The Race Card. Tara Fickle

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СКАЧАТЬ “inveterate gamblers” was invoked in magazine articles, newspaper op-eds, literary fiction, and even official legislation. For example, in the 1877 report of a joint congressional committee convened specifically to investigate “the character, extent, and effect of Chinese immigration into this country,” and whose findings directly contributed to the successful passage of the Exclusion Act, witness after witness testified to the Chinese’s “natural passion” for gambling—an “incurable” addiction, the committee concluded, unmatched by any except the “darker races,” specifically Mexicans and Indians, from whom East Asians, as “Mongolians,” had been distinguished in scientific and popular racial taxonomies since the eighteenth century.2

      It was not simply Chinese immigrants’ pursuit of games of chance, but the foreignness of the particular games they played, which became additional evidence of their alien status. From fan tan (番摊) to pai gow (牌九) to baak-gap-piu (白鸽票, later called keno), such ludic alienness could be used not only to support arguments for Chinese exclusion, but, interestingly, to argue for the ideological inclusion of other, non-Asian minorities. Such, in fact, was Brown’s broader intent in the passage quoted above, in using the “Chinese question” as a contrast to an equally irreverent meditation on what, in the postbellum United States, had come to be called the “Negro question.” “If anything were lacking to show the negro’s adaptability to American citizenship,” Brown mused, “his innate love of poker would settle the question. Too much praise can not be bestowed upon those negroes who have progressed from abject slavery to ‘craps’ to complete emancipation by poker.”3 Emancipation by poker is at once as absurd and as cogent as Exclusion by fan tan; for, as this book reveals, games of chance and racial legislation share a far greater intimacy than we might expect, and one that extends far beyond the nineteenth century. Particularly noteworthy in the Brown example, however, is that Asian Americans’ penchant for “foreign” rather than American games turns them into the illegitimate, negative analogue to African Americans, whose “patriotic” embrace of poker can be used to argue for their fitness to be free and full American citizens.4 The triangulation of black, Asian, and white, then, was in fact one crucial way gaming rhetoric was shaped by, and in turn sought to subtly critique, the broader political and social terrain of U.S. race relations.

      Scholars in Asian American studies have been somewhat too quick to assume that the consistent invocation of the Chinese as “inveterate gamblers” was as baseless as it was racist, and to dismiss it in favor of focusing on racialized labor as the primary issue in exclusion debates. Yet gambling was minor neither to early Chinese American experience nor to debates over immigration and exclusion. In 1878, San Francisco alone boasted forty exclusively Chinese-run and -patronized gambling houses. In Fiddletown, California, a trading center for mining camps with one of the largest Chinese American communities in the state, a full 10 percent of Chinese residents in 1880 reported their occupations as related to gambling or lottery.5 In addition to gambling houses, lotteries were popular and familiar enough that even in smaller Chinatowns drawings were made twice daily, and the winning numbers posted at all major Chinatown restaurants and storefronts.6 Although, for obvious reasons, the exact number of Chinese American gamblers is difficult to obtain, the industry was sufficiently large and profitable enough to engender specialized Chinese “Gamblers Unions”7 with a roll of dues-paying members and extensive tong protection networks.

      While the prevalence of Chinese American gambling was in part the inevitable outcome of bachelor societies comprising young, unattached men with a limited number of recreational outlets, it was also a regular and even expected pastime in the frontier communities in which they resided. Elaine Zorbas reminds us that “everybody gambled in California in the gold rush days”; in 1849, the state even officially recognized gambling as a legitimate profession.8 As one witness before the joint congressional committee remarked, “California was originally settled by gamblers, and this early passion has continued to the present day, till we may almost say today that our population is composed of gamblers!”9 Why, then, given gambling’s widespread cross-racial popularity, was it yet, as Stewart Culin noted in 1891, “often looked upon as one of the distinctive traits of the Chinese, and as such is almost invariably commented upon when any reference is made to them in casual speech”?10 Why, too, given gambling’s legitimization as a productive occupation in California and other frontier communities, would the practice be seized on by white exclusionists in these same communities as definitive evidence of the Chinese’s dangerously immoral influence on American youth?

      The answers to these questions lie in pejorative shifts in American attitudes toward gambling and toward Chinese immigrants between the 1850s and the 1880s. During this period, as Ann Fabian notes, “the moral values of a world based on production and productive labor gave way before the miraculous fertility of speculative capitalism.”11 Even the San Francisco Illustrated Wasp, arguably the most virulent anti-Chinese publication of the day, saw Chinese gambling as part of a broader social ill stemming from such shifts in economic and social relations. In 1879, the Wasp published a fictionalized letter from a Chinese American laborer to his love back in China. “Ah Fong,” as he was called, was introduced in the paper not simply as “a Love-Lorn Chinaman” but “an Observant Critic” on American social dynamics. Having recently bribed his way out of jail on charges of gambling, he reflected on the injustice of both the charge and his release: “in this country,” he tells his beloved, “I smack justice on each eye with a piece of gold and she becomes blind.” But while he surmises that “in this country I shall always be the debtor and never the creditor,” he yet notes that the very notion of gambling’s criminalization is equally bankrupt:

      Why the sages and wise men have declared gaming to be, socially, an evil I am at a loss to know. Life, everywhere, and in this country, perhaps, more than any other, is a risk, a gamble, a chance.… What is called business is but a game of chance. The merchant sends off his ship full of merchandise to where he thinks there will be a good market; if there is not a good market, he loses; if there is a good market, he wins. What is that? The stock speculator buys his securities in the hope of a rise; upon exactly the same principle that the gambler backs a horse in the hope that he will win the race. Where is the difference? Even the very solons who have pronounced against gambling hold their own positions as the result of a successful game of chance—an election.12

      As this unexpectedly sympathetic portrayal of the Chinese American dilemma suggests, the perceived linkage between the age’s “most reviled vice” and the age’s most reviled immigrant group was reflective not merely of regional racial anxieties about Asian Americans in particular, but of national anxieties about broader sea changes in material and ideological economies of the period. Gambling was, until well into the century, understood less as a moral failing than an economic boon: lotteries were regularly used to fund state and city projects. It was not until the 1870s—when even California followed other states in criminalizing house games—that it acquired a uniquely vilified status on economic grounds as a parasitic scourge, embodied by the growing numbers of late-century stock and commodities traders who “brought nothing to market and … offered no real exchange for the profits they made.”13

      So, too, with early Chinese immigrants, who in the mid-1800s were, if not celebrated, at least tolerated in mining camps and in the United States as a whole—in part for their tax contributions during economic depression.14 It was also not until the 1870s that exclusion grew from a concern of the Western states—which, due to frontier industries like gold mining, had the highest concentration of Chinese immigrants—to a galvanizing issue nationwide.15 Now, their “heathenness,” association with vices like gambling, opium, and prostitution, and “cheap” labor were all marshaled by exclusion proponents as evidence of Chinese immigrants’ unassimilability and their unfitness to be (and to compete with) American citizens. Like stock traders, Chinese workers were then framed as economic parasites, undercutting American laborers’ efforts to secure fair pay and funneling the profits of American industry back to China rather than reinvesting them in the national economy. In short, exclusionists framed Chinese Americans as the embodiment of the moral as well as economic ills of gambling.

      Historians of nineteenth-century U.S. culture have identified СКАЧАТЬ