Brokering Servitude. Andrew Urban
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readers and commenters. I was fortunate to have participated in two meetings of the International Conference of Labour and Social History, and I am grateful for the comments and feedback that I received from Dirk Hoerder, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, and Silke Neunsinger, who edited the volume Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers. I would also like to thank the contributors to the edited volume Making the Empire Work, who gathered at the University of Toronto. In addition, I acknowledge the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory, the Global Race, Ethnicity, and Migration workshop at the University of Minnesota, and Mae Ngai and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. As an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow, I had valuable time to work on this project.
Rutgers has been an incredibly supportive environment and an inspiring place to work. I would like to thank, in particular, Louise Barnett, Carolyn Brown, Kornel Chang, Dorothy Sue Cobble, Ann Fabian, Leslie Fishbein, Doug Greenberg, Allan Isaac, Kathy López, James Masschaele, Lou Masur, Meredith McGill, Andy Parker, Jamie Pietruska, Nancy Rao, Kyla Schuller, Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui, Judith Surkis, Jimmy Swenson, Mark Wasserman, and Ginny Yans.
Support from the Rutgers University Research Council allowed for the inclusion of color images in this book.
Dan Bender and Kim Phillips have provided wonderful encouragement as series editors. Dan in particular has been a mentor to me in all aspects of my career. NYU Press has diligently ushered this book toward completion. Deb Gershenowitz and Constance Grady were my editors when I began, and offered important help getting things off the ground. Clara Platter and Amy Klopfenstein have been resourceful, candid, and insightful in seeing the book to its completion. Dorothea Halliday, NYU Press’s managing editor, coordinated copyediting and production with precision and awareness of the various tenure-related deadlines I faced.
Last but not least, there are individuals whom I can never adequately thank. But I will try. Caley Horan offered editing help at a crucial juncture, and I am indebted to her for this timely intervention and for her support throughout. At Rutgers, Johanna Schoen read the book manuscript in its entirety and provided me with focused comments and suggestions. As my readers for NYU Press, Eileen Boris and Micki McElya provided two rounds of crucial feedback, each time pushing me to broaden the scope of my thinking. They have inspired me not only with their insights, but with their willingness to spend so much time helping a junior colleague. I can only hope that in the future I can replicate this commitment—and the generosity that inspires it.
My sister Claire, an immigrant rights lawyer, was a vital source of help in comparing past to present and in making sense of change over time. Where such change exists.…
My dad, Ted, has supported this project from day one. Whenever I seemed poised to lose it he helped with whatever needed helping, and brought me back down to earth. I am forever grateful.
This book would simply not be without my mom, Janet. Not only did she read the manuscript in its entirety and help to copyedit, she provided vital assistance in respect to cropping, formatting, and improving the resolution of the images that appear here. She has supported me with every aspect of this book—and in life—and I cannot thank her enough.
A NOTE ON LANGUAGE
When referring to Chinese names in this book, I use the renderings that American journalists, missionaries, and immigration officials provided. English translations of Chinese names, however, are notoriously unreliable.
In English translations of Chinese, the family name appears before the given name. Accordingly, I refer to individuals with Chinese names by their first rather than second name. The exception here is when the first name is given as “Ah,” which is used as a diminutive or nickname prefix added to a name in the Chinese language. Where white officials referred to a Chinese immigrant by Ah followed by a second name, I use the second name to refer to the individual, even if this is the person’s given name.
In referring to Chinese place names, unless I am quoting directly, I use the current Hanyu Pinyin transliteration system.
Introduction
Ye Gon Lun was eighteen years old when he succumbed to tuberculosis on June 23, 1874. Three days later, he was interred in Sacramento’s Old City Cemetery in a plot purchased for him by Nathaniel Greene Curtis, who, along with his wife, Nancy, had employed Ye as a domestic servant for nine years. Walking around the various plots, visitors encounter Ye’s tomb as an anomaly, surrounded as it is by grave sites memorializing the city’s white, Anglo founders. In Western cemeteries, Chinese immigrant graves are often located in segregated sections.
Curtis, a transplant from Memphis, arrived in California in 1850 during the Gold Rush. He quickly gave up prospecting to practice law. While simultaneously holding public offices as an elected judge and Democratic state assemblyman and senator, he was also well regarded as a criminal defense attorney. Curtis worked, on a number of occasions, as outside counsel for the Central Pacific Railroad. In 1887, he testified before the Pacific Railway Commission in response to allegations that he had set fire to financial ledgers revealing that the railroad’s executives and board members had fraudulently overcapitalized construction costs for their own personal profit. Reflecting on his relationship to California’s advancements toward the end of his life, he would claim membership in the “noble band of pioneers who had brought order out of chaos and had laid deep and broad and lasting the foundation of the social fabric which led to the present and happy condition of the people.”1 Defending railroad officials from charges of financial fraud was indeed consistent with how “civilization” unfurled in the American West. In material terms, the lawyer-pioneer belonged to an expanding class of salary earners with disposable income in cities like Sacramento and San Francisco—professionals such as politicians, accountants, and business owners who wished to employ servants, cooks, laundry workers, livery drivers, gardeners, and other service workers.
The Sacramento Daily Union reported that Curtis “came across” Ye in 1865 while he was in San Francisco for business. Ye was a nine-year-old immigrant boy who, as the Presbyterian minister Ira M. Condit commented, was “fresh from his heathen home in China.” How exactly Curtis encountered Ye, and what transpired between the two at that moment, was never disclosed, at least in public accounts. If Ye’s story conforms to that of other Chinese immigrants, his family may have relied on a lender to borrow money to finance his transpacific passage. His young age meant that he would have struggled to compete with older workers to get hired in more physically demanding jobs, and it is reasonable to infer that the intent was to have him specifically seek out work as a domestic laborer. Alternatively, Ye could have been the orphaned or abandoned child of a Chinese merchant family—a theory that has some credence if later rumors claiming that wealthy relatives wanted to exhume his body for return to China have any factual basis. There is no evidence that Ye was indentured to Curtis or forced into this relationship against his will—although “will” is a concept that this book complicates. The Thirteenth Amendment, which was ratified in December 1865, outlawed “involuntary servitude” along with slavery, although Ye’s age would have allowed for him to be fostered to a state-appointed guardian without his consent. “Being pleased with his appearance—for he was a bright, intelligent and handsome little boy, as white as any Caucassian [sic],” the Daily Union noted, without any additional detail, Curtis “took him into his service and gave him opportunities to learn.”2
Under the supervision of Condit and a “native Chinese helper,” Sit Ah Mun, Ye was baptized a Presbyterian when he turned fourteen. A member of Sacramento’s Chinese Christian Association, Ye had aspired to train as a minister to his people, and as a dying wish, newspapers reported, he donated his savings to a fund that would allow other Chinese immigrants to pursue this purpose. In his eulogy, Curtis declared that his deceased servant was “an honor to Christian civilization, and an honor to the Church.” Condit’s bilingual lyrics to the Christian hymn “Happy Land” enabled Chinese immigrants attending Ye’s funeral to solemnize his passing in song, alongside white mourners.3 The inscription on Ye’s tomb captures and conveys the possibilities for cosmopolitan and globe-spanning fraternity and equality that Christian universalism promised to the devout. It quotes Isaiah 45:22: “Look unto me, and be ye saved all the