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Family and Marriage of Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Chinese Immigrant Women Author(S): Huping Ling Source: Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol

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Family and Marriage of Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Chinese Immigrant Women Author(S): Huping Ling Source: Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol Family and Marriage of Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Chinese Immigrant Women Author(s): Huping Ling Source: Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Winter, 2000), pp. 43-63 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Immigration & Ethnic History Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27502545 . Accessed: 01/02/2011 20:17 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=illinois. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Illinois Press and Immigration & Ethnic History Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of American Ethnic History. http://www.jstor.org Family and Marriage of Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Chinese Immigrant Women HUPING LING This is terrible ghost country, where a hu . man being works her life away.. I have not stopped working since the day the ship . .. landed. In China I never even had to hang up my own clothes. I shouldn 't have left, but your father couldn 't have supported you with out me. I'm the one with the big muscles. ?Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior. IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCES in a new country could very likely re sult in changes in family life and marriage for immigrant women. Once in a different environment and a completely new culture, the female exodus found that the relationship between them and their husbands and children were altered. Like women in other immigrant groups, Chinese immigrant women also experienced changes in their families and mar riages. SOCIOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL RESEARCH ON CHINESE AMERICAN FAMILIES AND MARRIAGES Sociologists pioneered many early studies of Chinese American fami lies and marriages. In 1947, Rose Hum Lee in her dissertation entitled "The Growth and Decline of Chinese Communities in the Rocky Moun tain Region" found that thirteen Chinese families resided in Butte, Mon tana by 1870 and the average size of these families tended to be large, were usually seven people.1 Lee observed that Chinese women sub jected not only to their husbands' authority but also to clan and family associations.2 Despite the patriarchal control, Lee also noted, Chinese women in Butte occasionally challenged male predominance by running away from unhappy marriages.3 Two decades later another sociologist, 44 Journal of American Ethnic History /Winter 2000 Stanford Lyman, examined the social life of Chinese immigrants in the United States and spearheaded the discussion on polygamous practice among early Chinese immigrants. Not simply proclaiming the practice as evidence of the inferiority of Chinese, Lyman rather interpreted poly andry as a form of marriage among Chinese immigrants due to the shortage of women.4 Despite the above works, the studies of family and marriage of Chi nese immigrant women have evolved slowly. Most works on Chinese communities in America have either overlooked this aspect of family life or treated it in very terse text, with the discussions of family and marriage of Chinese immigrants only emerging sporadically and briefly. This situation continued until the publication of specialized studies on Chinese families in America in the 1980s. Evelyn Nakano Glenn's essay "Split Household, Small Producer and Dual Wage Earner: An Analysis of Chinese-American Family Strategies" was one of the recent signifi cant studies in the field.5 Glenn claimed that there were three distinct immigrant family types which emerged in different periods in response to particular political and economic conditions: split household (1850? 1920), small producer (1920-1960), and dual-wage worker (1960-1980). "The existence of these distinct types," Glenn stated, "suggested that characteristics often interpreted as products of Chinese culture actually represented strategies for dealing with conditions of life in the United States."6 While Glenn's work theoretically analyzes different forms of Chinese immigrant families in the United States, the following more recent stud ies provide evidence for the existence of Chinese families in different regions during early immigration. Sandy Lydon's Chinese Gold: The Chinese in the Monterey Bay Region examines the various Chinese communities in this part of California. He found that as early as the 1850s, there had been fishing families in the Monterey Bay region, contrary to the stereotypical Chinese laborers in California who generally left their families behind and worked in gold mines and railroads. As a family venture, fishing required the fisherman and his wife working jointly. While some Chinese wives went fishing with their husbands, others worked at home processing fish. Several couples even formed a fishing company, making fishing a profitable industry.7 Families not only existed in fishing villages, but were also found in agricultural areas. Sucheng Chan in This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860-1910 discusses the presence of families among Chinese farmers in the Sacramento-San Joaqu?n Delta in 1900 Ling 45 and notes the age difference between married couples as being a notable feature of these families.8 Chan also noticed the polyandrous practice among some Chinese miners and laborers in northern rural California in 1900.9 Sylvia Sun Minnick's Samfow: The San Joaqu?n Chinese Legacy also discovered seventeen Chinese marriages recorded between 1857 and 1880 from the San Joaqu?n County marriage records. Chinese fami lies became more apparent after 1900 as forty-three Chinese marriages were recorded from 1900 to 1924.10 Along the same line, Laura Wang in her study on the Chinese community in Vallejo, Solano County, California claimed that between 1910 and 1940 there was a family oriented Chinese community in Vallejo.11 Similarly, David Beesley challenged the notion that no family existed among the early Chinese immigrant laborers in his article "From Chi nese to Chinese American: Chinese Women and Families in a Sierra Nevada Town."12 From census and other data, Beesley gathered evi dence indicating that some of the Chinese laborers in a Sierra Nevada town with regular income had wives or women with them.13 In addition to California and the mountain region, Chinese families also appeared in the Midwest. Sarah R. Mason's case study of Liang May Seen, an early Chinese immigrant woman inMinneapolis between the 1890s and 1940s, indicates that Liang May Seen played a vital role in her family's survival, prosperity and cultural assimilation to Ameri can society.14 Recently, more specialized studies on families of Chinese immigrant women in America have emerged. Judy Yung's Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco examines the families of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Chinese immigrant wives in San Francisco. Yung observes that most immigrant women "presented a submissive image in public but ruled at home."15 Yung further asserts that immigrant wives "as homemakers, wage earners, and culture bear ers made them indispensable partners of their husbands."16 The above studies have confirmed the existence of family life among the early Chinese immigrants and greatly contributed to our knowledge of family and marriage of Chinese immigrant women in the United States. However, such questions as whether women's roles in Chinese immigrant families had changed, how the changes occurred, and what characterized marriages among Chinese immigrants of the period still remain understudied. Attempting to address the above issues, this study claims that immi gration had changed Chinese women's roles in most Chinese immigrant 46 Journal of American Ethnic History /Winter 2000 families. Immigration freed women from the dominance of their parents-in-law, and they became joint heads of the households as they left the extended families behind and came to America to join their husbands. The necessity of survival in the New World also made these women providers for their families. In performing the above roles, women also participated in decision-making in family affairs. Immigration also affected Chinese immigrant women's marriages. Marriages of Chinese immigrants during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries bore the following characterizations?a wide age gap between husband and wife, sporadic polygamous practice, the small number of interracial marriages for Chinese male immigrants, and the (almost) absence of outmarrying among Chinese females. First, the wide age gap between married Chinese couples, primarily caused by restrictive immigration laws, had been the dominant feature of many marriages. Second, the restriction on Chinese women's entry to the United States resulted in polygynous practice among some Chinese men who were not able to bring their wives from China and remarried in America. The severe shortage of women also contributed to polyan drous practice among some early Chinese immigrants. Finally, the ex treme sex disparity produced some interracial marriages among early Chinese immigrant males regardless of anti-miscegenation laws. How ever, the scarcity of women resulted in the near absence of interracial marriages among Chinese females of the same time period.
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