum for muck-a-muck chuck. ["I'll row strong for food and drink", alternately "muck-a-muck chuck" can mean "to drink", i.e. "to ingest fluid/something to drink"]
        • Spose you make nika potlatch kloon dolla beside." ["Spose you give me of three dollars also" - "spose" is usually translated "if", but obviously not that here...).
            • What he meant was: his heart with great sorrow was struck,
        • But he'd paddle the Chinaman round like a duck
            • For a three-dollar gift and a drink for good luck.
        • "Ah! my sabe," said Ling, "it's all litee, my flend,
            • But my likee to mixee li'l bit of your drink."
        • For he thought the two liquors would make a fine blend.
            • "Nika cumtux," said Ket, without stopping to think, ["I understand"]
        • Meaning he would agree, without paper or ink,
            • And they shoved the canoe off as quick as a wink.
  • De Armond, Robert N. "The USS Saginaw in Alaskan Waters, 1867-1868" Published as Alaska History No. 46 by the Limestone Press, Kingston, Ontario in 1997.
    • "Page 90: [Meigs:] "The supposed 'Chinaman' is a Sitka Siwash."
      • Interesting; A sitka siwash is an Alaskan variant of sitkum siwash, half-Indian, "halfbreed", and also like Siwash somewhat derogatory, though not entirely in areas with high native populations where it was a commonplace name for mixed bloods, or whatever the polite term is now (Metis have reserved that term for Metis-by-culture/descent connected with their origins in the Prairies, although under Canadian legal terminology it's supposed to be used for all of proven part-native descent, whether connected to the Prairie Metis culture or not; commenting on this because of the lack of a non-derisive/acceptable term instead of "halfbreed" or "mixed blood", which probably is also unacceptable to p.c.ism. Anyway, the use here is ambiguous and both could be negative or passive, and given it's an American vessel it may be perhaps more a bit on the negative side concerning both Chinese-ness and native-ness (half-blood or othewise).
  • Gwydir (linguist?) at Colville Reservation on CJ:
    • "page 44-45: “When [Colville Chief Tonasket] found a Chinaman on any of his ground or along the river bars, he would go up and catch him by the top of his head, and give him a kick and say ‘klatawa yyack’ (travel quick), which injunction the Chinaman would always obey and make tracks out of the country.”
  • I was wrong about Ktunaxa; it must be another language from that area, maybe Nez Perce, that I remember it from, and I've seen it in others; See the meesage with the ethnonym list in Kutenai and explanation if interested.
  • comment by Chinookology webhost Jeffrey Kopp:
    • "I am a bit delicate in my Web presentations in order to avoid attracting controversy to the Jargon, revising terms such as "Chinaman" to "Chinese," for example, when they appear in general context not referring specifically to actual usage in the frontier Jargon. It's not inappropriate when presented in a historical context--but currently a very "hot button" for some.
      • I've been ignoring my own posts to the Chinook Listserve out of natural courtesy and of-course-not-ness; but in this case he's partly talking about me - but also about "enemies" from talk.politics.tibet and the BC newsgroups who had secretly lobbied and defamed me to him and others in the Chinook group, but nobody in Chinook-L would even admit to it, because of the oh-my-goodness-me embarrassment/politically oversensitive purgings of Jeff's webpages - including edits of archival materials for new-language standards on otherwise archival-copy webpages (?! is that over-censorship or what?). So normally I'd avoid any mention in sourcing CHINOOK-L of my own posts; but he's partly referring to me here, and in the aftermath now years later, knowing what I found out in the meantime about the skulduggery and cowardly pressure campaign that went on behind the scenes, courtesy CCP and KMT politicos who despised me for my support of Tibetan independence, and also of course my forthrightness on BC history and also of course my position on the usage/history=etymology of "Chinaman"); long story, including incredible and rather notorious flamewars. All begun, by the way, off news items concerning the Jenny Kwan and Victor Yukmun Wong media campaigns about the word in the early '90s or late '80s or whenever; which if you have Pacific Press archives access I'm sure there's material on (ditto for Calgary papers about Ha Ling Peak).
  • Ethnonym list and comments by Dave Robertson (currently Ph.D candidate in BC chinookology at U.Vic, or just graduated maybe?); previous item included for context:
      • "A) Terry, viz. the entertaining origin of "Ethiopia" in ancient Greek geographical knowledge: I recall it means "burnt skins" or "burnt land" or whatnot.
      • B) Without comment, here is the list of words for folks of various ethnicities in Father LeJeune's "Chinook Rudiments". It's attributed, in its earliest form, to his superior, Bishop Durieu (?of Victoria, no?), 1879:
            • Passayoox - "Frenchman" ["cloth person/people", i.e. cloth dealers, people who wear/brought cloth]
            • kinjorj, Englishman ["King George"]
            • Boston man, American
            • Canada man, Canadian
            • Tlil telikom, niggers ["black man" - tlil or tlell or klale also meant dark blue]
            • Tekop telikom, white men [lit. "white". An available pun, tl'kope telikom which seems very plausible would be "sharp people", more meaning rude or dangerous than "smooth" mdash; klimmin as in kliminawhit, "liar"]
            • Telikom, indians ["the people", kinsmen, family, friends; the speaker would be meaning his own tribe/community]
            • Chinaman, Chinaman
            • kanaka, kanak ["Hawaiian" - LeJeune's use of Kanak may be, perhaps, from French, because of the connection to French Melanesia etc.]
    • "In LeJeune's own enumeration, we find
            • Telikom, Natives
            • h'loima-telikom, other indians [i.e. than "us" in each case]
            • pel telikom, red people
              • [lit. "red people", and red/pil/pel always implies or can mean the same as pil-pil, "blood", i.e. "blood people"; Lejeune is probably writing in shorthand here, as the transliterations ar those usual in D. Robertson's transcriptions of the KW', so there's an e-i leveling; usually pel is "skin/fur", although more commonly lapel telikom, so pel telikom *could* mean "skin/fur people", although in which case it seems more to mean the people who provide the pel, the skins/furs which were traded for the cloth goods of the Pasaiooks/Passayoox (French fur traders). Blood/red is so much more obvious, but the duality is interesting; ambiguity is stock-in-trade in the CJ.
            • Boston, Americans
            • Lejooip, Jews (from Fr. les juifs, le juif)
            • Jap, Japs
      • "FWIW, when folks got to thinking much about these things, some of 'em listed everything they'd ever heard said, I suppose.
          • This isn't to say that Father Lejeune and Bishop Durieu weren't racist pigs, likewise the little girl who like the guy who came to the door with ginger and lilies....
  • Noting in passing that that CJ's accretiveness is amazing; imported neologisms were de rigeur inevitably leading to a blurring of the line between Chinook and English; I can't see, btw, "Chinese" being used in CJ, although "Chinee" maybe although localized traditinal-language name may have been completely indigenous, as in Ktunaxa is it turned out); but just in passing on another message Lejeune translated a news item about the Boxers into Chinook shorthand, and coined Boksirs (as transcr. from shorthand). If I have time I'll look it up and see what he uses (I can read the shorthand, though with difficulty, unlike Dave R.).

This last example is a citation of Chinook Jargon usage; something that as noted was controversial in Chinook studies and even though evidence is here of its being part of the CJ, at least in BC, you'll have a hard time cornering one of the contemporary chinookology crowd to admit that it's a Jargon word, despite the evidence; they've purged Grand Ronde's version of the CJ of it, I don't know how recently the change was made, to China tillikums (polite for Americans, e.g. is Boston tillikums, although they use a spelling which comes out in ASCII-IPA as tIlIXEm, with the capital-E a schwa, and I don't know what the capital-I is; "ih-" I think.Skookum1 08:24, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • End of CHINOOK Listserve listings search "Chinaman". I'm gonna have to dig into some correspondence and othe threads, because I know I've seen it "cinmn" with a sub-dot under the c and an accent or hatch on the m and/or one of the n's, from some language, somewhere, and it was in a discussion about others; not sure where now so I'll think about it. Most discussions in the listserve were to do with the derisive/non-derisive variability of siwash/sawash (from fr. le sauvage for a native male, or a general native adjective). The following was found during a search for "Chinese" at teh same listserve:
  • This item mentions a Kipling travel memoir "From Sea to Sea", volume 2, Doubleday & McClure, New York (1899),concerning his travels here in 1887: one line in the review/summary given is:
    • "There follows a vivid description of a hellish salmon-wheel and canning factory staffed by Chinese immigrants in extremis.
      • I wonder if Kipling is online much; might be, huh? I don't imagine he'd use "Chinese person" or "Chinese man" instead of "Chinaman", would he? The least of all 19th Century writers, in fact, though hard to say whether his usages, when located, are derisive or flattering, as with other citations from the period which seem prejudiced to jaundiced modern eyes but which were meant complimentarily (perhaps) and not in wilfull ignorance; in those days, of course, a Chinese person would not lecture a white person on how a white language was to be spoken....Skookum1 08:24, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Chinee"/Chayni in Chehalis language:
    • TABLE II. POSSIBLE ADDITIONAL WORDS FROM CHINUK WAWA
  • Comment in CJ from Tony Johnson, Grand Ronde OR CJ scholar/program director, on Chayni not being acceptable modern CJ:
    • "WEXt 'Chayni' yaka Lush Chinuk-wawa pus 'Chinese'-tIlIxam"
      • "'Chinee', that's not good Chinuk-wawa as is 'Chinese people/friends'" - although it's interesting Tony still doesn't try and Chinookify "Chinese"....makes me wonder what he does use...the issue here, albeit in pure CJ, is about what ethnonyms to use, the unspoken topic being "Chinaman", i.e. whether it's legitimate CJ or not.
  • post in CJ by Scott Tyler, IIRC of Neah Bay WA, with adaptations of ethnonyms perhaps unique to Neah Bay an the Makah variant of the Jargon, or even/also of Scott's own coinage,
    • "huloimi nem kopa huloimi tillikum? Pe wa wa Ma!qa klaska wa wa kopa chaydeetX (Chinese), chapedetX (Japanese), chabidatX (German). Pastad kopa Boston kopa American kopa Whiteman. Kin choch kopa King George kopa English. Pe wext Nez Perce pe Yakima pe Wasco tillikum klaska wa wa kopa Whiteman kopa soyapo pe seapo pe shoyop kopa wa wa 'hat guys'!!!!!!!!!!! Kehwa seahpo nem kopa Whiteman kopa klaska huloimi tillikums.
      • Never mind the translation, unles you really want to know....
  • excerpts of ethnoyms from J. Teit's work on the Secwepemc in the publications of the Jessop North Pacific Expedition, speaking here of the Shuswap language's list of ethnonyms (which are very interesting):
    • "And for Chinese:
      • "Skomkeme'mps ("lump at the back of head," on account of the cue tied up at the back of the head). . . Tee'namen (from English Chinamen)."
        • Which, needless to say, demonstrates transmission to CJ to another language, as also shown with CJ itself so far (cf. Lejeune to Durieu, above).
  • Completely non-evidential but just for fun Chinook translation of the Tao Te Ching, by Christopher Schindler, who also bravely attempted translations of various Latin texts.
  • End of search for "Chinese" at Chinook listserve.Skookum1 08:53, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Washington State Digital Archives

[edit]

Oregon State University Digital Archives

[edit]

University of Washington Digital Collections

[edit]

There are three archived headlines only in the U.W. collections using "Chinese" April 1, 1904, April 12, 1905, April 12, 1910 Also in image files but not newspaper headlines:

Kate and the girls are going to try to do their work. I think they cannot afford the Chinaman" (this mostly likely in reference to a household servant they had to "let go")
Ching and Chung these (?) Chinaman room together and Friday night about two o'clock a drunken Chinese woman came to the door of their rome makeing [sic] a terrible banging.
I don't quite understand the "these" if that's what it is (this is a handwritten-letter image) as she mentions Ching in the sentence before; could be "two" or "and Steve (?" Chinaman (??).

Emily Carr in UBC Digital Collections

[edit]
Things are all bursting out our having a Chinaman to dig soon seeds already in flower loves you know the green thing in the Penticton pot you gave me?
["Penticton" was overwritten, like she'd had trouble spelling/remembering it, as an unfamiliar word...she rarely went to the Interior)
Geez, makes you wonder about the seeds, and which green thing in which flowerpot from Penticton, and why the Chinese gardener liked it, too. This interpretation influenced by the unpunctuated and very erratic handwriting of Mlle. Carr, which is worth a look (she's known for it, but this particular quote make you wonder why...)
A Chinaman responded but he was young
I can't quite make out the sense of the rest — it begins "Been very busy and pretty groggy..."
I imagine it may turn up here and there in Emily's writings, albeit more likely in older editions than more modern one.......hmmm, now about Pauline Johnson....yeah, I'm sure she uses it, I just don't own Legends of Vancouver anymore.Skookum1 10:18, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Online Archive of California (Bancroft Library)

[edit]

The Chinese in California (collection)

[edit]

samples:

"Rev. O. Gibson was requested to prepare an answer to the lecture delivered by Father Buchard, a Jesuit Priest, on "Chinamen or White man, which?" This text is the published version."

Cartoon/drawing captions:

Stereo Views of California and the West ca. 1867-1903

[edit]

Cook (Jesse B.) Scrapbooks Documenting San Francisco History and Law Enforcement: Additions

[edit]
  • [BANC PIC 1998.067--fALB:148b . "A white woman married to a Chinaman , 1919."]

Micheline Jack papers, 1948-1986

[edit]

Ralston (William Chapman) Correspondence

[edit]
  • Fry, James Barnet, Headquarters Military Division of the South, Louisville, K[entucky, July 18th, 1869. To [William C.] Ralston.] "Enclosed clipping entitled The Chinese in California which gives "the leading democratic view on the Chinese question" in the local area; it will be a mistake for Senator [Eugene] Casserly to appease the Irish by making "war on the Chinaman "; will not be supported by the party on this side and he will be "out in the cold"; "a fair chance for all will be the result of the war""

Cook (Jesse Brown) Scrapbooks Documenting San Francisco History and Law Enforcement, ca. 1895-1936

[edit]

Framed items from the collections of The Bancroft Library

[edit]

Robert B. Honeyman, Jr. Collection of Early Californian and Western American Pictorial Material

[edit]

Graves (Roy D.) Pictorial Collection, ca. 1850-ca. 1968

[edit]

University of British Columbia library items

[edit]

Items turn out to be "search expired" when linked on; search "chinaman" to get these results:

End search UBC stacksSkookum1 20:36, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]


US Nat'l Postal Museum - Letters of the Great Migration and the Depression

[edit]
But sometimes the letters printed in the Defender served a more socially conscious purpose. One of these, dated August 26, 1916, responds to claims made by prominent black leaders that African Americans should remain in the south because of the many dangers associated with migration. The writer, W. J. Latham of Jackson, Mississippi, explains, “These letters give reasons why the Negro should stay in the south, but none of them give any good reason why our people should not go as the Chinaman, the Japanese, the Italian, the Pole, the Scandinavian and other foreigners who come to America for work have.” After detailing the poor working conditions in the south at that time, Latham goes on to describe his vision of what migration means for the African American citizen/:
Note that Chinaman is used in the same context as Japanese, Italian, Pole and Scandinavian, i.e. it is used as a proper name, not as a derisive (there are derisives for each other others - Jap, Wop, Pollack, Scandahoovian and/or "Swede").Skookum1 18:49, 26 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

From the Smithsonian Institute website

[edit]
There is also a mode of travelling by means of a "mule litter", which resembles the shafts and frames of a dray, only there are shafts at both ends, a mule going before and another behind, and a man carrying a man between them. When the journey is over uneven ground, and the animals do not keep step, this style of travelling affords some of the most peculiar wriggling ever known, and gives rise to nausea, like sea-sickness; we will call it mule sickness. Thousands of large, fat Chinamen riding on small donkeys, scarcely larger than first-class Newfoundland dogs, excite your commisseration. The Chinese in Peking have a fashion of riding mules by sitting over the animals hips, the whole body being before. When, as is generally the case with these riders, they present the appearance to a person in the rear, of a tall Chinamen tapering out into a pair of mule's legs below.
"Commisseration" is not a form of derision, now, is it?Skookum1 18:58, 26 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It's life imitating Frederic Remington, Albert Bierstadt and Charles M. Russell. It's also the largest event of its kind, attracting some of the genre's leading figures to a convivial affair that's as much reunion as tax deduction. On a sprawling campground, two white men pose as Lewis and Clark; a Lakota boy wields a bow and arrow; a Lakota woman cradles her two children. In the distance, Indians pursue a stagecoach; a trio of mountain men pause in a canoe in the middle of the river; a Korean-American portrays an 1860s "Chinaman" panning for gold at the river's edge. "There's just so much going on," says Rick Meoli, a St. Louis fine art photographer. "Why wouldn't you want to shoot it?"
The only one I ever witnessed was in Webber's prairie, the occasion being the killing of a Comanche, one of a party that had been on a horse stealing trip down into Bastrop. They were hotly pursued, and, reasoning about horses as the Chinaman does about boots—that the biggest must naturally be the best—• they mounted a warrior on Manlove's big horse, which was part of the booty, and left him behind as rear guard, while the balance hurried the stolen horses away.
  • this link yields an error and produces a "source" HTML page; it may be that a font style "chinaman" appears to be the reason why the search produced this article; I can't view it in pdf form to see if "chinaman" is in the text, as it may be; but it appears here to be a font style name (?).
Bishop Kingsley, writing from Singapore, says: "It is perfectly marvelous how, in this moist climate, certain kinds of trees can be made to take all forms of things animate and inanimate. In a rich Chinaman's garden are trees the exact resemblance of lions, dogs panting for breath, with mouths widely extended etc."
The wages of Chinamen are 75 cents to $1/day, if they find their own board, or from $18 to $20 a month, if it is found. Those who are "found" usually understand some English, and have skill which the others have not.
fourth pair with black areas relatively broader and together with the paler (mostly chinamen-buff or deep cream-buff) interspaces, forming distinct transverse bands, much broken, however, along edges and on distal portion, the tip (for about 10 ram.) pale pin "kish buff or cream-buff";
(from a description of Goldman's Whippoorwill)
distal primaries with larger and mostly imnmculato spots of paler cinnamomeous, the d?k interspaces also mostly im?naculate; tail with transverse series of narrow, irregular, mottled bands of chinamen-brown, these some-times scarcely if at all intcrrupted;
(from a description of a screech owl}

Metropolitan Museum of Art (one item)

[edit]
Le Noir was the founder of a dynasty of French clockmakers who specialized in making movements in lavishly decorated cases for royal and aristocratic patrons from all over Europe. The case of this one, made in the Chantilly porcelain manufactory (founded ca. 1725), reflects the taste for chinoiserie, or European evocations of Chinese art, sometimes including, as on this clock, amusing figures of "Chinamen." The movement has a single train and does not strike the hours.

Placenames

[edit]

There is only one remaining "Chinaman placename" in Canada: Geographical Names of Canada online database:

  • Chinaman Island, Manitoba Location 26-67-23-W NTS topo 063K15

It remains common in the United States, however, as a USGS search on topozone.com for "chinaman" demonstrates (the second item in each listing is the county; after the "type" - bay,summit etc - is the elevation, then the name of the USGS quad, following by the latitude-longitude):

  • Chinaman Bayou, Lafourche, LA, bay, unknown, Bay Courant, 29.300ºN 90.336ºW
  • Chinaman Bluff, Juneau, WI, summit, 1040 feet, Camp Douglas, 43.933ºN 90.280ºW
  • Chinaman Coulee, Williams, ND, valley, unknown, Williston East, 48.187ºN 103.604ºW
  • Chinaman Cove, Lewis and Clark, MT, bay, unknown, Canyon Ferry, 46.651ºN 111.709ºW
  • Chinaman Cove Campground, Lewis and Clark, MT, locale, 3780 feet, Canyon Ferry, 46.651ºN 111.709ºW
  • Chinaman Creek, Tuolumne, CA, stream, unknown, Strawberry, 38.201ºN 120.081ºW
  • Chinaman Diggings, Lincoln, NV, mine, unknown, Bristol Range SE, 38.093ºN 114.623ºW
  • Chinaman Flat, Pima, AZ, flat, unknown, Agua Dulce Mountains, 32.122ºN 113.194ºW
  • Chinaman Gulch, Chaffee, CO, valley, 8000 feet, Buena Vista East, 38.809ºN 106.081ºW
  • Chinaman Gulch, Meagher, MT, valley, unknown, Charcoal Gulch, 46.726ºN 110.800ºW
  • Chinaman Hat, Josephine, OR, summit, 3559 feet, York Butte, 42.432ºN 123.871ºW
  • Chinaman Hat, Wasco, OR, summit, 3623 feet, Hastings Peak, 44.993ºN 120.549ºW
  • Chinaman Hat, Culberson, TX, summit, 4670 feet, Guadalupe Pass, 31.771ºN 104.795ºW
  • Chinaman Hill, Chouteau, MT, summit, 3114 feet, Fort Benton, 47.865ºN 110.739ºW
  • Chinaman Hills, Hidalgo, NM, range, unknown, Hilo Peak, 31.449ºN 108.607ºW
  • Chinaman Lagoon, Aleutians East, AK, bay, unknown, Port Moller C-6, 55.524ºN 161.696ºW
  • Chinaman Lake, Beltrami, MN, lake, 1355 feet, Decker Lake, 47.628ºN 94.462ºW
  • Chinaman Mine, Elko, NV, mine, unknown, Blanchard Mountain, 41.682ºN 114.705ºW
  • Chinaman Slough, Valdez-Cordova (CA), AK, stream, unknown, Cordova C-2, 60.679ºN 144.730ºW
  • Chinaman Spring, Teton, WY, spring, unknown, Old Faithful, 44.442ºN 110.831ºW
  • Chinaman Tank, Gila, AZ, reservoir, unknown, McFadden Peak, 33.922ºN 110.890ºW
  • Chinaman Trail, Grant, OR, trail, unknown, Olive Lake, 44.801ºN 118.560ºW
  • Chinamans Arch, Box Elder, UT, arch, unknown, Lampo Junction, 41.628ºN 112.493ºW
  • Chinamans Canyon, Las Animas, CO, valley, unknown, Madrid, 37.229ºN 104.698ºW
  • Chinamans Dinner Dam, Chouteau, MT, dam, unknown, Rice Reservoir, 47.642ºN 110.832ºW
  • Chinamans Hat, Washington, ID, summit, 6180 feet, Monroe Butte, 44.543ºN 117.034ºW
  • Chinamans Hat, Golden Valley, MT, summit, 4171 feet, Progress, 46.214ºN 109.528ºW
  • Chinamans Hat, Kittitas, WA, summit, 3718 feet, Colockum Pass SE, 47.026ºN 120.251ºW
  • Chinamans Spring, Silver Bow, MT, spring, unknown, Ramsay, 46.017ºN 112.699ºW

Evidently the US renaming campaign was not as thorough as that in Canada. NB some of these placenames, whether branded as derogatory or not, are in National Parks - e.g. Chinmaman Spring, which is in Grand Teton National Park.Skookum1 19:47, 26 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Journal or Arthur Bushby, Clerk of the BC Assizes Court, 1859

[edit]

Bushby accompanied Justice Matthew Baillie Begbie on his rounds of saddelbag justice in the early colony, and kept one of the more thorough and colourful diaries of the period; these are two extracts quoted in Irene Edwards Short Portage to Lillooet (see Lillooet for publication data):

Tuesday 12th April, 1859. Got two Indians and an old white horse; packed them and set off at 7 o'clock; breakfasted on the road, and camped about 3 miles on the other side of Halfway House, about 12 miles from Port Anderson, in a pretty spot among a bunch of cedar trees. We had some beans and rice for dinner, which were capital, quite a relief to bacon. One the road we met at least 50 Chinamen at different times - some white men, Indianas, and lots of mules. It is strange to see how different nations carry their loads - the Indians on their backs, suspended by a band from the head - the Chinese on long poles over the shoulders - the Englishmen on the shoulder. The Chinese seem very good, peaceful people - they chat away and are very polite.
Yup, rank, virulent racism and derisive language all right.....
Saturay, 16th April, 1958 - WE have been waiting for the Indians to take our packs on to Port Douglas. Thre have just come in sight. Hurra!~ There are only three - we must pack them well - the begtgars! Theyu said they would not take our packs. They said they were too heavy, so we told them to klatawa (Chinook - "to go"), and made a show of putting up the tent, thinking that might induce them to come to terms, but no. Happily a canoe came by so we shipped all the baggage & called the Indians back. They however wanted $3.00 a head whereupon we lost all patience, kicked them off and shouldered our own packs. We had not gone far when we met a Chinaman & 3 mules who, much to our delight, took our packs, and so on we went. I endeavoured to hold a conversation with "John" but could not understand him at all. We got that afternoon to the HOT SPRINGS [sic] where we camped. It is a very pretty spot - the rock from which the spring emmanates [sic] is in the midst of a cedar wood, and each side of the Hot Spring are two cold ones. An Irishman is building a modern Hotel and a bath House over it. We bathed of course, the first time I have been really clean since I left S. Francisco.
I left the whole passage to give context to the Chinaman usage, and to show there was no follow-up that might be negative. Seems Bushby liked this guy, but of course there are those who will maintain this is a derogatory/derisive usage and at best a demonstration of Bushby's racism and ignorance. Not. As for his use of "John" here, Bushby was a very recent arrival from the UK and may not have picked up the derisive flavour of that word; mind you, this is very early - 1859 - and the derisive context of John Chinaman may not have fully developed yet. About that I found a forum discussion about "Johnny Jihad" which contained the following comments:
Two other uses of “Johnny” to personify an enemy soldier come to mind. Australians refered to their opponents as “Johnny Turk” during the First World War, while the Union side in the American Civil War dubbed soldiers from the south as “Johnny Reb”. Could these earlier usages, coupled with the attractive alliterative potential of “jihad”, have suggested this current term?" by Stephen Grasser 08 Aug 06, 0155 GMT
Perhaps, but Johnny and John are common given names in fictional everyman-type words: John Bull, John Chinaman, John Doughboy, John Farmer, John Indian, John Law, Johnny Congress, Johnny Green, Johnny Haultaut, Johnny Newcome, Johnny Raw, Johnny Tinplate, etc., etc. (all taken from the Historical Dictionary of American Slang). by Grant Barrett 08 Aug 06, 0205 GMT

National Archives of Canada

[edit]

==="Chinaman" search

THE Marquis Tseng says he does not understand the rage for old china. Why the French, for example, should prefer Chinese embroidery and porcelain to their own, which are daily improving in quality, he cannot understand. It is natural enough that old China should not be inestimably precious in the eyes of a Chinaman. He is able to see that in many respects the bric-â-brac [sic] of Europe is superior to the cups and saucers of his own country. But fashion has ordained that Chinese ware shall be chic, and the Marquis Tseng notwithstanding, people will continue to live up to their Chinese teapots.Skookum1 22:45, 26 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

End of "chinaman" results from Nat'l Archives of Canada, "chinamen" results to follow.Skookum1 22:45, 26 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

[edit]

33 results in total:

-It would be interesting to see usages in the return correspondence from the Chinese Consul and other Chinese govt agencies in this period.....

End of "Chinamen" search results at Nat'l Archives. Can't be certain as documents catalogued here are not necessarily online, but it looks as though "Chinamen" is to be found in the titles/contents of letters addressed/correspondence either by or to the Chinese Consul.....Skookum1 18:24, 27 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

From BC/PacNW local histories

[edit]

Some passages from such books are from original sources and will be quoted separately; passages here are for local/folk historians whose own writing includes the use of "Chinaman" or "Chinamen".

The Mexican muleteers were tough happy men, scoffing at hardships and disaster which were often their lot. They along with the Negroes, Chinamen, Indians. and countless other nationalities, added color and life around the night campfires and cabin stoves. They boasted of their strength and endurance on the trails, and often cheered their fellow travellers with their music and songs.
Some of the prospectors hired the Indians and Chinamen to help with their loads when they could afford it. Chinese packers were a common sight, balancing their burdens on long poles on their shoulders.
By the next year [1860] it was soon found that the pack trains could not possibly carry enough supplies for the needs of the hordes of nmienrs on the Upper Fraser and the Cariboo. When a wagon road was finally built, oxen and horses reaplced most of the mule pack trains.
From "Packing the Early Trails" section in Short Portage to Lillooet, Irene Edwards, self-publ. Lillooet BC 1976 (no page no.s).
Mrs. Edwards is speaking of the Douglas Road and the River Trail/Old Cariboo Road; 500 Mexican mules and their muleteers were brought in for freighting companies, along with those infamous camels brought in by Frank Laumeister (who lost his shirt, and his camels). Mrs. Edwards was born in Fort Fraser and ran the stores in D'Arcy and Short/Seton Portage for years. I knew her, she wasn't a racist...(she'd lived among native most of her life, and in the D'Arcy-Seton-Lillooet area she also had Japanese as customers and friends, and likely what Chinese were still there too...as Dr. Miyazaki said about the area "you can't be a racist and stay in Lillooet very long". Well, nowadays you can, but not back in those days, when people needed each other and lived on much closer personal quarters than in the post-mediafied, post-vehicular age...which is one reason "antique" or "quaint" or "archaic" words survive in such places (and as it still happens to survive today).Skookum1 01:33, 27 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Excerpts from Rudyard Kipling

[edit]

Traffics and Discoveries

[edit]
  • Even now I can at will recall every tone and gesture, with each dissolving picture inboard or overside--Hinchcliffe's white arm buried to the shoulder in a hornet's nest of spinning machinery; Moorshed's halt and jerk to windward as he looked across the water; Pyecroft's back bent over the Berthon collapsible boat, while he drilled three men in expanding it swiftly; the outflung white water at the foot of a homeward-bound Chinaman not a hundred yards away, and her shadow-slashed, rope-purfled sails bulging sideways like insolent cheeks; the ribbed and pitted coal-dust on our decks, all iridescent under the sun; the first filmy haze that paled the shadows of our funnels about lunch time; the gradual die-down and dulling over of the short, cheery seas; the sea that changed to a swell: the swell that crumbled up and ran allwhither oilily: the triumphant, almost audible roll inward of wandering fog-walls that had been stalking us for two hours, and--welt upon welt, chill as the grave--the drive of the interminable main fog of the Atlantic. We slowed to little more than steerage-way and lay listening. Presently a hand-bellows foghorn jarred like a corncrake, and there rattled out of the mist a big ship literally above us. We could count the rivets in her plates as we scrooped by, and the little drops of dew gathered below them.
NB this is one of two usages I've found in Kipling giving one of the non-ethnic meanings for Chinaman, in this case that of a ship involved in the China trade, instead of a dealer in China ware is is the other non-ethnic meaning.

Knights of the Golden Venture

[edit]
  • We lay bound among the benches till morning, when the Danes dragged us to the high deck by the steering-place, and their captain - Witta, he was called - turned us over with his foot. Bracelets of gold from elbow to armpit he wore, and his red hair was long as a woman's, and came down in plaited locks on his shoulder. He was stout, with bowed legs and long arms. He spoiled us of all we had, but when he laid hand on Hugh's sword and saw the runes on the blade hastily he thrust it back. Yet his covetousness overcame him and he tried again and again, and the third time the Sword sang loud and angrily, so that the rowers leaned on their oars to listen. Here they all spoke together, screaming like gulls, and a Yellow Man, such as I have never seen, came to the high deck and cut our bonds. He was yellow - not from sickness, but by nature - yellow as honey, and his eyes stood endwise in his head.'
'How do you mean?' said Una, her chin on her hand.
'Thus,' said Sir Richard. He put a finger to the corner of each eye, and pushed it up till his eyes narrowed to slits.
'Why, you look just like a Chinaman!' cried Dan. 'Was the man a Chinaman?'
'I know not what that may be. Witta had found him half dead among ice on the shores of Muscovy. We thought he was a devil. He crawled before us and brought food in a silver dish which these sea-wolves had robbed from some rich abbey, and Witta with his own hands gave us wine. He spoke a little in French, a little in South Saxon, and much in the Northman's tongue. We asked him to set us ashore, promising to pay him better ransom than he would get price if he sold us to the Moors - as once befell a knight of my acquaintance sailing from Flushing.

The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows

[edit]
  • It isn't really a gate though. It's a house. Old Fung-Tching had it first five years ago. He was a boot-maker in Calcutta. They say that he murdered his wife there when he was drunk. That was why he dropped bazar-rum and took to the Black Smoke instead. Later on, he came up north and opened the Gate as a house where you could get your smoke in peace and quiet. Mind you, it was a pukka, respectable opium-house, and not one of those stifling, sweltering chandoo-khanas, that you can find all over the City. No; the old man knew his business thoroughly, and he was most clean for a Chinaman. He was a one-eyed little chap, not much more than five feet high, and both his middle fingers were gone. All the same, he was the handiest man at rolling black pills I have ever seen. Never seemed to be touched by the Smoke, either; and what he took day and night, night and day, was a caution. I've been at it five years, and I can do my fair share of the Smoke with any one; but I was a child to Fung-Tching that way. All the same, the old man was keen on his money, very keen; and that's what I can't understand. I heard he saved a good deal before he died, but his nephew has got all that now; and the old man's gone back to China to be buried.
He kept the big upper room, where his best customers gathered, as neat as a new pin. In one corner used to stand Fung-Tching's Joss--almost as ugly as Fung-Tching--and there were always sticks burning under his nose; but you never smelt 'em when the pipes were going thick. Opposite the Joss was Fung-Tching's coffin. He had spent a good deal of his savings on that, and whenever a new man came to the Gate he was always introduced to it. It was lacquered black, with red and gold writings on it, and I've heard that Fung-Tching brought it out all the way from China. I don't know whether that's true or not, but I know that, if I came first in the evening, I used to spread my mat just at the foot of it. It was a quiet corner you see, and a sort of breeze from the gully came in at the window now and then. Besides the mats, there was no other furniture in the room--only the coffin, and the old Joss all green and blue and purple with age and polish.
Fung-Tching never told us why he called the place "The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows." (He was the only Chinaman I know who used bad-sounding fancy names. Most of them are flowery. As you'll see in Calcutta.) We used to find that out for ourselves. Nothing grows on you so much, if you're white, as the Black Smoke. A yellow man is made different. Opium doesn't tell on him scarcely at all; but white and black suffer a good deal. Of course, there are some people that the Smoke doesn't touch any more than tobacco would at first. They just doze a bit, as one would fall asleep naturally, and next morning they are almost fit for work. Now, I was one of that sort when I began, but I've been at it for five years pretty steadily, and its different now. There was an old aunt of mine, down Agra way, and she left me a little at her death. About sixty rupees a month secured. Sixty isn't much. I can recollect a time, seems hundreds and hundreds of years ago, that I was getting my

three hundred a month, and pickings, when I was working on a big timber contract in Calcutta.

  • There was ten of us met at the Gate when the place was first opened. Me, and two Baboos from a Government Office somewhere in Anarkulli, but they got the sack and couldn't pay (no man who has to work in the daylight can do the Black Smoke for any length of time straight on); a Chinaman that was Fung-Tching's nephew; a bazar-woman that had got a lot of money somehow; an English loafer--Mac-Somebody I think, but I have forgotten--that smoked heaps, but never seemed to pay anything (they said he had saved Fung-Tching's life at some trial in Calcutta when he was a barrister): another Eurasian, like myself, from Madras; a half-caste woman, and a couple of men who said they had come from the North. I think they must have been Persians or Afghans or something. There are not more than five of us living now, but we come regular. I don't know what happened to the Baboos; but the bazar-woman she died after six months of the Gate, and I think Fung-Tching took her bangles and nose-ring for himself. But I'm not certain. The Englishman, he drank as well as smoked, and he dropped off. One of the Persians got killed in a row at night by the big well near the mosque a long time ago, and the Police shut up the well, because they said it was full of foul air.
They found him dead at the bottom of it. So, you see, there is only me, the Chinaman, the half-caste woman that we call the Memsahib (she used to live with Fung-Tching), the other Eurasian, and one of the Persians. The Memsahib looks very old now. I think she was a young woman when the Gate was opened; but we are all old for the matter of that. Hundreds and hundreds of years old.

Letters of Travel

[edit]
  • The blame of their city [New York] evils is not altogether with the gentlemen, chiefly of foreign extraction, who control the city. These find a people made to their hand—a lawless breed ready to wink at one evasion of the law if they themselves may profit by another, and in their rare leisure hours content to smile over the details of a clever fraud. Then, says the cultured American, 'Give us time. Give us time, and we shall arrive.' The otherwise American, who is aggressive, straightway proceeds to thrust a piece of half-hanged municipal botch-work under the nose of the alien as a sample of perfected effort. There is nothing more delightful than to sit for a strictly limited time with a child who tells you what he means to do when he is a man; but when that same child, loud-voiced, insistent, unblushingly eager for praise, but thin-skinned as the most morbid of hobbledehoys, stands about all your ways telling you the same story in the same voice, you begin to yearn for something made and finished—say Egypt and a completely dead mummy. It is neither seemly nor safe to hint that the government of the largest city in the States is a despotism of the alien by the alien for the alien, tempered with occasional insurrections of the decent folk. Only the Chinaman washes the dirty linen of other lands.
  • Those who know the East know, where the system of 'squeeze,' which is commission, runs through every transaction of life, from the sale of a groom's place upward, where the woman walks behind the man in the streets, and where the peasant gives you for the distance to the next town as many or as few miles as he thinks you will like, that these things must be so. Those who do not know will not be persuaded till they have lived there. The Overseas Club puts up its collective nose scornfully when it hears of the New and Regenerate Japan sprung to life since the 'seventies. It grins, with shame be it written, at an Imperial Diet modelled on the German plan and a Code Napoléon à la Japonaise. It is so far behind the New Era as to doubt that an Oriental country, ridden by etiquette of the sternest, and social distinctions almost as hard as those of caste, can be turned out to Western gauge in the compass of a very young man's fife. And it must be prejudiced, because it is daily and hourly in contact with the Japanese, except when it can do business with the Chinaman whom it prefers. Was there ever so disgraceful a club!
  • Perhaps it would not be altogether wise on the strength of much kindness from Japanese officials to recommend that these your countrymen be handed over lock, stock, and barrel to a people that are beginning to experiment with fresh-drafted half-grafted codes which do not include juries, to a system that does not contemplate a free Press, to a suspicious absolutism from which there is no appeal. Truly, it might be interesting, but as surely it would begin in farce and end in tragedy, that would leave the politest people on earth in no case to play at civilised government for a long time to come. In his concession, where he is an apologetic and much sat-upon importation, the foreign resident does no harm. He does not always sue for money due to him on the part of a Japanese. Once outside those limits, free to move into the heart of the country, it would only be a question of time as to where and when the trouble would begin. And in the long run it would not be the foreign resident that would suffer. The imaginative eye can see the most unpleasant possibilities, from a general overrunning of Japan by the Chinaman, who is far the most important foreign resident, to the shelling of Tokio by a joyous and bounding Democracy, anxious to vindicate her national honour and to learn how her newly-made navy works.
  • It was a very rainy afternoon; all the streets were full of gruelly mud, and all the business men were at work in their offices when it began. A knot of Chinamen were studying a closed door from whose further side came a most unpleasant sound of bolting and locking up. The notice on the door was interesting. With deep regret did the manager of the New Oriental Banking Corporation, Limited (most decidedly limited), announce that on telegraphic orders from home he had suspended payment. Said one Chinaman to another in pidgin-Japanese: 'It is shut,' and went away. The noise of barring up continued, the rain fell, and the notice stared down the wet street. That was all. There must have been two or three men passing by to whom the announcement meant the loss of every penny of their savings—comforting knowledge to digest after tiffin. In London, of course, the failure would not mean so much; there are many banks in the City, and people would have had warning. Here banks are few, people are dependent on them, and this news came out of the sea unheralded, an evil born with all its teeth.
  • One cannot leave a thing alone if it is thrust under the nose at every turn. I had not quitted the Quebec steamer three minutes when I was asked point-blank: 'What do you think of the question of Asiatic Exclusion which is Agitating our Community?'
The Second Sign-Post on the Great Main Road says: 'If a Community is agitated by a Question—inquire politely after the health of the Agitator,' This I did, without success; and had to temporise all across the Continent till I could find some one to help me to acceptable answers. The Question appears to be confined to British Columbia. There, after a while, the men who had their own reasons for not wishing to talk referred me to others who explained, and on the acutest understanding that no names were to be published (it is sweet to see engineers afraid of being hoist by their own petards) one got more or less at something like facts.
The Chinaman has always been in the habit of coming to British Columbia, where he makes, as he does elsewhere, the finest servant in the world. No one, I was assured on all hands, objects to the biddable Chinaman. He takes work which no white man in a new country will handle, and when kicked by the mean white will not grossly retaliate. He has always paid for the privilege of making his fortune on this wonderful coast, but with singular forethought and statesmanship, the popular Will, some few years ago, decided to double the head-tax on his entry. Strange as it may appear, the Chinaman now charges double for his services, and is scarce at that. This is said to be one of the reasons why overworked white women die or go off their heads; and why in new cities you can see blocks of flats being built to minimise the inconveniences of housekeeping without help. The birth-rate will fall later in exact proportion to those flats.
Since the Russo-Japanese War the Japanese have taken to coming over to British Columbia. They also do work which no white man will; such as hauling wet logs for lumber mills out of cold water at from eight to ten shillings a day. They supply the service in hotels and dining-rooms and keep small shops. The trouble with them is that they are just a little too good, and when attacked defend themselves with asperity.

Kipling in BC - the following section I've quote at length because of the intimations of inter-ethnic attitudes contained in it, and also because Keefer4 and JGGardiner and others around hare are from BC and might find it interesting; there's a whole "British Columbia" section in the quoted material, which is from Letters of Travel, 1892-1913.

  • A man penned me in a corner with a single heavily capitalised sentence. 'There is a General Sentiment among Our People that the Japanese Must Go,' said he.
'Very good,' said I. 'How d'you propose to set about it?'
'That is nothing to us. There is a General Sentiment,' etc.
'Quite so. Sentiment is a beautiful thing, but what are you going to do?' He did not condescend to particulars, but kept repeating the sentiment, which, as I promised, I record.
Another man was a little more explicit. 'We desire,' he said, 'to keep the Chinaman. But the Japanese must go.'
'Then who takes their place? Isn't this rather a new country to pitch people out of?'
'We must develop our Resources slowly, sir—with an Eye to the Interests of our Children. We must preserve the Continent for Races which will assimilate with Ours. We must not be swamped by Aliens.'
'Then bring in your own races and bring 'em in quick,' I ventured.
This is the one remark one must not make in certain quarters of the West; and I lost caste heavily while he explained (exactly as the Dutch did at the Cape years ago) how British Columbia was by no means so rich as she appeared; that she was throttled by capitalists and monopolists of all kinds; that white labour had to be laid off and fed and warmed during the winter; that living expenses were enormously high; that they were at the end of a period of prosperity, and were now entering on lean years; and that whatever steps were necessary for bringing in more white people should be taken with extreme caution. Then he added that the railway rates to British Columbia were so high that emigrants were debarred from coming on there.
'But haven't the rates been reduced?' I asked.
'Yes—yes, I believe they have, but immigrants are so much in demand that they are snapped up before they have got so far West. You must remember, too, that skilled labour is not like agricultural labour. It is dependent on so many considerations. And the Japanese must go.'
'So people have told me. But I heard stories of dairies and fruit-farms in British Columbia being thrown up because there was no labour to milk or pick the fruit. Is that true, d'you think?'
'Well, you can't expect a man with all the chances that our country offers him to milk cows in a pasture. A Chinaman can do that. We want races that will assimilate with ours,' etc., etc.
'But didn't the Salvation Army offer to bring in three or four thousand English some short time ago? What came of that idea?'
'It—er—fell through.'
'Why?'
'For political reasons, I believe. We do not want People who will lower the Standard of Living. That is why the Japanese must go.'
'Then why keep the Chinese?'
'We can get on with the Chinese. We can't get on without the Chinese. But we must have Emigration of a Type that will assimilate with Our People. I hope I have made myself clear?'
I hoped that he had, too.
Now hear a wife, a mother, and a housekeeper.
'We have to pay for this precious state of things with our health and our children's. Do you know the saying that the Frontier is hard on women and cattle? This isn't the frontier, but in some respects it's worse, because we have all the luxuries and appearances—the pretty glass and silver to put on the table. We have to dust, polish, and arrange 'em after we've done our housework. I don't suppose that means anything to you, but—try it for a month! We have no help. A Chinaman costs fifty or sixty dollars a month now. Our husbands can't always afford that. How old would you take me for? I'm not thirty. Well thank God, I stopped my sister coming out West. Oh yes, it's a fine country—for men.'
'Can't you import servants from England?'
'I can't pay a girl's passage in order to have her married in three months. Besides, she wouldn't work. They won't when they see Chinamen working.'
'Do you object to the Japanese, too?'
'Of course not. No one does. It's only politics. The wives of the men who earn six and seven dollars a day—skilled labour they call it—have Chinese and Jap servants. We can't afford it. We have to think of saving for the future, but those other people live up to every cent they earn. They know they're all right. They're Labour. They'll be looked after, whatever happens. You can see how the State looks after me.'
A little later I had occasion to go through a great and beautiful city between six and seven of a crisp morning. Milk and fish, vegetables, etc., were being delivered to the silent houses by Chinese and Japanese. Not a single white man was visible on that chilly job.
Later still a man came to see me, without too publicly giving his name. He was in a small way of business, and told me (others had said much the same thing) that if I gave him away his business would suffer. He talked for half an hour on end.
'Am I to understand, then,' I said, 'that what you call Labour absolutely dominates this part of the world?'
He nodded.
'That it is difficult to get skilled labour into here?'
'Difficult? My God, if I want to get an extra hand for my business—I pay Union wages, of course—I have to arrange to get him here secretly. I have to go out and meet him, accidental-like, down the line, and if the Unions find out that he is coming, they, like as not, order him back East, or turn him down across the Border.'
'Even if he has his Union ticket? Why?'
'They'll tell him that labour conditions are not good here. He knows what that means. He'll turn back quick enough. I'm in a small way of business, and I can't afford to take any chances fighting the Unions.'
'What would happen if you did?'
'D'you know what's happening across the Border? Men get blown up there—with dynamite.'
'But this isn't across the Border?'
'It's a damn-sight too near to be pleasant. And witnesses get blown up, too. You see, the Labour situation ain't run from our side the line. It's worked from down under. You may have noticed men were rather careful when they talked about it?'
'Yes, I noticed all that.'
'Well, it ain't a pleasant state of affairs. I don't say that the Unions here would do anything to you—and please understand I'm all for the rights of Labour myself. Labour has no better friend than me—I've been a working man, though I've got a business of my own now. Don't run away with any idea that I'm against Labour—will you?'
'Not in the least. I can see that. You merely find that Labour's a little bit—er—inconsiderate, sometimes?'
'Look what happens across the Border! I suppose they've told you that little fuss with the Japanese in Vancouver was worked from down under, haven't they? I don't think our own people 'ud have done it by themselves.'

Kim

[edit]
  • 'I go in and out. I am no banker,' laughed Kim.
'Alas! I am an old man. I did not know.' Then, fingering his rosary, he half turned to the Museum.
'What is your caste? Where is your house? Have you come far?' Kim asked.
'I came by Kulu - from beyond the Kailas - but what know you? From the Hills where' - he sighed - 'the air and water are fresh and cool.'
'Aha! Khitai [a Chinaman],' said Abdullah proudly. Fook Shing had once chased him out of his shop for spitting at the joss above the boots.
'Pahari [a hillman],' said little Chota Lal.
'Aye, child - a hillman from hills thou'lt never see. Didst hear of Bhotiyal [Tibet]? I am no Khitai, but a Bhotiya [Tibetan], since you must know - a lama - or, say, a guru in your tongue.'
'A guru from Tibet,' said Kim. 'I have not seen such a man. They be Hindus in Tibet, then?'
'We be followers of the Middle Way, living in peace in our lamasseries, and I go to see the Four Holy Places before I die. Now do you, who are children, know as much as I do who am old.' He smiled benignantly on the boys.

Captains Courageous

[edit]
  • Mrs. Cheyne had been looking at the faces - Disko's ivory-yellow, hairless, iron countenance; Uncle Salters's, with its rim of agricultural hair; Penn's bewildered simplicity; Manuel's quiet smile; Long Jack's grin of delight; and Tom Platt's scar. Rough, by her standards, they certainly were; but she had a mother's wits in her eyes, and she rose with outstretched hands.
"Oh, tell me, which is who?" said she, half sobbing. "I want to thank you and bless you - all of you."
"Faith, that pays me a hunder time," said Long Jack.
Disko introduced them all in due form. The captain of an old-time Chinaman could have done no better, and Mrs. Cheyne babbled incoherently. She nearly threw herself into Manuel's arms when she understood that he had first found Harvey.
"But how shall I leave him dreeft? " said poor Manuel. "What do you yourself if you find him so? Eh, wha-at'? We are in one good boy, and I am ever so pleased he come to be your son."
    • from Captains Courageous, 1896
      • NB this is the other usage in Kipling of the chinaman-as-ship meaning, although not as nautical a passage as the other.

American Notes

[edit]
  • Here a tram-car, without any visible means of support, slid stealthily behind me and nearly struck me in the back. This was the famous cable car of San Francisco, which runs by gripping an endless wire rope sunk in the ground, and of which I will tell you more anon. A hundred yards further there was a slight commotion in the street, a gathering together of three or four, something that glittered as it moved very swiftly. A ponderous Irish gentleman, with priest's cords in his hat and a small nickel-plated badge on his fat bosom, emerged from the knot supporting a Chinaman who had been stabbed in the eye and was bleeding like a pig. The by-standers went their ways, and the Chinaman, assisted by the policeman, his own. Of course this was none of my business, but I rather wanted to know what had happened to the gentleman who had dealt the stab. It said a great deal for the excellence of the municipal arrangement of the town that a surging crowd did not at once block the street to see what was going forward. I was the sixth man and the last who assisted at the performance, and my curiosity was six times the greatest. Indeed, I felt ashamed of showing it.

This lengthy passage addresses Kipling's various ethnic biases, and also uses other terms in equivalency to "Chinaman/men". Kipling's comments on African-Americans are produced here to give context to his relative views on Chinese people/culture and his prevailing use of "Chinaman" in a non-disriminatory, albeit not always flattering, view.

  • When a policeman, whose name I do not recollect, "fatally shot Ed Hearney" for attempting to escape arrest, I was in the next street. For these things I am thankful. It is enough to travel with a policeman in a tram-car, and, while he arranges his coat-tails as he sits down, to catch sight of a loaded revolver. It is enough to know that fifty per cent of the men in the public saloons carry pistols about them.
The Chinaman waylays his adversary, and methodically chops him to pieces with his hatchet. Then the press roars about the brutal ferocity of the pagan.
The Italian reconstructs his friend with a long knife. The press complains of the waywardness of the alien.
The Irishman and the native Californian in their hours of discontent use the revolver, not once, but six times. The press records the fact, and asks in the next column whether the world can parallel the progress of San Francisco. The American who loves his country will tell you that this sort of thing is confined to the lower classes. Just at present an ex-judge who was sent to jail by another judge (upon my word I cannot tell whether these titles mean anything) is breathing red-hot vengeance against his enemy. The papers have interviewed both parties, and confidently expect a fatal issue.
Now, let me draw breath and curse the negro waiter, and through him the negro in service generally. He has been made a citizen with a vote, consequently both political parties play with him. But that is neither here nor there. He will commit in one meal every betise that a senllion fresh from the plow-tail is capable of, and he will continue to repeat those faults. He is as complete a heavy-footed, uncomprehending, bungle-fisted fool as any mem-sahib in the East ever took into her establishment. But he is according to law a free and independent citizen--consequently above reproof or criticism. He, and he alone, in this insane city, will wait at table (the Chinaman doesn't count).
He is untrained, inept, but he will fill the place and draw the pay. Now, God and his father's fate made him intellectually inferior to the Oriental. He insists on pretending that he serves tables by accident--as a sort of amusement. He wishes you to understand this little fact. You wish to eat your meals, and, if possible, to have them properly served. He is a big, black, vain baby and a man rolled into one.
A colored gentleman who insisted on getting me pie when I wanted something else, demanded information about India. I gave him some facts about wages.
"Oh, hell!" said he, cheerfully, "that wouldn't keep me in cigars for a month."
Then he fawned on me for a ten-cent piece. Later he took it upon himself to pity the natives of India. "Heathens," he called them--this woolly one, whose race has been the butt of every comedy on the native stage since the beginning. And I turned and saw by the head upon his shoulders that he was a Yoruba man, if there be any truth in ethnological castes. He did his thinking in English, but he was a Yoruba negro, and the race type had remained the same throughout his generations. And the room was full of other races--some that looked exactly like Gallas (but the trade was never recruited from that side of Africa), some duplicates of Cameroon heads, and some Kroomen, if ever Kroomen wore evening dress.
The American does not consider little matters of descent, though by this time he ought to know all about "damnable heredity." As a general rule he keeps himself very far from the negro, and says things about him that are not pretty. There are six million negroes, more or less, in the States, and they are increasing. The American, once having made them citizens, cannot unmake them. He says, in his newspapers, they ought to be elevated by education. He is trying this, but it is likely to be a long job, because black blood is much more adhesive than white, and throws back with annoying persistence. When the negro gets religion he returns directly as a hiving bee to the first instincts of his people. Just now a wave of religion is sweeping over some of the Southern States.

Kipling visits a cannery

The steamer halted at a rude wooden warehouse built on piles in a lonely reach of the river, and sent in the fish. I followed them up a scale-strewn, fishy incline that led to the cannery. The crazy building was quivering with the machinery on its floors, and a glittering bank of tin scraps twenty feet high showed where the waste was thrown after the cans had been punched.
Only Chinamen were employed on the work, and they looked like blood-besmeared yellow devils as they crossed the rifts of sunlight that lay upon the floor. When our consignment arrived, the rough wooden boxes broke of themselves as they were dumped down under a jet of water, and the salmon burst out in a stream of quicksilver. A Chinaman jerked up a twenty-pounder, beheaded and detailed it with two swift strokes of a knife, flicked out its internal arrangements with a third, and case it into a blood-dyed tank. The headless fish leaped from under his hands as though they were facing a rapid. Other Chinamen pulled them from the vat and thrust them under a thing like a chaff-cutter, which, descending, hewed them into unseemly red gobbets fit for the can.
More Chinamen, with yellow, crooked fingers, jammed the stuff into the cans, which slid down some marvellous machine forthwith, soldering their own tops as they passed. Each can was hastily tested for flaws, and then sunk with a hundred companions into a vat of boiling water, there to be half cooked for a few minutes. The cans bulged slightly after the operation, and were therefore slidden along by the trolleyful to men with needles and soldering-irons who vented them and soldered the aperture. Except for the label, the "Finest Columbia Salmon" was ready for the market. I was impressed not so much with the speed of the manufacture as the character of the factory. Inside, on a floor ninety by forty, the most civilized and murderous of machinery. Outside, three footsteps, the thick-growing pines and the immense solitude of the hills. Our steamer only stayed twenty minutes at that place, but I counted two hundred and forty finished cans made from the catch of the previous night ere I left the slippery, blood-stained, scale-spangled, oily floors and the offal-smeared Chinamen.

From Early Canadian Online

[edit]

Many of the texts in ECO, aka canadiana.org, are in simple image form and so unsearchable for text strings, e.g. JB Kerr's Biographical Sketches (cited on Francis Stillman Barnard for one), but a search for "chinaman" on ECO turned up records mdash; 1085 pages in 247 documents — of committee debates and other official government documents as well as other materials. Repeated documents of different sessions etc are omitted. It was inevitable that this list would include many important 19th Century historical sources like Lord Dufferin's trip or the stuff connected to Sandford Fleming because of the general currency of "Chinaman" in contemporary Canadian/British Columbian usage in the 19th Century. Some entries, particularly from the Maritimes and one in particular from 1824, may be in reference to the china trade/ships as opposed to Chinese people but I haven't read through them yet (all texts are complete online):

Finished Page 13 of 25 in the search results; to be continued.Skookum1 22:54, 27 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Commodore Perry, er, actually Francis Hawks...

[edit]
"He had imagined that it would be more striking to a stranger than in his case it proved to be. He expected to behold myriads of boats, decked with gay banners, and moving with cheerful activity in all directions. His fancy had sketched a pleasing picture of beautiful floating domiciles, moored under the banks of the river, and inhabited by a hundred thousand people in variegated costume; he recalled to memory the stories of the lofty pagodas lifting roof above roof, . . . the snug cottages with the picturesque bridges and the comfortable Chinaman under the shade of a willow, with nothing to do but fish, all of which we have been accustomed to read, and pictures of which served to amuse us in our childhood. . . . But the sketches of imaginative boyhood were . . . dispelled by the sober realities of maturer years. There was nothing of all this beautiful picture of crowded and happy life. There were, indeed, boats and people, pagodas and cottages, bridges and trees; but there were also filth and noise, poverty and misery, lying and roguery, and, in short, anything but a picture of quiet content and Arcadian simplicity.
-Francis L. Hawks, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, Performed in the Years 1852, 1853, and 1854, under the Command of Commodore M.C. Perry, United States Navy (Washington, D.C.: A. O. P. Nicholson, printer, 1856), 135.

The Biography of a Chinaman

[edit]

Another one for the "bibliography of notable titles":

"Lew Chew, a Chinese American businessman in New York, recounted a memory from his childhood in China in the mid-nineteenth century: “I worked on my father’s farm till I was about sixteen years of age, when a man of our tribe came back from America and took ground as large as four city blocks and made a paradise of it. He put a large stone wall around and led some streams through and built a palace and summer house and about twenty other structures, with beautiful bridges over the streams and walks and roads. Trees and flowers, singing birds, water fowl and curious animals were within the walls. . . . The man had gone away from our village a poor boy. Now he returned with unlimited wealth, which he had obtained in the country of the American wizards.”
- Hamilton Holt, The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans (New York: Routledge, 1990), 183. This interview was originally published as “The Biography of a Chinaman” in The Independent (19 February 1903), full quote above is from footnote on gutenberg-e access only .
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Chinaman/Skookum1%27s_sources&oldid=1148963495"