History
Prior to the 1840s few Chinese emigrated to the United States or Canada, although large numbers had left China, particularly Fujian and Canton, since the seventeenth century to seek their fortune in southeast Asia and Taiwan.
After settling in San Francisco and other California cities, Chinese workers faced hostility from their American peers who felt threatened by the Chinese who worked for lower wages. As labor unions and angered workers became more aggressive, many Chinese felt pressure to leave and go east, where they heard life would be less dangerous. As a result many Chinese immigrants moved to cities such as New York and Boston where today there are large enough populations to build communities known as "Chinatowns".
Many Chinese soon organized voluntary associations for support and protection. These focused around their originating district in China, family name, native dialect in the case of Hakka speakers, or sworn brotherhoods. Unfortunately, as Ko-lin Chin has asserted, many of these volunteer societies did not have the financial ability to fund community events or look after their members, and those that did tended to focus inward and provide help only to their own members. As a result, many tongs with little or no hereditary financial value had to either disband or operate activities such as gambling houses. This transformed them from benevolent associations to providers of illegal services. Notably, many of the illegal tong activities were legal in China, but not North America. The early Chinese populations in the United States and Canada were overwhelmingly male in nature, a situation that became worsened when sex-restrictive immigration laws were passed in 1882 in the USA and 1923 in Canada respectively. (see Chinese Exclusion Act and Chinese Immigration Act, 1923 For this reason tongs participated heavily in importing women from China both for marriage and to serve as prostitutes. A large percentage of the "tong wars"—disputes between the rapidly growing and powerful tongs—of the 19th and early 20th century often centered around these women. In the early years they employed "hatchet men" or boo how doy as hired killers to fight the bloody street battles that ensued over turf, business, and women.
Read more about this topic: Tong (organization)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It is true that this man was nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by extreme cunning and by a relentless tactical clairvoyance .... Hitler was history in its purest form.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“The history is always the same the product is always different and the history interests more than the product. More, that is, more. Yes. But if the product was not different the history which is the same would not be more interesting.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)