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The Pseudo-Lynching of Wong Foon Sing

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The Pseudo-Lynching of Wong Foon Sing UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Perils of Home: Race, Gender, and Labor on the Pacific Frontier Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/94h8h0b8 Author Kim, Jason Ulim Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Perils of Home: Race, Gender, and Labor on the Pacific Frontier By Jason Ulim Kim A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Michael Omi, Chair Professor Catherine C Choy Professor Evelyn N Glenn Professor Charis M Thompson Summer 2015 Abstract The Perils of Home: Race, Gender, and Labor on the Pacific Frontier By Jason Ulim Kim Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Michael Omi, Chair In the early twentieth century, Chinese men and white women often worked in close proximity to each other in various intimate settings in the North American West— from the kitchens of upper class homes to the noisy cafés of the city. However, little has been said in the scholarship on the social and political significance of these encounters. Instead, this study centers on the different and connected ways in which intimacy shaped the North American West in the early twentieth century. As such, this work makes central and transparent the connections between the expansion of white women’s political and economic rights and efforts to exclude the Chinese in British Columbia and California. Thus, this study asks: How were changes in the status of white women and shifting notions of domesticity related to debates about Chinese labor and migration? Conversely, to what extent was the anti-Oriental movement and its calls for exclusionary measures informed and shaped by debates about gender roles? Last, how might a transnational analysis of these intersecting debates deepen our understanding of how such controversies shaped Vancouver and San Francisco as frontiers and gateways for Chinese labor migration and white settlement? If both Western Canada and the United States were primary sites for Asian labor migration and white settlement, did intimacy and affective labor play out differently in these two contexts? By using primary source documents to analyze two murder cases involving Chinese servants and two legislative efforts regarding affective labor in the distinct but connected contexts of Western Canada and the United States, this study shows how white women and Chinese men working together in intimate settings became increasingly scrutinized and subject to rampant social commentary and governmental intervention as racial, sexual, and class tensions flared. 1 For my parents and halmoni i Table of Contents Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................... iii The Perils of Home, Sluttish Women, and Chinese Houseboys: An Introduction to a Framework ......................................................................................... 1 Part One: Intimate Proximities Between Sluttish Women & Chinese Houseboys ............................................................................................................................. 17 Chapter One: The Pseudo-Lynching of Wong Foon Sing ................................................ 22 Chapter Two: The Beautiful and the Damned: A San Francisco Love Triangle ............ 32 Epilogue ..................................................................................................................................... 44 Part Two: Legislating Affective Labor ............................................................................ 46 Chapter Three: White Womanhood and Anti-Orientalism in Samuel Gompers’ Labor Movement from 1901 to 1924 .................................................................................... 48 Chapter Four: The Settler Feminism of Mary Ellen Smith and the Women’s and Girls’ Protection Act of 1924 ................................................................................................. 65 Epilogue ..................................................................................................................................... 79 Conclusion: Making Visible the Unseen Labor of the Sluttish Woman & Chinese Houseboy in History ........................................................................................... 81 Endnotes.................................................................................................................................... 83 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 93 ii Acknowledgments When you have been researching and writing as long as I have, the list of people to thank grows almost by the day. Acknowledgments are more than a simple courtesy, but an opportunity to shine a light on the many people who carried me along during the seven or so years it took to finish this work. My many great mentors, colleagues, and friends made these pages possible and many of my thoughts thinkable. Some of them are now dead but not forgotten, others are alive and well, and many more have faded into the spaces in-between the lines of my work, our connection being brief, lost, or otherwise unremembered. I wish to begin by expressing my gratitude for all those too subtle influences of indeterminate origin that I cannot name, but by their kindness I have undoubtedly benefited. I thank my chair Michael Omi for being a wonderful model of mentorship and professionalism over the years. I am very fortunate to have worked alongside and be mentored by him so steadily for nearly a decade, and his fingerprints are all over my career in academia in general and my ideas about intersectionality and racial formation in particular. I also thank Nelson Maldonado-Torres for his exceptional guidance in the early years of my graduate studies. I am further grateful to Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Charis Thompson, and Catherine Ceniza Choy who served as committee members for this dissertation. I would be remiss to not mention Francisca Cazares, Gloria Chun, and countless other campus professionals for making this entire process less painful. Todd Lawson, Wambui Mwangi, Franco Pozzuoli, and Phil Triadafilopoulous were formative in the early stages of my intellectual development and were instrumental in encouraging me to pursue graduate studies abroad. Without their early support for my development as a thinker and scholar, I would not have even been able to begin this journey. This project could not have been completed without the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s doctoral fellowship, the Edward Hildebrand Fellowship in Canadian Studies, and funding provided by the University of California’s Graduate Division and Department of Ethnic Studies. I must also thank the working paper panelists from the 2012 Association for Asian American Studies conference, the 2012 Asian Canadian Studies Graduate Workshop, and UC Berkeley’s Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop for engaging with very early versions of parts of this dissertation. Conversations I have had with Henry Yu and Rosanne Siu were also important in shaping my thinking about “Pacific Canada” in general and the fraught racial history of British Columbia in particular. Behind every historian is a bevy of great archivists and librarians. I am particularly thankful to the staff at the City of Vancouver Archives, as well as the staff at the National Museum of iii American History’s Archives Center for their patience and assistance. I must also thank Mary E. Mitchell at the University of British Columbia’s Law Library for assisting me to find information regarding the Women’s and Girls’ Protection Act and the related Municipal Act, both discussed in Chapter Four. My friends and colleagues have also been extremely crucial to the development and completion of this project. John Dougherty, Yomaira Figueroa, Jorge Gonzales, Laura Kwak, Janey Lew, Tacuma Peters, Melanie Plasencia, Jennifer Reimer, Stevie Ruiz, Kim Tran, Joshua Troncoso, and Sunny Xiang provided much needed emotional, professional, and intellectual support over the years. Too many of the above were subjected to my complaints and/or early drafts at various moments throughout my studies, and I must express my deepest gratitude for their words of encouragement and care for my well-being. I must also thank Shan Alavi, Zuhaib Chughtai, Christopher Kim, and Shahreen Reza for reminding me that there is far more to life than my research. I am especially grateful to my lifelong friend Bilal Hashmi for being a generous listener, my staunchest supporter, and my closest confidante over the last fifteen or so years. It means the world to me that we never subdued the rebellious questioning of our adolescence, and that we have both gone on to complete doctoral degrees on our own terms at elite institutions far from our humble and boring origins in suburbia. I am honored to call you colleague, friend, and brother. I owe my greatest debt of gratitude to my parents, grandparents, brother, and extended family. Though I lived thousands of miles away from them during the course of my studies and my visits were far too infrequent, I could not have completed this work without their support. It is here
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