We are pleased to include below the first post in an ongoing occasional series titled "From the Archives." Our first contribution comes from Joshua Paddison.
Autobiography of an Unnamed Chinese Woman
Introduced and Transcribed by Joshua Paddison
The following unnamed Chinese
woman’s life story, written “in her own words,” was published in San
Francisco’s Presbyterian newspaper, The Occident, on August 5, 1885. At the time, she was an interpreter and resident at
the local Presbyterian Mission Home for Girls. Presbyterian missionaries had
been working with Chinese immigrants in San Francisco since the 1850s.
In the 1870s,
California’s politicians had seized on the figure of the “sinful” and
“diseased” Chinese prostitute to urge the necessity of halting immigration from
China. This resulted in the Page Act of 1875, the federal government’s first
restriction of immigration, which forbade Chinese “coolies” and prostitutes
from entering the United States. Protestant missionaries in California
generally supported the Page Act but argued that Chinese women could and should
be cared for, “uplifted,” and transformed into “useful Christian women.” “What
maketh us to differ from them?” asked Presbyterian missionary Samantha Condit
in 1874. “God’s grace alone.”
Chinese women’s
autobiographical stories such as this one appeared occasionally in California’s
Protestant publications, offered as evidence of the progress missionaries were
making as well as the redeemability of all of the world’s “races.” These
narratives are a largely untapped resource for historians of Asian American
history, offering evidence of both the benefits and costs accrued when Chinese
Americans joined Protestant churches in the nineteenth century.
My home was in Onom, China, when I was three years old. I
have ten sisters and one brother. And they all are married. My father was the
richest man in that town, so we had a good home to live in at first. But
afterward he lost all his money, and he went to another country to try to get
work. But since he went there we have never heard anything from him. So my
mother tried to find out where he was, and by and by a man came from where my
father was. He told my mother that he was dead. She could not get along without
money, so then she took me down to Hong Kong, and sold me to a woman for eighty
dollars, and then she went back to her home. And that woman took me to her
home, and got a teacher to teach me to sing, and paid one hundred and eighty
dollars for him to teach me thirty pieces or songs only, in eight months.
I learned every one of them and I was then only eight years
old. So I began to go out every day, to sing for the people at the hotels.
Sometimes I earned eighty dollars in one night, sometimes more than that. So I
went on every day and every night, without stopping, for six months, and then I
had to stop because I was very sick for nearly a year, and that woman was
afraid that I was not going to live any longer; not because she cared for me,
but because she wanted the money that I could earn.
Not long after that, I began to get a little better; and so
she took me and sold me again to another woman for three hundred and forty
dollars, and she brought me to this country. She treated me just like her own
little child. She was very kind to me indeed. I was only nine years and a few
months old, and she told me to call her husband papa, and call her mamma. I
staid [sic] with her until I was twelve years old, and, not long after that,
she got a letter from her mother-in-law’s friends, saying she was dead; so she
had to go back to China, not because she liked to go, but because that is our
Chinese heathen way to worship the mother-in-law after she is dead. Papa wanted
to take me with him, but mamma said that I didn’t need to go with them, because
she was coming back very soon, and it would cost so much to take me along; so
she left me in the care of a friend until she would come back; but her friend
was one of the bad women, so she took me and sold me to a man for five hundred
dollars for his third wife. And now came the time for me to fall into cruel
hands.
Only a few months after that, he tried to take me to the
country and sell me again. But his kind young brother had heard some other men
talking about it, so he came to me and told me what his brother wanted to do;
and after a few days, a man came [to] me and asked me if I was willing to go
with him to the country the next week.
Then I said to him, “No, I don’t want to go any place”; and
he said to me, “Your husband has taken some money from me, so you have to go
with me.”
So then I did know what his brother had told me was true,
and the next day I was trying to get away from him. I began at nine o’clock in
the morning. I was very much afraid to let him find out what I intended to do,
because if he knew, I could not get away from him, so I went to his other wife
about twelve o’clock and told her that I wanted to run away from him. So she
said to me, “Do as you like, because I know that he is not good for you to live
with,” and then I ran off and he ran after me.
But I know God helped me get to the Mission Home. He told
Miss [Margaret] Culbertson to give me back to him, because he had paid five
hundred dollars to get me. But she told him she will not make me go with him
unless I was willing to go, and I was not.
I have been in the Home about seven years, and have always
had kind friends to take care of me, and last year I learned where my mother
lives. I have a friend here who knew me when I was a little girl, and who is
also a friend of my cousin, and he went to see my cousin, and began to talk
with him about his aunt selling a girl, and she had never heard anything from
her, and told my father’s name to him, all my sisters’ and brothers’ names, and
also he told my name to him. So when he came to see me he said, “I went to see
a friend last night, and he told me that his aunt had lost a girl of the same
name, and as yours.”
Then I asked him her father’s name, and he told my father
name to me I began to cry and told him to bring my cousin to me. So when he
came to see me he asked if I was a Christian girl. I said, “Yes, I became a
Christian three years ago.”
And then he said, “If your mother hears this she will be
very sad to think about it.”
I said to him, “Why should she be sad?”
“Because,” he said, “when you a Christian you cannot pray to
her when she is dead.”
But I wrote to her and told her all about God, and how he
had helped me to get out of all the trouble, and how Jesus died for our sins.
So a few months ago I got a letter from her, and she wants me to go home; and
she said she is very sorry, and that I was a very foolish girl to be a
Christian, because Chinese always pray to their father and mother when they are
dead. But I am thankful to learn to love God, and I hope many other Chinese
girls may learn to love Him too.
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