The 'Joiningest’
pp. 43-44 · Read in the full issue
folk in Hawaii
Sojourners and Settlers: The Chinese Migrants in Hawaii. By Clarence E. Click. Published by the Hawaii Chinese History Center and The University Press of Hawaii, Honolulu.
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Sus2O. Isbn 0 8248 0707 3.
The arrival of the 460-tonne barque Thetis in Honolulu har bour on January 3, 1852, marked the beginning of Hawaii’s modern social history.
Its cargo included 200 Chinese contract labourers, destined for the fields of the islands’ bur geoning sugar industry. They constituted the beginning of a migration of peoples from Asia, Europe, and the Pacific who
would irreversibly change the nature of Hawaii’s population and, more important, of its culture.
Forty-six thousand Chinese journeyed to Hawaii before its annexation to the United States in 1890. Most came to work in the sugar plantations. Others came as free labourers to work on rice farms developed by fellow Chinese migrants.
Chinese also cultivated coffee, bananas, and taro. And of those who signed up with the Caucasian-owned sugar plan tations, too few renewed their contracts. They sought instead the status of free labourers and the economic opportunities of the towns. Thus, the labour recruiters turned to Portugal and eventually Japan and the Philippines.
In Sojourners and Settlers: The Chinese Migrants in Hawaii, Clarence E. Click studies these 46 000 Chinese, their cohesion as an ethnic group, and their integration into the larger community of Hawaii. Admirably researched and thoroughly documented, Sojourners and Settlers offers an example of the scholarly thoroughness which is called for in the study of each of Hawaii’s major immigrant groups.
The Chinese triumphed over discrimination with weapons which their oppressors could appreciate: first, they made money. When the Hawaii legis lature or government ministers reproached the Chinese com munity, its leaders hired law yers, and went to court.
Second, they organised.
Click portrays a people who may qualify as one of the ‘joiningest’ groups of people in modern immigrant history.
They joined cemetery associ ations, Hoong Moon societies, volunteer fire departments, and the umbrella United Chinese Society. They joined district associations, village clubs, lineage-village clubs, dialect as sociations, surname societies, and craft guilds.
When the Chinese com munity or an individual Chinese faced a crisis, there existed network upon network of per sonal alliances to meet it. An indigent Chinese could find bed, board (and a safe place to smoke opium) at his Hoong Moon club house. A Chinese school seeking funds could de pend on the support of the community’s organisations.
Click’s major failing is stylistic. He is a sociologist, and
too often writes like one. That is not a compliment. The language of social science may rival Haaka or Punti in difficulty, and is as thoroughly boring to the uninitiated. When Click abandons it for a more straightforward narrative style, Sojourners and Settlers makes
good reading.
Dan Boy I an.
Chinese store-front in Hawaii: Part of a pattern of commerce, guilds, clubs and societies. The photograph is a detail from Rick Golfs recently-published Hawai'i Hawai'i, from the Uni versity Press of Hawaii.