Heathens: Chinese Religion and American Exclusion

Kim Schultz: Welcome to Our Seven Neighbors season five. We are so happy you were here with us today. My name is Kim Schultz, and I'm the director of inter-religious engagement at Chicago Theological Seminary and producer of this podcast. Season five is titled Religion and Resistance in America, and it is hosted by Reza Aslan. And with me is none other than Reza Aslan. How are you today, Reza?

Reza Aslan: I'm doing great, Kim. Thanks.

Kim: Good to see you. Good to have you here. I'm looking forward to this conversation today.

Reza: Yeah, it's gonna be a good one.

Kim: So today, will you talk to Dr. Jonathan Lee, a scholar who specializes in history, religious studies, Asian studies, and specifically China studies.

Reza: Yeah. We often tell the story of Chinese immigration to America as a story about labor. Gold miners, railroad workers, laundrymen. And all of that is true, but it's obviously not the whole story because the men and women who came to America in the 19th century brought more than just labor. They brought their religion with them, their rituals, their festivals. And today's guest, Dr. Jonathan Lee, helps us see that history not as a kind of side note to American religion, but as one of its central chapters. In fact, his work traces the story of Chinese immigration to America from the Gamsan, the so - called Gold Mountain, to the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, from so - called Joss houses and temple networks to exclusion laws, massacres, court battles, and the rise of anti-Asian hate that goes all the way to today. So today we ask what happens when a nation that calls itself Christian marks another people not just as other, but as heathen?

And what survives when those people end up building a community anyway? Because the Chinese-American religious history reminds us that belonging is not something that's granted from above. It's built, defended, and made sacred from below.

Kim: So fascinating. We're listening. Take it away.

Reza: Dr. Jonathan Lee, thank you so much for joining us on this season of Our Seven Neighbors. It's a pleasure to have you.

Jonathan Lee: Oh, thank you for inviting me. I'm humbled to be here.

Reza: We've talked to a lot of experts about the different ways in which religious communities, minority religious communities have struggled and fought to achieve the rights that were already afforded to them by America's founding documents, but which they often had to fight for in order to actually achieve. And sometimes in these conversations, the community that often gets left out is the Chinese American community. And partly that, I think that has to do with the fact that we always think of the story of Chinese immigration to the United States solely through labor. Mm-hmm.

And rarely do we remember that these weren't just workers, they were families, they were communities, they were worshipers, people who came with a deeply embedded religious tradition. And so our conversation today is gonna be a little bit about that. I wanna trace the history of the Chinese immigrant experience from Gold Mountain to the railroads, the experience of exclusion and the way in which unlike a lot of other religious minorities in America who were excluded or made to feel different, the unique experience of the Chinese religious communities who were unquestionably labeled not just as other, but as heathens. So let's start there. You talk about in your book about the United States as really being shaped by white and Christian supremacies from the very, very beginning. And so if you could just lay the beginnings of this story out for our listeners. Let's start with the first major Chinese arrivals to the US in the 1840s and the '50s.

What do you think those immigrants kind of imagined when they thought about coming to America some hundred years or so after its founding?

Jonathan: Good question. A lot there. There's a lot there to unpack. But the first wave of Chinese migrants were in fact, I think, seeking opportunity. Internally in China, they were colonized by multiple European and even American forces and Japan, that was a rising global superpower and dominant power in East Asia. And there was famine, natural disasters, a weakening imperial centralized government. And the result of that were Chinese migrants looking for opportunity. And of course, the discovery of gold was that major kind of historians of immigration call push factor.m. A push factor in terms of pushing them out and then the discovery of gold and the opportunities of wealth was the pull factor, the variable that pulled them out of China.

But gold was discovered not just in California, but up in Alaska and also over in Australia. And I think for the most part, many came in search of gold. And this is where I think one of the labels that we have for the early first group as souljourners. They weren't necessarily someone who came with the intentions of settling. They came as sojourners to find gold and to go back to China to support their family. And for this reason, the majority of the first wave of migrants were male. Of course, some were married and had families and so they left their families or else they were unmarried with no family and they're just seeking opportunity. So they came for gold and then life happens, history unfolds. And what you have is by like the mid 19th century, you had two thirds of these early migrants not fitting that strict definition of a sojourner, but rather they were settlers.

They came and they settled. And so at the very beginning when they did come, the reception was relatively positive. There were depictions of them in the SF Chronicle at that time and other newspapers saying that these were celestials that were clean, that would one day become good American citizens. But then what you have and you have this pattern that's repeated time and again through American history during this period and even up until today is you have the scapegoating of them once they became an economic competitor. So they did become an economic competitor with white miners competing for gold. And so they passed a foreign miners tax that was a, you know, an extra tax on miners who were not eligible to become a naturalized citizen based on the 1790 Naturalization Act that, that granted it only to free white men. And so when they experienced exclusion in mining, that's when they go into other ventures and other areas of labor and that's when they went to work on the railroads.

And of course, this is something that we learn about at minimum in US history here. So they work on the railroads and they did good work. They were hard workers. And so the owners of the railroads were like, "Wow, we need more of them." And so there were recruiters sent out to get more over. They were paid for the same work that they did better, you know, and were more industrious and got more done. They were paid less. And so of course that built up like anti-Asian sentiments and anti-Asian or anti-Chinese prejudice and anti-Chinese sentiments. And so that just caused a backlash, right? And then eventually they started to exclude Chinese laborers from coming in. And ultimately that resulted in the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

Reza: Right, right. I, I wanna get to that act because I think it was such a touchstone in American history. You did bring up the Transcontinental Railroad and you rightly note that, you know, if there's anything that <laugh> Americans probably know about the Chinese immigrant experience, it has to do with the railroad. It is one of the great national myths, the idea of the Iron Horse binding the continent together. But of course, as you note, the labor behind that myth was overwhelmingly Chinese. And a couple of questions that I have for you. One, can you talk to us a little bit about the conditions that most of those Chinese workers were working under? And then also, if you could also tell us a little bit about the 1867 strike, because that is a moment that I think truly deserves to be remembered as part, not of Chinese history in America, but of the American labor history.

Jonathan: So the working conditions were unequal. I think the Chinese laborers were required to do some of the more dangerous tasks of mining and digging tunnels and handling explosives. And they were paid lower than the white workers. They were also working longer hours than the white workers. And it was that unequal treatment that would later lead to unrest and the strike.

Reza: Yeah. So tell us about the 1867 strike. What the demand and how did it actually change American labor history?

Jonathan: The strike by the Chinese railroad workers, several thousand of them, they demanded better wages or equal wage. They demanded better food, better physical living quarters as well. I think one of the significance of this strike is, and it's a perpetual kind of stereotype that is around today in various ways, right? Of this Asians as a model minority, but part of that model minority stereotype is based on this idea that Asians or Chinese in particular are just docile and they don't fight back. And I think what that strike and many other strikes that followed on plantations and on different farms in California and throughout the history is that it showed that the Chinese migrants at this period weren't quote unquote docile. And that they had a sense of agency and that they were willing to fight back and resist, right? So I think that, that's important to point out.

And not as a legacy of the strike, but as a kind of different narrative. Because they were such efficient workers for the railroads, right? They were in essence successful with their demand. But then at the same time, that then just resulted in a backlash of increased anti-Chinese kind of feelings against them.

Reza: Right. Right. It's funny because we do so often just think about the Chinese workers as workers, like as bodies on a work site. But of course, these were families and they carried with them this entire religious and cultural universe. Could you tell us a little bit about what Chinese spiritual life looked like in 19th century California?

Jonathan: They came and they did have religion with them. They came with their religious beliefs and with their religious practice. And during this period, they weren't necessarily a follower of like one particular kind of religion. So within the Chinese religious landscape and the Chinese American religious landscape, we have this idea of Chinese popular religion, which is a syncretism of folk and indigenous Chinese belief with aspects of Buddhism with elements of Confucianism and with Daoism as well. Though Confucianism and Taoism are like indigenous Chinese religious tradition. Buddhism was a foreign religion that was successful in China and then over time develop into what we call Chinese Buddhism. But they work together, right, to represent Chinese religiosity, Chinese faith, Chinese practices and the way the Chinese understand and view the world. And so during this period of the Chinese experience, the majority came and I think practiced what we call for better or worse, a diffused form of Chinese religion <laugh>, right?

'Cause it's not institutionalized. There's no Buddhist monasteries, confusion monasteries or Daoists. So it's diffused religion and the diffused religion are in their temples. So in a Chinese temple, you would have altars to Buddhist and barisatvas, Daoist deities. You would see elements of Confucian kind of principles and virtues in terms of the ancestral altars that they might have. And those were, I think, key to community life for the Chinese, especially in the areas where they were established and built and organized because much of this was, much of this were in areas that they were excluded from, right? What we refer to as Chinatowns. They were kept in segregated communities. So in these segregated communities that would later develop into Chinatowns and communities where they came and settled, the temple becomes a boarding house, a community school, a community kitchen, as well as a place of worship.

Reza: This is such an important conversation because as your scholarship has shown that the anti-Chinese exclusion that we often so, we so often cast as being specifically racial or as you've mentioned economic was fairly clearly also religious. I mean, we, as I mentioned at the beginning of this, you know, Chin- Chinese immigrants weren't just cast as other, they were cast as heathens. And I wonder if this is my own kind of rumination about this, that part of the reason why Chinese Americans were seen as such a unique threat to white Christian America has to do with the fact that unlike say Jews or Muslims or Mormons or even the indigenous communities, communities that we've talked about in this season of the podcast, there was something really profoundly unfamiliar about Chinese religions, far more so than the other religious minorities that Americans were also very exclusionary towards, but uniquely so when it came to Chinese religions.

Why do you think that was? What was it so, that was so specifically threatening about Chinese temples, Chinese rituals, ideas of ancestor veneration, ideas of popular religion, the sort of polytheistic nature of Chinese spirituality? What was it that made it so uniquely threatening to white Christian America, do you think?

Jonathan: I don't know if it was uniquely something Chinese because much of the elements and dimensions of Chinese religion that you cited, if we looked into this and explored it, are similar to the indigenous religions, right? Okay. In terms of ancestral generation or rituals, polytheism. I think where we need to really look, and there's a lot of work on this, is really at the intersection of race and religion. And so it's not just about the expression of white supremacy, but the expression of white and Christian supremacy. And in this case, how that relates to citizenship and belonging in the United States. So after the Civil War, there was a huge debate, right, about citizenship. And it was after the Civil War that, that people of African descent were included in, were given the right to become naturalized citizens as well. And so once you start expanding who can naturalize, right?

Then the question is who else can become naturalized? But in responding to the question, who else can have a right to nationalization? The Chinese were kept out of that right. And the arguments made were both racial in terms of the kind of racial construction of the Chinese as non-white, but then also religious in terms of pointing out that they are heathens, just like the indigenous are heathens. But then people making that argument, then they encounter their own kind of contradictions. Well, if they are heathens, <laugh> you know, can they be converted? We're converting Native Americans, right? We're cultural and biological genocide, forced conversion. We're saving their souls. So if they can become Christian, why can't the Chinese become Christian, right? And so the variable that is not brought into this discussion of race and religion is economic competition. And so, and the exclusion was due to economic competition and it continued to be economic competition, not just for the Chinese, but for all the other Asian migrants that follow the Chinese that were brought in to replace the Chinese labor, like replace Chinese cheap labor.

The Japanese were brought in to replace Chinese cheap labor on the plantation. And then once the Japanese started to demand <laugh> better pay, better living condition and equal treatment to white workers, they were excluded, right? And then they brought in Koreans and then South Asians, right? And then ultimately the Filipinos during this first wave of Asian migration, first period of Asian migration. And it was economic competition through and through that coupled with white and Christian supremacy defined the Chinese as non-white and left them out of the right to be nationalized and to belong in the US.

Reza: This is a great transition to the Chinese Exclusion Act, which you'd already mentioned. I think when it comes to American history, what's extraordinary about this act is that it's really the first restrictive federal immigration law, right? It's the first law that is designed to bar a specific ethnic group from America. And frankly, the doctrines that that law represents still shape a lot of America's immigration policy. Can you talk a little bit about what the Chinese exclusion case reveals about the way in which Americans thought about and treated Chinese immigrants as a group that sort of falls permanently outside the circle of American belonging?

Jonathan: Yeah, it reveals a lot. And I think if anything, what it should reveal for us is this idea of race as a social, historical, political construction, right? So one thing that I have argued was that before the first wave of Chinese migrants, there was no conception, no kind of understanding or vocabulary for quote unquote the Chinese race, right, in our politics or in our mainstream popular kind of discourse in the United States. And with the migration of the Chinese and of course economic competition and then the kind of simultaneous kind of rise of social prejudice with there was then the social, historical, economic, political construction of the Chinese race. And the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is the definition of what the Chinese race is, which is that it's not white <laugh> right? And so, and, and that because it's not white and based on the 1790 Naturalization Act, they are not eligible to become a citizen.

So if they're not eligible to become citizens, then they can be excluded, right? But who's pushing that exclusion? It was white labor. It was white labor union. <laugh> It was white labor leaders and white politicians that wanted to win election by parroting and voicing anti-Chinese kind of messaging that they're here to steal our jobs, which we hear today. We hear it in the 1980s about Mexicans. We heard it last year during the presidential election about Somali refugees. And so it's a kind of racist weapon that is used time and time again. And there's many examples of this in our history.

Reza: Obviously we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about the fact that some of this rhetoric, this language of exclusion, religiously polarizing language of heathens corrupting a Christian country, these laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act, that these had very real life consequences. They led directly to profound acts of violence against Chinese communities, acts of massacre, acts of terror. And those things are, I think, very important for us to keep at the front of our minds because sometimes in these conversations it, we start to get a little too philosophical, right? We start to talk about trends and ideas and otherization without remembering that these things had very real life consequences. And especially when it comes to the law, one of the patterns that we've noticed a lot in these conversations that we've been having is that the same law that so often is used to exclude religious minority communities in the United States then used by those minorities to fight back and to claim for themselves through blood, sweat and tears, the rights that they should have been given freely anyway.

Bottom line is this, that these communities begin to create these legal principles. They use the law that was being employed to suppress them to start to fight back, to start demanding things like equal protection, to demand things like birthright citizenship as you say. And then really this story goes all the way to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which utterly transforms Chinese American religious life. So if you could just talk to us a little bit about the ways in which these communities, I know you mentioned it already, but the ways in which Chinese communities, particularly once they start getting into that second generation, begin to seize for themselves, demand the rights that should have been theirs by birth.

Jonathan: Well, first, I think I wanna emphasize the point that you made about the real life material consequences of all of these anti-Chinese kind of legislation and kind of mainstream anti-Chinese prejudice and racism is it was a very violent period. So there was a period between 1882 and the end of World War II, or maybe up to World War II, right? Known as the exclusion period. And that period really saw a massive transformation of the kind of Chinese landscape in the United States. So before that, as you can imagine, there were a Chinese settlement from Baja, California all the way up to Alaska, right? And in every rural kind of community, there was a Chinese quarter or a Chinese alley, quote unquote, a Chinatown. Every single gold mining town had a Chinatown. A logging settlement or town had a Chinatown, right? And so once you stop Chinese immigration, what happened in many of these towns, right, where you had targeted massacres, lynchings, mass violence.

And at that time, it was the need and desire to drive the Chinese out of their community because they were seen as heathen as un-American. And so all of these towns, quote unquote, all of these Chinatowns, they eventually just disappeared. And what you have is you have the kind of material evidence of them being there, which is buildings that might have some Chinese characters or Chinese kind of motifs, right? Or names of Chinese, uh, associations or restaurants and temples. And then, and so they were driven out during this period and of all these smaller communities. And where they went was they went to areas where there were more of them. There was like a safety in number, right? So they would go to San Francisco, they would go to Oakland and they would go to Sacramento. And those three areas became the bigger Chinatowns, right, that survived from this period.

And so in many, I think the primary challenge was that they're entitled to equal protection because they are American, right? I think winning in the courts was a primary way for them to resist. That, the thing that led to the transformational kind of change though was World War II because during World War II, the US and China were allies, right? And World War II, I think, not just for the Chinese American community, but for the indigenous, Mexican, blacks and others, specifically Japanese American community during this period, it was a big moment for the world to really see and witness US hypocrisy, right? And it's something that's still, I think, around today where, you know, here's the war we're fighting fascism, dictatorships in the name of democracy, but yet a black soldier or Chinese soldier or a Navajo soldier coming back, they cannot sit at a counter, they have to use the back door, right?

And then for many of them, right, especially if they were in Europe during this period, they were able to go into a restaurant and be served well and treated well with dignity. So it was a big wake up call.

Reza: Yeah. I think it's such a remarkable story about the ways in which through sacred space, temples, cultures, these sort of public rituals, Chinese religion has become so much a part of the American religious landscape. We're obviously decades and decades removed from the Chinese Exclusion Act. That doesn't mean that, especially when it comes to religion and spirituality, Americans have fully embraced Chinese Americans, but we are in a different world now. And yet, as we learned post - COVID, right, that a surge of anti-Asian violence can very quickly become part of the everyday life of Chinese people. Uh, again, that this sort of current revival of Christian nationalism that has become so visible in our politics can... Just as easily result in the same kind of violence and exclusion that we saw in our history. And so just to kind of close up our conversation here, I wonder when you look at the role of Chinese Americans and Asian American religious life in the United States now, what do you feel has changed and what do you think has stayed the same?

Jonathan: There's so many like angles from which to answer. I think one, I think we have to still accept and be aware that white and Christian sup- supremacy is still at play and around, right? We see this in challenges to Asian American communities attempting to build sacred religious sites where they use coded racism in terms of traffic and noise concern to express their nimbyism. Don't build this in our neighborhood, right? Because it's just too Asian looking in terms of its architecture. I mean, this happened in all places at Berkeley, right?

Kim: Yeah.

Jonathan: You know, I used to live in Berkeley a block away from the very popular Thai Buddhist temple and they were over the years buying up lots around their little temple in order to build a grander, bigger Thai temple and community center. And the architecture was very Thai inspired, right? And you literally had people there that were against it and they were like white liberals <laugh> right? And they cited noise and traffic as the reasons you had in Mountain View, California and this was documented by others, Burmese Buddhist temples attempting to be built and citing noise. But eventually through concessions, they, they get their permits and they build their temples, right? But the fact that there is a challenge to them doing it, I think speaks to the white and Christian kind of supremacist forces that Asian religious communities encounter. The second thing that I think we need to explore in this one, and you're probably aware of this as well, Asian religion post-Vietnam War became very popular with the Beatles, people turning east for spiritual enlightenment, spiritual growth.

I mean, yoga and the popularization of yoga over the last three decade, I think, you know, is a legacy of that as well. And so what you have in terms of these kind of spiritual spaces is you have a kind of growing dichotomy between convert non-Asian practitioners and the Asian practitioners. And then the language by academics especially, right? Researching this is to use kind of racialized language to describe say the white convert as being more interested in the philosophy of Buddhism or Daoism or Confucianism that they are practicing a more elite form of these religion that are stripped of the rituals, right? And the other elements that are associated with the practice and then to describe these other communities as the ethnic communities <laugh>, right? As if ethnic then becomes a negative. It creates a kind of landscape in which we will continue, I think, to see anti-Chinese prejudice being produced, expressed and perpetuated.

Reza: Well, if nothing else, I think what this history reminds us is that belonging is not a thing that's granted from above. It's something that's built. It's something that's defended. It's something that is seized from below. And so I thank you so much for giving us a primer of the Chinese American religious history and we are grateful to have your voice as part of the podcast this season. Thank you, Dr. Lee.

Jonathan: Great. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Kim: And there you have it. Another great discussion with Reza and our special guest this week, Dr. Lee. Learn more about Dr. Lee and all of our guests at our7neighbors.com. Thanks for joining us. Tune in next time. We look forward to having you back. Learn more about CTS at ctschicago.edu. Take care and take care of each other. See you next time.