those wages]? Do they lay up money? Do they accumulate?
DUFFIELD: Hardly. You may find a few in the washing business here who may accumulate a little money, but gambling is such an inveterate passion with them that it nearly all goes that way. Very rarely will you find any of them who can raise any considerable amount of money …
BROOKS: Then the laboring class, according to your idea, do not send much money out of the country.
DUFFIELD: I do not think they do.28
The matter-of-factness of his answers conceals the radicalness of their content. Duffield’s statements bluntly, and seemingly unintentionally, upend the reigning historical understanding of anti-Chinese sentiment—as motivated largely by the “parasitic” nature of Chinese sojourners whose wages were whisked away back to China—that has defined our current understanding of the “yellow peril” and its relation to the model minority. Duffield’s comments, in short, undercut one of the most entrenched assumptions about nineteenth-century Chinese labor and immigration. Here, Chinese American gamblers are cast not as inscrutable, scheming parasites but as victims of their own violent passions and, further, as the hosts for unscrupulous intra-ethnic parasites who bleed them of their money. Stewart Culin, whose 1891 book The Gambling Games of the Chinese in America reveals both significant research knowledge and sympathy for Chinese immigrants and the “vulgar prejudice” leveled against them, underscored Duffield’s claims in observing that significant gambling losses were regularly incurred by Chinese laborers, most of whom, “from their youth and lack of money, if for no other reason, were quite unaccustomed to hazard their earnings in the manner that is almost universal among the Chinese in the United States effectively.”29 Becoming easy marks for the gambling house proprietors—who, in Culin’s account, were the only ones who “reap the benefit” of Chinese labor and, as true sojourners, “return with competencies to China”—these poor saps were “compelled to stay on far beyond the time they would otherwise remain in this country,” thus lending “permanency to their settlements.”30
The Chinese American exclusion debates showcase the capaciousness and flexibility of a ludo-Orientalist rhetoric that is capable of at once buttressing and critiquing competing arguments. As gambling could be used to explode the sojourner myth, so it was also used by other “experts” to counter the foundational myth that the majority of immigrants were coolies: thus, as Giles Gray, an attorney and surveyor of the Port of San Francisco pointed out, not only had his twenty years of dealing with court cases involving Chinese immigrants convinced him, “most positively, that the Chinese do not come here slaves to any person nor to any company”; the very fact of their gambling provided the most indisputable proof of it. For “if they were all slaves,” Gray argued, then “their masters would hardly allow them to spend their earnings in gambling, as many now do.” The very “voluntariness” of gameplay, which Huizinga and Caillois identified as the ludic’s most essential characteristic, here becomes a means of asserting the non-coerced status of Chinese labor.
Gambling allowed both sides of the exclusion debate to discuss work and play not only as cause and effect, but as a two sides of the same racial character trait. For exclusionists, this meant linking, as one witness put it in a separate congressional inquiry, the idea of the Chinese as both “cheap labor” and “cheap men.” In arguing that “the Chinaman could live longer without food than without lying or cheating,”31 exclusionists implied that their “cheapness” in a ludic sense—of playing “dishonorably”—was the psychological analogue to the bland and meager rice that made up their diet and ensured their unfair competition against those who “lived on beef.”32
“The Heathen Chinee”
For all their adaptability, gaming tropes and allegories often prove to be as risky as games of chance themselves; the very flexibility of meaning and possibility that gaming allows means the gap between intention and interpretation is significant. The same game can look very different from the perspective of one player to another, or, in the case of “The Heathen Chinee,” author and reader. In September 1870, a largely unknown American writer named Bret Harte penned a poem that became, nearly overnight, not only “one of the most popular poems ever published” but, by many accounts, did more than “any other writer” had to shape “the popular conception of the Chinese” in the United States during the period.33 Originally titled “Plain Language from Truthful James,” the poem was soon circulating as the more familiar “The Heathen Chinee.” It dramatizes a game of euchre34 played between the eponymous Irish American narrator, his compatriot Bill Nye (no apparent relation to the scientist), and a Chinese immigrant named Ah Sin. “Truthful James,” while initially “grieve[d]” upon discovering Bill’s intent to cheat the “childlike and bland” Ah Sin, is soon consumed by a more “frightful” revelation: Ah Sin is an even more skillful cheat than Bill, ultimately trouncing the two Irish cardsharps at a game he initially professed not “to understand.” In response, an outraged Bill lets loose an exceptionally strange war cry—“We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor”—and falls on Ah Sin, revealing “twenty-four jacks” concealed in the latter’s voluminous sleeves and, staining his long fingernails, the wax he had been using to mark cards.35
Within days the poem had been reprinted in dozens of newspapers and magazines, and soon emerged as a virtual motto for anti-Chinese labor organizations—adapted into speeches, read before meetings, and even presented on the floor of Congress—all despite Harte’s emphatic protests that the poem was intended to be a “satiric attack on race prejudice,” not an endorsement of it. Although contemporary scholars have echoed Harte’s own protestations, they have mainly attributed the poem’s “misappropriation” by its intended targets to the “ambiguity” of the work itself, comparing it to a Rorschach test, in which one could see any pattern, and could thus put it toward any purpose.36 The assumption, then, has been that the poem’s obliqueness was largely a product of its genre and thus, like all satires, fully reliant on the reader to enact an ironic reading rather than a literal one; that it contributed to an especially hostile and charged debate topic simply compounded the likelihood of it being read as anti-Chinese. Yet the irony of the anti-Chinese movement co-opting Harte’s poem lay less in their misreading than in Harte himself unintentionally giving rhyme and reason to the conflation of work and play that had already been implicit in the movement itself. Harte’s poem became the perfect narrative instrument for translating Chinese labor from economic virtue to moral vice, for seeing it as not simply “cheap” but as a form of “cheating.”
Figure 1.1. Illustrated versions of “The Heathen Chinee,” often vividly depicting the violence visited on Ah Sin, were common. Illustration by Joseph Hull. “The Heathen Chinee,” unauthorized printing, Chicago Western News Company, 1870.
Although one can easily read Bill Nye’s outburst about being “ruined by Chinese cheap labor” as a Freudian slip, revealing his desire to work out within the magic circle of the card table the violent frustrations he had long wished to physically unleash beyond it, Nye’s semantic conflation of Ah Sin’s gaming habits and labor practices was, as we have seen, also giving voice to a long-developing intimacy between “cheap” labor and “cheap” play. The poem allowed exclusionists to frame the Chinese laborer as a cheat by reframing labor itself as a different sort of game: one guided less by the rules and logic of what Roger Caillois called agon (competition) or the “economic rationality” of supply and demand, and instead by alea (chance) and the abstract virtues of honor and absolute, instantaneous justice.
To cheat at a game is to transform honesty from a fact to an illusion: indeed, what appears most honest becomes most suspect, and gives the game much of its dynamic excitement, as with bluffing in poker. So, too, did exclusionists use Harte’s poem to render Chinese honest labor only a bluff, a deliberate deception for the race’s actual “dark ways.” The metaphor of a chance-based card game had further rhetorical and ideological uses, many of which Harte likely did not even
