(RNS) — “Strangers in the Land,” the recently published book by New Yorker Editor Michael Luo, chronicles the journey of Chinese immigrants to the American West, and then eastward across the country. Perhaps inevitably, it is also an account of the violence and bigotry directed against them, which only became more intense as the boom years of the Western Gold Rush gave way to the economic downturn that followed the Civil War.
Christian clergy cast their own shadow over Luo’s narrative. Faith leaders — almost all of them white Protestants — were instrumental in shaping, not only the experience of the immigrant, but also the communities that sometimes welcomed, sometimes attacked them.
Asian American history is not, in general, part of the standard public school curriculum, nor have American historians paid much attention. “Until recently, U.S. historians largely ignored Asian immigrants and their U.S.-born descendants,” said Harvard University historian Erika Lee in her essay, “The Necessity of Teaching Asian American History.” “When they did appear in scholarly monographs or textbooks, they were little more than footnotes and dismissed as tangential to the making of the United States.”
Luo’s book, with its meticulously detailed cast of characters, makes a spirited argument that it is time to redress that imbalance, not only out of fairness to a minority group, but in order to reveal the central role Chinese immigrants played in the life of the nation. “The Chinese in America were not simply the victims of barbarous violence and repression; they were protagonists in the story of America,” Luo writes in the book’s introduction.
Passed in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first U.S. law approved on the basis of race, was not fully repealed until 1965, when a new immigration regime set aside quotas based on national origins, allowing large numbers of Chinese immigrants to settle in the United States. The earlier, mostly male pioneers who braved the unsanitary and often dangerous journey across the Pacific to find work were both defended and demeaned by Christian leaders, according to Luo.
Tim Tseng. (Photo courtesy of Fuller Theological Seminary)
Christian clergy and missionaries of the time “really modeled how to support and defend the most unlikable people,” said Tim Tseng, director of the Asian American Christian History Institute at Fuller Theological Seminary. “The Chinese were classified as the least likable.”
But many white pastors who show up in Luo’s book “had ugly views of the Chinese because they were, as they put it, heathens,” he writes. “You see this duality again and again.”
Both types of clergy were driven by the sense that the immigrants were not equal to the white population, suggested Cornell University historian Derek Chang, who directs the university’s Asian Studies program. “You don’t need to uplift or convert or transform a population, unless you think that somehow they are lacking something,” said Chang, author of “Citizens of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problem of Race in the Nineteenth Century.”
“This is very much a civilizing mission,” said Jennifer Taylor, a professor of public history at Duquesne University. Besides conversion to the faith, those who ministered to the Chinese community provided food and English lessons. Catechism was a facet of this larger assimilation.
The Rev. William Speer, who had spent four years in Guangzhou as a missionary, was recruited by Chinese residents of San Francisco in 1853 to advocate for them in the face of frequent violent attacks. While Speer praised Chinese civilization and history, Luo says, he believed it was America’s divine privilege to educate these “heathens,” as they had done with Africans before them.
In 1870, the Rev. Otis Gibson, another former missionary in China, founded the Women’s Missionary Society of the Pacific Coast with his wife. According to its constitution, its mission was “to elevate and save heathen women on these shores.” The mission’s third floor was set aside for Chinese women who had escaped prostitution or abusive situations as servants in the home, or who were prospective brides for the Chinese men who lodged them there, according to Luo.
Derek Chang. (Photo courtesy of Cornell University)
While Gibson was a vocal advocate for the Chinese immigrants, becoming one of the few Americans who spoke out against the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, he was “obsessed with Chinese women, viewing Chinese female prostitutes as a threat to White families,” writes Luo. In California, missionaries bent on stopping the sex trade joined forces with immigration opponents in barring entrance to many Chinese women. (Many, Luo argues, were wives coming to join their husbands.)
White women, meanwhile, were fixtures in mission work. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, said Chang, Donaldina Cameron, a Presbyterian, ran a missionary society in San Francisco committed to helping Chinese women who had been caught up in the sex trade or otherwise badly treated after immigrating. Under Cameron’s watch, they were also expected to pray, entertain guests and attend classes.
Luo, who spent a lot of time digging through the archives of Philadelphia’s Presbyterian Historical Society, found that some of the Chinese were already Christians. Though the voices of Chinese appear only rarely in the historical records, when they do, Luo says, it’s often because they spoke English and because they are Christian converts.
Yung Wing, who converted to Christianity at a missionary school in Macau before sailing to New York, became the first Chinese immigrant to attend Yale University, starting as a freshman in 1850.
Four years later, he boarded another ship in New York and returned home, determined to help others come to China to be educated. Leveraging his connections in China and the United States, he established the Chinese Education Mission in Hartford, Connecticut. Per an agreement with the Qing government, families who housed the mission’s students were forbidden to proselytize, but, Luo writes, “there is little doubt that the opportunity to model Christian living for the students motivated many of them.”
Yung and others mentioned in Luo’s book illustrate the dynamic connection between Chinese immigrants and their country of origin, with many choosing to make the challenging, long trip home after working on the railroad or in American factories, and some returning to America before the passage of the Exclusion Act made it impossible.
“The missionaries didn’t do a good job of spreading Christianity in China, but they did do a good job of bringing a Western style of learning to China,” said John Haddad, a professor of American studies at Penn State Harrisburg, who has written several books on the American relationship with China. Tseng pointed out that when the Qing dynasty fell, the Chinese educational system was rebuilt on Protestant missionary networks.
Hints of the faith practices Chinese immigrants brought with them show up now and then in the archives. In the wake of an 1871 massacre in which at least 18 Chinese Los Angeles residents were lynched and shot, Luo writes, Daoist priests traveled from San Francisco to participate in Daoist and Buddhist ceremonies to honor the dead.
The missionary zeal of the mainline Protestant organizations began to fade toward the end of the 19th century, and many who had spoken up on behalf of Chinese immigrants retreated, “becoming less invested in turning back the tide of exclusion,” said Chang.
The racism directed at Asian Americans, a constant for more than a century and a half, may be why we don’t hear more about Chinese immigration. “Because it doesn’t fit neatly into the American narrative of progress, I think sometimes it’s forgotten, or left out,” Chang said.
It also has been obscured by Chinese immigration, a flow fractured by years of exclusion. Chinese-American churches of today are frequently more theologically conservative and less concerned with politics than those experienced by 19-century immigrants. “It’s very much an indigenous movement of Chinese-style denominations, if you can really call it that,” said Tseng, who noted that some younger Chinese Christians were more liberal.
But as the Chinese experience of Christianity in America continues to evolve, Luo, Tseng, Haddad and other writers have laid down markers — potent reminders of the way faith, race, bigotry and politics molded immigrants, leaving an indelible mark on America.