Most of the Chinese who journeyed to Gam Saan (Golden Mountain) in California were unskilled or semiskilled contract laborers. An American or Chinese company would pay for their transport in return for a number of years of work. Out of their earnings the ticket price would be deducted. (Despite charges that the Chinese immigrant workers were “coolies”—the term designates a slave trade in poor Chinese prevalent in other parts of the world—few if any Chinese workers in California came over by that method. The term literally meant “bitter strength.”)

The trip took eight or nine weeks across the Pacific, often under horrendous conditions. Shipwrecks were common, but greater problems were poor sanitation and overcrowding, and on occasion deliberate cruelty by the crew. Perhaps the most extreme voyage was that of the Libertad in 1854, which pulled into San Francisco with one-fifth of its five hundred passengers dead.

Initially the majority of Chinese passed through San Francisco and immediately went to the Sierras to mine gold. As the Chinese grew into the most numerous minority in the diggings, laws like the Foreign Miners’ Act of 1850 became merely part of a wide range of racist, exclusionary actions taken against them in the state. The law was repealed and reinstated a number of times, and finally declared unconstitutional in 1870.

By then better than one in eight workers in San Francisco were Chinese. Cloistered in the crowded Chinatown, their unfamiliar cultural behaviors became the basis for speculation and prejudice. [...]