The New Yorker:

The true cost of the immigration policy can be measured in the generations of Chinese Americans who were never born.

By Jane Hu

Between 1848 and 1852, more than twenty thousand Chinese migrants made their way to San Francisco in search of gold. The vast majority were men—rural peasants from Guangdong Province, situated on the southeast coast of China, near Hong Kong. They continued to leave for the United States throughout the nineteenth century, first working in gold mines, then taking up other forms of labor, including the construction of the transcontinental railroad. They came to be known as “bachelor men,” though many were bachelors in name only. Rarely able to send for their wives and often without the means to go home, they established ethnic enclaves, or “bachelor societies,” a number of which would develop into California’s earliest Chinatowns.

In 1875, the Page Act effectively barred Chinese women from entering the U.S., widening the gender gap even further. (It would begin to shrink after the 1946 War Brides Act, which allowed Chinese American veterans to bring over wives and children as non-quota exceptions.) The Page Act prefigured the near-total ban on Chinese immigration to the U.S. seven years later, with the Exclusion Act of 1882—the country’s first federal law to restrict a group on the basis of race. These laws maintained a gender imbalance of Chinese immigrants for more than a century, and their aftereffects persist to this day. The legacy of Chinese exclusion lies in the absence—the lost generations or broken bloodlines—of families that might otherwise have been. It’s impossible to calculate the full consequences of these laws. We can’t know how many bachelor men did eventually have children, especially after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fire destroyed local public birth records. But an absence of archives, of course, doesn’t entail an absence of history.

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