Immigrant Sugar Plantation Workers in Hawaii: A History

As we observe Asian Pacific American Heritage month, we are pleased to share this post by CGS volunteer Cindy Thomson.

The first sugar plantation workers in Hawaii were Native Hawaiians.  Given their aversion to the regimented, arduous labor required in the cane fields and the widespread view (at least at that time) that disease was driving the Hawaiians to extinction, the sugar planters, mostly American businessmen, began looking elsewhere for labor.  Between 1852 and 1946, over 375,000 workers were recruited from around the world.  Immigrants who began arriving before 1900 included the Chinese, Portuguese, Germans, Norwegians, Galicians, and mainland (naichi) Japanese. Those who began arriving in 1900 or later included Okinawans, Puerto Ricans, Koreans, Filipinos, African Americans from the U.S. South, Spaniards, and Russians from Manchuria. The multi-ethnic nature of the workforce reflected early efforts to offset the numerous Chinese with Portuguese and other Europeans, and later efforts to offset the increasingly militant Japanese with recruits from elsewhere in the world. Europeans often brought their families, while most other groups consisted largely of males who arrived alone.

Contract between Japanese worker and McBryde Sugar Company, Kauai.
(Source: Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association Plantation Archives,
Hamilton Library, University of Hawaii at Manoa)

The duration of labor contracts was five years for the Chinese, later shortened to three years. A contract typically required a work commitment of six days per week, ten hours per day in exchange for housing, food, water, firewood and medical care. Some of the Europeans were also offered homestead land. The ethnic hierarchy on the plantations dictated both living conditions and employment opportunities. Caucasians (other than Portuguese) were at the top of the hierarchy, then the Portuguese, followed by East Asians, with Filipinos (who were the last non-Europeans to arrive) at the bottom.

Low pay kept field and mill workers at the poverty level, and housing, sanitation and medical care were often substandard. On some plantations, grueling work conditions and sometimes harsh treatment by field overseers (“lunas”) led to resistance by the workers. This included work slowdowns, strikes, desertions, feigned illness to avoid work, violence against lunas, and property destruction – including arson in the cane fields and sugar mills.  The plantation workforce was up to 70 percent Japanese in the early 1900s and about 70 percent Filipino by the 1930s. Japanese and Filipino strikes were the most disruptive – typically lasting for months and involving large numbers of workers on multiple plantations. Strikers were evicted from plantation housing and other ethnic groups were brought in as strikebreakers. The Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA) often made wage or other concessions months after a strike ended, so as to not associate the concessions with the strike.

A record card for Filipino Esteban Fernandez indicates he was fired
by the Oahu Sugar Company after taking part in a strike in April 1924.
(Source: Filipino Laborers Collection, Joseph F. Smith Library, BYU-Hawaii)

Most workers left the plantations as soon as their contracts expired and found work elsewhere in Hawaii or on the U.S. mainland.  Some Asians returned home, due to the proximity of their homelands to Hawaii.  The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which took effect in Hawaii when it became a U.S. Territory in 1900, terminated Chinese immigration to the islands.  When Korea became a Japanese protectorate in 1905, Japan stopped Korean immigration to reduce competition for their own workers in Hawaii. Under the 1907 “Gentlemen’s Agreement” between the U.S. and Japan, Japanese immigration was also restricted. Even after these dates, however, some Asians already in Hawaii were allowed to bring family members, including “picture brides,” to Hawaii.

The HSPA gradually mechanized operations in the fields and mills – providing their workforce with more skilled, blue-collar jobs and some advancement for those who were at the bottom of the plantation hierarchy.  Improved living and working conditions motivated multiple generations of the same family to stay on the plantations.  These laborers lived, worked and recreated together, enjoyed each others’ foods, intermarried, and sent their children to the same schools.  Plantation acres in cultivation began to decline noticeably in the 1970s and the last plantation closed in 2016.  Some families still have reunions to “talk story” about the tight-knit communities where they once lived and perhaps recall the ancestors who came to Hawaii so long ago.

Cindy Thomson’s interest in genealogy began with family stories about her immigrant ancestors in Hawaii and evolved into an obsession over the past 15 years. She is a CGS member and teaches a class on “Immigrant Sugar Plantation Workers in Hawaii: A Multi-ethnic Approach to Genealogy.” For more information, contact her at cthomson@californiaancestors.org

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society

Chinese Exclusion Act files in Seattle: a treasure trove of information

We continue our observance of Asian Pacific Heritage Month with this blog post about the Chinese Exclusion Files found at the National Archives in Seattle. Trish Hackett Nicola leads a free webinar on the collection on May 28.

Trish Hackett Nicola never expected to find herself specializing in records related to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Her own ancestry is German and Irish. But when the Seattle-based genealogist met Loretta Chin about eighteen years ago, she was introduced to the Chinese Exclusion Act files held at the National Archives at Seattle. Chin “told me about how wonderful these files were, and she became my mentor,” says Nicola. Today Nicola works with a small team of volunteers who have devoted themselves to preserving and indexing the more than 50,000 government files collected on Chinese immigrants between 1882 and 1943. The files represent those who arrived at the ports of Seattle, Sumas, and Port Angeles in Washington; Portland, Oregon; and Vancouver, B.C.

Since May 2015, Nicola also has published an ongoing blog, ChineseExclusionFiles.com, in which she features particularly interesting finds from the records. “I started the blog to highlight the personal stories that are found in the Chinese Exclusion Act case files,” she says. “I wanted more people to know what valuable family and social history is found in these files." 

Lee Gok Suey, father of San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee

There’s the case file for Lee Gok Suey, for example, born in China although both his father and grandfather were American citizens. His father, grandfather, and other relatives had to undergo detailed and repeated interrogations before Lee was finally granted admission to the U.S. in 1937, at the age of 17. Lee grew up, served in the Korean War, married, and fathered five children—one of whom, Edwin, would become San Francisco’s first Asian-American mayor in 2011. This file contains more than 50 pages of detailed information about Ed Lee’s ancestors and relatives, including specifics of the village in China where the family came from.

12-year-old Ora Chang in 1910

In sharp contrast is the slim file that contains an application by Charlotte Chang seeking to take her young son and daughter with her on a trip to visit relatives in China in 1910. The file contains names and addresses of many family members but little more. It does, however, include a charming photo of twelve-year-old Ora Ivy Chang, dressed all in white, with enormous satin bows in her hair.

The files vary widely in content; each is unique, providing a glimpse into the lives of immigrants from all parts of China. They usually contain “incredible” photos, Nicola says, and intimate details of the subject’s life. “The file might describe the person’s village and neighbors, or tell if they owned a rice cooker, or the number of windows in their house.” Of crucial importance to genealogists is that the files usually contain the subject’s original name written in Chinese characters, enabling researchers to trace their Chinese family back hundreds of years. “We now have two volunteers who speak and read Chinese and we are including the name of the subject of the file in Chinese characters on the blog,” says Nicola.

The Seattle files are indexed by file name and number. Nicola and fellow volunteers are now meticulously adding important metadata to each file—names, keywords, cross-references to relatives' files, notes on photos, maps, or other items of interest, and much more. Trish Hackett Nicola gives an overview of the Seattle Chinese Exclusion Act Files on Thursday, May 28. This is a free webinar hosted by CGS; register at the link at EventBrite.


Trish Hackett Nicola is a certified genealogist with more than 30 years of experience. She has volunteered at the National Archives in Seattle since 2001.
 

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society

Religion and Politics: A Korean Family’s Journey to Hawaii

Cindy Kim Thomson shares this story of her Korean missionary ancestors

In 1904 my second-great-grandparents, Chang Sung and Chu No (Rebecca) Kim, immigrated to Hawaii from Hamhung in northeast Korea.  Accompanying them aboard the SS Gaelic was their only child, my great-grandmother Nak Kull Yee, with her husband and two small children. Nak Kull’s stories have been passed down in my family for generations: how her parents were converted by American Christian missionaries in Korea, how – during seasonal lulls in activity on their farm – they trekked hundreds of miles north (even crossing a frozen river) to proselytize in Manchuria, and how fearful they were of encountering tigers along the way. 

Hamhung and Manchuria are on opposite sides of the mountain ranges that run down the spine of the Korean peninsula. Considering the topography, was it even possible for Chang Sung and Rebecca to make that trek to Manchuria?  How could they proselytize in Manchuria when they couldn’t even speak Chinese? And did tigers really live in Korea?  I looked to histories of Korea and biographies and memoirs of the missionaries for answers to these questions.

Korean print depicting a tiger
(National Museum of Korea, Seoul)

According to early Korean church records in Honolulu, Chang Sung and Rebecca were baptized in Korea by the Reverend William Arthur Noble. Noble had arrived in Korea in 1891 and in 1896 took charge of the Northern Presbyterian Mission based in Pyongyang (then known as the “Jerusalem of the East”), now the capital of North Korea.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s (Chang Sung and Rebecca’s last years in their homeland), the mountains of northern Korea were prime tiger habitat. So great was the fear of these animals that some villages hired tiger hunters for protection. Tiger skins were the insignia of high office and also used on carrying chairs of the nobility, their teeth and claws used for ornaments, and ground-up bones for medicine. The tiger (now extinct in Korea) remains an iconic figure in Korean folklore.

The Yalu and Tumen rivers comprise the northern border between Korea and China. To escape famine and economic and political oppression, Koreans sometimes crossed these rivers (which froze over for months in the harsh weather) to find work in Manchuria or Siberia. In the late 1800s, about 70,000 Koreans were living in Manchuria. Chang Sung and Rebecca were likely preaching to fellow Koreans rather than to Chinese in Manchuria. 

In the spring of 1891, Presbyterian missionaries James Gale and Samuel Moffett, accompanied by an early convert named So Sangyun, left Seoul for a three-month, 1400-mile journey that included territory covered by the Northern Presbyterian Mission. Details of their journey are recounted in Richard Rutt’s A Biography of James Scarth Gale and His History of the Korean People (1972). Of particular interest to me was the portion of their trip where they visited Korean Christian villages in Tonghua, Manchuria, then crossed the Yalu River and stopped in the Korean towns of Chasong, Changjin and Hamhung. This route took them through the “immense Yalu forests” (suggestive to me of tiger habitat), the Yalu valley where “there were still seven or eight feet of ice in the ravines,” and the “fertile rice valleys” around Hamhung. I don’t know if Chang Sung and Rebecca followed the missionaries’ route, but I am no longer skeptical of Nak Kull’s stories of their travels between Hamhung and Manchuria.    

Korean immigration to Hawaii peaked during 1903-1905. Many Christian missionaries encouraged their congregants to find a better life and proselytize in Hawaii. Every ship departing from Korea included at least one minister who uplifted the Christians and reportedly annoyed some of the non-Christians. It’s no wonder that Christians were disproportionately represented among the Korean sugar plantation workers in Hawaii. Because the Presbyterians did not have a presence in Hawaii, Chang Sung worked for the Methodist Hawaiian Mission ministering to the Koreans at Pahala Plantation. He died in 1916, and Rebecca died in 1923.

Photo of Nak Kull, about 1952

Nak Kull raised eight children and outlived three husbands and a beloved son who died at age 24.  In 1950, just before the outbreak of the Korean War, she received word that her cousins in Korea had fled to the south from their home in now-Communist Hamhung. In 1952, when fighting on the battlefield had diminished, Nak Kull left for Korea to find her cousins at a squalid refugee camp in Busan. Her children, who had futilely objected to her departure, sent her money and goods to sell on the black market. Nak Kull died in South Korea. In 1957, her ashes were shipped to Honolulu (presumably by her cousins) and scattered at Koko Head after a service at the Korean Christian Church.

Cindy Thomson’s interest in genealogy began with family stories about her immigrant ancestors in Hawaii and evolved into an obsession over the past 15 years. After retiring as a Commerce Department economist, she moved to Oakland and started taking classes at CGS.  She also volunteers as a CGS Library and event assistant, and teaches a class on “Immigrant Sugar Plantation Workers in Hawaii: A Multi-ethnic Approach to Genealogy.” 

 

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society

Lost at sea: a discovery in a Japanese koseki

As we observe Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, we share this story by guest contributor Gordon Hamachi, based on research into his Japanese heritage.

"That’s got to be a mistake," I muttered, as I puzzled over my freshly received koseki tohon.  Koseki tohon are official Japanese government records that identify all family members in a household.  According to the translation, my maternal grandparents' only child was a male named Yojiro Nishikawa, born 21 April 1930.

Family members all disagreed.  My mom is one of seven children, all born in California, starting with Hatsuko (“Grace”) in 1925.  Even if there was some unknown Japanese custom regarding the oldest son, that would be Katsumi, who was born in 1926. Phone calls confirmed what I already knew: nobody had heard of a family member named Yojiro. 

This would not be the first time a government bureaucracy had erred.  When I originally requested my family records from Japan, I was required to attach a copy of my mother’s U.S. birth certificate.  Her birth certificate is a sloppy mess, with multiple typographic errors in both her first and last names. To avoid unnecessary confusion, I silently corrected these errors with Photoshop before transmitting the birth certificate.

Because Yojiro couldn’t possibly be a relative, I promptly forgot about him as I gleefully mined the Japanese government records to add four generations of ancestors to my family tree.  It was months later when I revisited the matter of Yojiro.  This time I noticed something odd that I had missed: according to the koseki, Yojiro was "born above Pacific ocean between Honolulu, Hawaii and San Francisco, U.S." He couldn’t have been born on an airplane, as Pan American’s China Clipper didn’t begin service until 1935.  In 1930 people traveled across the Pacific by boat.

My maternal grandparents, Haruji and Tsuruye Nishikawa, from their Alien Registration cards

Fortunately, steamship records are freely available on FamilySearch.org.  I was delighted to find a couple of matches for my grandmother.  One was from 17 April 1924 when—just after she married in Japan at age 18—she traveled to San Francisco on the Korea Maru.  The other was dated 11 April 1930, when my grandmother sailed on the Tenyo Maru from Yokohama, Japan to San Pedro, California with children ages five, three, and one. Presumably she had taken them to Japan to visit family. Out of curiosity I also searched for the mysterious Yojiro Nishikawa.  This led to a tragic discovery. A separate page of the passenger manifest of the Tenyo Maru recorded that my grandmother gave birth to a son, Yojiro, on 21 April 1930, about 400 miles northwest of Honolulu, followed by his death a few days later of pneumonia, not far from San Pedro.  Imagine the hardship of traveling while pregnant in a tiny third-class cabin with three small children, giving birth on the ship, and then losing the child.

Yojiro was a late addition to the passenger manifest

Only births and deaths reported to the Japanese Consulate in the U.S. make their way into the official Japanese records.  My grandparents never bothered to inform the consulate, but the steamship company doubtlessly reported births and deaths that happened at sea.  This is why Yojiro was recorded as their only child.

That is the story of how I discovered an uncle that nobody knew.

Gordon Hamachi was born in Southern California, moved to the Bay Area to study computer science, and then worked in the tech industry.  Now retired in Mountain View, he has been working on genealogy for the past five years and repairing books at CGS.  Bicycles and computers are some other things that he likes to repair: years ago he was on the board of Berkeley Neighborhood Computers, and more recently he served on the board of the Silicon Valley Bicycle Exchange.

 

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society

Chinese Couplets: A daughter's long search for her immigrant mother's past

On Mother's Day, we are pleased to share this story by guest contributor Felicia Lowe.

I didn’t really know my mother.
She spent most of her life hiding who she was.
Lying about where she came from, how she got here.
What secrets were so dark that the truth had to be concealed?

These are the opening lines to my documentary “Chinese Couplets,” which explores the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943) on four generations of women—my maternal grandmother, my mother, Lettie Kam, my daughter, Alana, and me. The story is shaped by my quest to unravel the mystery surrounding my mother’s origins, the revelation of her illegal immigration to America during the period of Chinese exclusion, and the resulting web of secrecy and shame underlying her assimilation and achievement of the American Dream. The journey takes us from contemporary San Francisco to 1930s rural China, across the world to pre-revolutionary Cuba, post-Mao rural China and again to California, a place on the cusp of its own revolution in multiculturalism.

Felicia Lowe's mother (center) as a baby,
with her mother and older sister.

The research was complicated and messy.  There was not a single source to gather the information I needed to formulate a picture of my mother’s journey to America. For one, she was a “paper daughter,” meaning she had assumed the identity of a child of a citizen, one of the few exempt classes allowed to enter the United States in 1937. For me, the intrigue began when I was three years old and my mom instructed, “If anyone asks where I come from, say Hawaii.”  I knew from my aunt, her older sister, that they were born in China so it was very confusing.

My mother maintained her “born in Hawaii” persona most of her life and refused to offer any explanation as to why her maiden surname was Kam (Kam Sau Quon) while her sister’s last name was Louie.  At the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Kam Sau Quon’s files revealed the story of a family with three young children who left Hawaii for China in 1924, then chose to return in 1937 as war was escalating in China. To learn of my mother’s early life, I read my aunt’s immigration transcripts.  She left China in 1931 in an arranged marriage so there was no subterfuge in her interrogation answers.

An ally in my investigation was my daughter, Alana.  She was able to break through her grandmother’s shell of secrecy by interviewing her for a school assignment. Out of it emerged a huge revelation.  My mother did not meet her father until he returned from Cuba when she was 15.  He’d left his pregnant wife and five-year-old daughter to find work there.  Chinese in Cuba?  That was new news to us.

Trips to Cuba and China followed in search of answers.  The most precious was a visit with my mother to Dutou, the village she’d left six decades earlier.  Like the Chinese couplet, a traditional poem consisting of two lines of verse held in contradictory and complementary balance, my family’s cross-generational tale encompasses a series of interlocked pairings: my mother’s secretive relationship to the past and the mother she left behind when she emigrated to America… my own fraught relationship with my mother… and my daughter Alana’s less-burdened curiosity about her Chinese ancestry and the bright hope it offers for healing the immigrant cycle of rupture, abandonment, denial and shame.

The turbulent times in which my mother came of age, the powerful challenges that all immigrants face, and the strength of the women, both my grandmother and mother, define my daughter and me.  It is their gift and our legacy–secrets and all.

Felicia Lowe is an award winning television producer, director, and writer with 40 years of production experience.  Her films “Chinese Couplets,” “Carved in Silence,” “Chinatown,” and “China: Land of My Father” have been broadcast on PBS and are used in classrooms across the country.  She’s long been associated with the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation through her films and activism. www.lowedownproductions.com

Copyright © 2020 by California Genealogical Society

Grant Din: Uncovering Asian American history from the Transcontinental Railroad to the Titanic

It’s been a busy month for local genealogist Grant Din. In addition to the usual flurry of events marking Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, this year marked the 150th anniversary of theTranscontinental Railroad—a monumental undertaking built largely by Chinese laborers. Din was among those who gathered in Promontory, Utah, on May 10 for the sesquicentennial celebration. “It was just exciting to be a part of it,” he said.

Grant Din

Din joined others of Chinese descent for a group photograph at the site where a ceremonial golden spike marked the joining of the Central and Union Pacific railroads on May 10, 1869. It was part of a years-long movement of Asian Americans reclaiming their history. In the official photos taken at Promontory Point on May 10, 1869, Chinese faces are nowhere to be seen. The Chinese contributions were also dismissed at the 100^th anniversary celebration in 1969. At that event, Philip Choy, president of the Chinese Historical Society, was bumped from the official festivities by the arrival of a surprise guest, John Wayne; and U. S. Secretary of Transportation John Volpe lauded the building of the railroad with these words: “Who else but Americans could chisel through miles of solid granite?” This year, the Transportation Secretary was Elaine Chao and featured speakers included Bay Area historian Connie Young Yu, who proclaimed, “I am a descendant of a Chinese railroad worker, an American, speaking about American history.” 

Grant Din (far right by post) and others at the 150th anniversary celebration of the Transcontinental Railroad. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Uncovering the hidden past is a slow and ongoing process, but that’s the nature of genealogy and history. Din, who formerly worked as community resources director for the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, is an experienced genealogist whose specialties include research into “paper sons” and “paper daughters,” Chinese who came to America under assumed names and identities: it was the only way to get around the restrictive immigration policy dictated by the Chinese Exclusion Act, which held sway from 1882 until World War II.

Din’s detective skills led to recent work as a consultant for “The Six,” a documentary about six Chinese workers who survived the 1912 Titanic disaster. The film by Arthur Jones and Steven Schwankert, currently in production, looks into the fate of six Chinese workers who survived the 1912 Titanic disaster. All were experienced seamen. When they booked steerage class on the ill-fated ocean liner they were on their way to meet another ship, the Annetta, which would carry them to the Caribbean to work on fruit ships. Eight Chinese nationals boarded the Titanic in April 1912. Two of them, Len Lam and Lee Ling, are thought to have perished along with more than 1,500 other victims lost after the ship hit an iceberg and sank. The other six made it out alive. But instead of being brought ashore and sheltered at New York with other survivors, they were promptly transferred to the Annetta, which departed within 24 hours. What little mention they received in the New York press was derogatory; it was widely reported that the men had dressed as women, pushed children aside, or hidden like stowaways in order to get on the lifeboats—all completely false allegations. And then the trail goes cold.

"The Six" (Facebook)

“They couldn’t enter the U.S. because of the Chinese Exclusion Act,” said Din. “And because of the Exclusion Act, no one wanted to talk about it.” The filmmakers found one man from the Midwest who was told after his father’s death that his father had been on the Titanic. Din and other researchers followed obscure clues, making their way through a web of different names and changing identities to try to determine if this story was true, and to bring the survivors’ stories to light and to find their descendants. The crew of international researchers shared information via Skype, at one point conferring weekly. The project, Din said, was “probably the most fun I’ve had in genealogical work besides my own family.” And with the stories they uncovered and the family connections forged by the researchers, a bit more human history comes to light.

To view a trailer for "The Six," click here.

Copyright © 2019 by California Genealogical Society

Look what we have in store for you!

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD PRINTABLE CALENDAR

We're well into spring now, and many exciting genealogical events lie ahead in the coming months! Starting this Wednesday, May 2, Lisa Gorrell will be leading her Intermediate Records Series, a 5-class series on finding and interpreting court, immigration, land, and church records. Space is still available; register at Eventbrite here!

May 26 is Chinese Ancestry Day at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. We will have a series of blog posts leading up to the event, in honor of Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month. 

There's also a workshop on LGBTQ genealogy with Stewart Traiman; a field trip to the Bancroft Library, and much more. Of course, we also have our ongoing special interest groups that meet monthly--all are welcome. 

To download and print out your own copy of a handy calendar of upcoming 2018 events, follow this link.


Copyright © 2018 by California Genealogical Society