Exclusion discourse placed Chinese as more efficient than whites, whose “manhood” is wasted in repetitive tasks such as mining and service work. Lye shows that the Chinese were for this reason seen as more “modern,” more suited to a future of proletarian work. The Anglo-Saxon’s supposedly large, violent, inefficient body had been well adapted to hunting and Indian-killing, an era that had ended. Thus the anxieties around Chinese Exclusion were partially a result also of the closing of the frontier. The Octopus represents the Chinese as docile and feminized, but for that very reason as more refined. Unlike anti-Black racism, where the African is animalized in contrast to the European, in the American West it is Anglo-Saxons who are closer to animals because they are more alive, virile, and so on. They are “red-blooded Americans.” When the Anglo-Saxon farmhands and the Chinese cooks appear together, it is when the former are eating, and Norris’s description emphasizes the scale of the operation,best grow pots the frenzy of impersonal activity: “The half hundred men of the gang threw themselves upon the supper the Chinese cooks had set out in the shed of the eating-house…
The table was taken as if by assault; the clatter of iron knives upon the tin plates was as the reverberation of hail upon a metal roof” . The way the Chinese “set out” the food appears refined in comparison to the naturalist cacophony of “the gang’s” eating, as unstoppable as the weather. The cooks are set apart from the farmhands, but are an integral component of the large-scale ranch. Like the new machinery, the Chinese cooks allow for the rationalization and division of labor of the new agriculture, as opposed to the archaic animal nature of the farmhands: “It was a veritable barbecue, a crude and primitive feasting, barbaric, homeric. But in all this scene Vanamee saw nothing repulsive… this feeding of the People, this gorging of the human animal, eager for its meat.” The feasting is both “barbaric,” those outside of civilized discourse, and “homeric,” the origin of Western civilization—this is a tension internal to the Anglo-Saxon race, internal to “the People” and their holy destiny of Indian-killing, and is best captured by the phrase “the human animal.” The otherness of the Chinese, who are not hungry for meat, is of a different order, on par with the introduction of machines into the landscape.
The labor of “the gang” is what is being replaced by mechanized agriculture, whereas the Chinese domestic servants’ positions are secure, as they work in the house feeding the ranch’s owners as well. Norris signals the defeat of the white workers when, for all the talk of Chinese famine, it will be a white farmer who actually starves to death in the novel. Mrs. Hooven, the widow of a German immigrant farmer killed at the irrigation ditch, is dispossessed of the family’s land by the railroad and travels to San Francisco with her two daughters. This account of proletarianization is formally the most elaborate section of the book, with the events presented out of temporal sequence. The teenage daughter, Minna, becomes separated from her mother and young sister, and after witnessing the “horrors” of Chinatown she is the first to face the shock of starvation: “The idea of her starving, of her mother and Hilda starving, was out of all reason. Of course, it would not come to that, of course not. It was not thus that starvation came” . After long descriptions of her physical hunger, she is able to survive by becoming a prostitute. The narrative then juxtaposes the mother’s plight and a dinner party held by San Francisco elites including Cedarquist and one of the railroad barons, as well as Presley due to a series of convenient accidents. The dinner party takes only a few hours while Mrs Hooven’s story unfolds over many days, but the narrative cuts back and forth between the rising dramatic tension of the two plotlines. After twenty pages of intercutting, the section climaxes with “‘My best compliments for a delightful dinner’… ‘she has been dead some time—exhaustion from starvation,” .
The Hoovens lose each other because they are country folk unaccustomed to the scale of the city, and because, as German immigrants, they do not speak perfect English. In the racial schema employed by Gompers and Norris, they are not Anglo-Saxons, and so are technically not part of the labor competition. In the new world of U.S.-Chinese relations, their Europeanness is a comical archaicism that cannot survive: they must either die, as the parents do, or assimilate into degrading wage labor, as Minna does.This is part of Lye’s general focus on how U.S. East Asia policy is related to representations of Asian Americans. But the boycott as a social movement shows that the political consequences of American China policy operate in both North America and East Asia. Any contradictions in The Octopus’s view of political economy are familiar from neoliberal globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century, which again advocated for restrictions on racialized immigration but not on goods. We can see this already in the nineteenth-century Exclusion discourse itself, which Cedarquist’s speech does not in fact contradict. Consider this 1886 memorial to Congress, after Chinese had allegedly struck so as not to work alongside white workers: “To begin with, they have a hive of 450,000,000 Chinese to draw from,plant in pots ideas with only one ocean to cross, and behind them an impulsive force of hunger unknown to any European people” . The Chinese are not rational but propelled by impulse, not individuals but a group mind. This naturalist conception of the world, where hunger is an external force, driving them out of the hive from behind, is of a piece with both Turner’s view of forces and what we will encounter in The Octopus. The insect comparison is typical, as shown in an address by Morris M. Estee before the State Agricultural Society at Sacramento, in which the Chinese are so hungry as to be counterproductive in agricultural labor because they eat more than they harvest. He recommends barring from “our orchards, vineyards, hopfields and grain fields […] the thieving, irresponsible Chinaman, who like the locusts of Egypt, are eating out our substance” . It is apparently when working in the fields that such a voracious hunger comes to the fore, unlike the machinic and docile mode when engaged in modern service work. The broader point, however, is that Chinese hunger also underlies U.S. imperial reach in Asia.
As we saw above, Norris describes a shift from war and empire to trade and markets. Lye tends to focus on the rupture between these two, so that empire is now a euphemism or exciting metaphor for what is actually the cold economic logic of the market. I am instead following Eperjesi in emphasizing the continuities, seeing economic power as a new form of empire.For Western understandings of China have long taken famine to be a crucial component of its political system. In The Spirit of the Laws –the most influential text of the Enlightenment on comparative political systems–Montesquieu argued that while the Chinese had the most advanced methods of intensive farming, this could never keep up with their large population. This imbalance somehow derives from a contradiction between low fertility of the land and high fertility of the Chinese female body: “The climate of China is surprizingly favourable to the propagation of the human species. The women are the most prolific in the whole world. …[However,] China, like all other countries that live chiefly upon rice, is subject to frequent famines” . Writing in the mid-eighteenth century, the author does not even explain, let alone support, these fertility dynamics. By comparison, Norris’s version at the turn of the twentieth century is relatively sophisticated, with its pseudo-scientific theory of the decline of Chinese rice’s nutritive value. I raise this long history of the idea of Chinese hunger here to argue that, far from a projection of immigration discourse, it is the historically-primary way of thinking about China in terms of food. Thus the authoritarian rulers are compelled to rule well and provide enough food for the people lest they be overwhelmed by the hungry population. Montesquieu here applies his famous theory of checks and balances to the Chinese system, but these checks are not a separation of powers among institutions but the environmental power of fertility and hunger that checks the emperor. It is a domestic economy rather than a political economy. We see these same themes repeated in the U.S. in the late nineteenth century, that China is a land of overpopulation and famine, and that individual Chinese are satisfied with less. It underlies Cedarquist’s vision of Empire marching westward: whoever can feed the Chinese is their rightful imperial ruler, and so the mandate falls to American industry. However, whereas Europeans already viewed the Chinese in terms of food in the eighteenth century—unmatched agricultural innovations coexisting with famine and limited dietary needs—this was in the context of an inquiry into social questions, above all religious, political, and economic organization. By the time we reach the mid- to late-nineteenth century, and specifically in the labor market of the western U.S., these food characteristics were reconceptualized in terms of biological race. One aspect of this is the dehumanization following from extreme hunger, which animalizes them, as in the above quotations where the Chinese emerge from a “hive,” feed like “locusts,” and are biologically different from the “beef-and-bread man.”
These are the characterizations that the Chinese boycott proponents are fighting and they show what is at stake in refusing consumption. Where the Americans use food distribution as a weapon to conquer China, the Chinese politicize food consumption. Where the Exclusion supporters politicize the theory of evolution through biological races, the boycott supporters apply the theory of evolution to the history of political forms to show the need for a strong nation.American Studies scholars have often noted the contradictory attitudes of love and hate that Americans have felt toward China, which in this period can be seen in the contradiction between the twin discourses of the dream of the China market and the nightmare of Chinese invasion, the yellow Peril . While psychoanalytic and other theoretical frameworks can illuminate the dynamics between these two tendencies, we can understand the more direct connections between them by foregrounding the Chinese experience of the U.S. In the U.S. this is primarily a class difference, between the workers who oppose competition, that is, who want a monopoly on the labor market, and the merchants and industrialists who want to increase exports to China. This is not, however, always understood as a direct class conflict, as for example Gompers argues that the boycott threat will never become a reality, and so Chinese workers can be excluded without hurting American capital in Asia. Frank Norris, on the other hand, is more dubious about the China trade’s effect on American workers, as we have seen when Mrs. Hooven starves in San Francisco. The larger point is that U.S. texts from this period generally do not see a causal link between the China market and Chinese immigration; they are two contemporary phenomena which must both be managed. The Chinese proponents of a boycott of American goods, however, articulate a direct connection between the two: cutting off foreign trade is an appropriate response to the mistreatment of Chinese nationals in the U.S. While this is partly a practical matter—the only way ordinary Chinese can affect the us, in however small a way—it also reflects the historical and economic links between Western imports into China and Chinese immigration to the Americas, both of which are the result of Chinese decline and Western military interventions. While many American Studies scholars tend to treat Chinese Exclusion as an internal development in the unfolding national history of race and labor, we should see that this is also a pivotal moment in the history of China. The campaign in support of coolie labor is the first Chinese social movement to be articulated in nationalist terms. On the other hand, while the boycott is often described by historians of China as the first Chinese social movement to define itself in national terms, this relationship with the U.S. at the origin is generally seen as somewhat incidental and not central to the development as Chinese nationalism as a whole. In this chapter I have been arguing that we should recenter this relationship in considering the early twentieth-century development of both countries.