Takaki – Chapter 8 : 3 questions

Even before starting the chapter, I knew what it was about. Takaki seems to be tackling the races and showing how there struggle has been similar in the beginning. Chapter 8 is charmingly titled “Searching for Gold Mountain,” it was the Asians turn.
From previous knowledge I knew that Gold Mountain could only refer to California, a name given to it by the Chinese. It was there money haven, their life’s answer to poverty but once the Chinese immigrants arrived in California, they found that the gold mountain was an illusion. Mining was uncertain and laboring work, and the gold fields were littered with disappointed prospectors and hostile whites. To make situations worse, the newly arrived immigrants soon learned that they were cut off from their families. As the dream of gold faded, these men found themselves stranded in a strange new land far from home with locals ceremoniously bashing them for their race and skin color. California, and as Takaki argues, America did not welcome them.

Were the Chinese preferred over blacks?
At first Takaki seems to say yes. “Planters soon saw that the Chinese could be employed as models for black workers.” (202) The Chinese had at this point already had been immigrating for some time. “Half of the labor force in the city’s four key industries- boot and shoe, woolens, cigar and tobacco, and sewing- was Chinese.” (198) The immigrants had proved themselves to be hard workers. Whites already had a purpose for them, “hardworking and frugal, the Chinese would be the ‘educators’ of former slaves” (202)

If Chinese were preferred over blacks, did they have a higher social status then them?
Not really. The Chinese were everywhere and employers preferred them over other whites because they could be paid less and work even harder. But “the use of Chinese labor and its success raised two crucial questions” in the minds of white folk. (203) “How they rank, socially civilly, and politically, among” whites and “what would happen to white workers as America’s industrial development depended more and more on Chinese labor.” (203) The minds of the white locals all rang in unison, “from the gold fields of the Sierras came the nativist cry: ‘California for Americans.’” Native whites did not want permanent “chinamen” on their lands. They in affect tried to create a “permanently degraded caste labor force”. (203) “The employers of Chinese labor argued that they did not intend top allow the migrants to remain and become ‘thick’ in American society.” (204) And laws were created to enforce this. The Chinese Exclusion Act was an act created to stop Chinese immigration into the U.S. The Act excluded the Chinese from entering the country for ten years under penalty of imprisonment and deportation. The Act also affected Chinese who were already in the United States. Any Chinese who left the United States had to obtain certifications for reentry, and no Chinese could become U.S. citizens.

In the end, Caliban?
According to Takaki, quite so. “Like blacks, Chinese men were viewed as threats to racial purity.” (205) Like the blacks before them, the Chinese were now being classified because of their skin color, their race. “Lawmakers prohibited marriage between a white person and a ‘negro, mulatto, or Mongolian.” (205) Takaki states that the Chinese just like all people of color were became just that, a color in the eyes of whites, a color that signified dirtiness and not purity. “All three groups – blacks, Indian, and Chinese- shared a common identity: they were all Calibans of color.” (205)