John Doe Chinaman
A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law
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- $34.99
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- $34.99
Publisher Description
A revelatory history of the laws that conditioned the everyday lives of Chinese people in the American West—and of those who negotiated, circumvented, and resisted discrimination.
Legal discrimination against Chinese people in the United States began in 1852, when California passed a tax on foreign gold miners that was explicitly designed to exploit Chinese labor. Over the next seventy years, officials in California, Oregon, Washington, and other western states instituted more than five thousand laws that marginalized and controlled their Chinese residents. Long before the Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese immigration, these laws constrained the activities and opportunities of Chinese people already living in the United States.
In this eye-opening account, Beth Lew-Williams describes a legal architecture redolent of Jim Crow but tailored specifically to people often referred to only as “John Doe Chinaman” or “Mary Chinaman” in official records. Enforced by police and tax collectors, but also by schoolteachers, missionaries, and neighbors, these laws granted the Chinese only limited access to American society, falling far short of equality or belonging. Cementing stereotypes of Chinese residents as criminals, invaders, and predators, they regulated everything from healthcare to education, property ownership, business formation, and kinship customs. Yet in the face of these limitations, Chinese communities reacted resourcefully. Many fought, evaded, and manipulated these laws, finding ways to maintain their prohibited traditions, resist unfair treatment in court, and insist on their political rights.
Drawing on dozens of archives across the US West, John Doe Chinaman reveals the depth of anti-Chinese discrimination beyond federal exclusion and tells the stories of those who refused to accept a conditional place in American life.
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The story of the Chinese in America is a history of erasure via a complex series of legal restraints, argues Princeton history professor Lew-Williams (The Chinese Must Go) in this penetrating account. Over the course of the 19th century, she explains, white officials "passed more than five thousand laws that marginalized and controlled Chinese people." These statutes were enforced by "eclectic groups of sheriffs, policemen, tax collectors, judges, missionaries, teachers, realtors, and public health officials," whose archival records Lew-Williams scours to piece together the lives of people so despised they were not accorded personal identities, but were logged as "John Doe Chinaman" or "Mary Chinaman." Lew-Williams structures her findings in a compulsively readable format, organizing the stories she uncovers into chapters interrogating stereotypes and common myths of the "wily Chinamen" and the threats they posed; revealing an in-depth view of daily life in the American West, especially for Chinese women and girls; and deconstructing how these restrictive laws were part of a white supremacist "racial regime" targeting cultural practices linked to Chinese residents (like carrying baskets on poles or playing gongs in theatrical productions). Lew-Williams cogently argues that the "racial etiquette" enforced by these laws has a lingering effect today, as Asian Americans continue to feel pressure to "discreetly regulate themselves." It's a vital and painstakingly constructed window into an intentionally obscured part of American history.
