THE CHINESE WALL
This piece was created by Friedrich Graetz in approximately 1882. This drawing shows people of countless nationalities including African American and Italian. These people are then shown to be working together to construct a wall meant to keep the Chinese out of America. However, right behind the wall that is being built, you can see another wall being brought down. This wall was a wall built by China accepting trade with American merchants. If you look closer at the drawing you will notice words on the bricks. Some of these words are “jealousy”, “un-American”, “competition”, and “laws against race”[1]. This drawing refers to several monumental historical events that occurred at the time that will be discussed in the following paragraph.
When this drawing was published in 1882, an act called the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by the United States. This act made it so that Chinese laborers were no longer permitted to enter America for a term of ten years. This act was able to be passed because at the time there was a lot of discrimination against people who came from China. With that being said, the Chinese people (who were large in quantity) were very new to the American culture. The people who already resided in America hated the fact that all these new immigrants were coming into America and believed that they were taking away job opportunities. However, this was far from the truth as the Chinese workers mainly took jobs that the American citizens did not originally want[2].
The lives of the Chinese migrants were nothing to be jealous about. Many of these workers struggled to find an identity. Many came into the country without any knowledge of the language let alone the culture. However, they worked very hard to quickly become accustomed to the environment. Even then, they were still treated differently by people native to America. They started to doubt everything that was out of their hands. Furthermore, the repercussions of racial discrimination were taking a toll on young Asian Americans. Even though they felt American and became accustomed to the culture, they were still treated as though they do not belong in America[3]. Although their personal lives were tough, their work lives were not any better. Many Americans believed that the Chinese were stealing their jobs which is what began the anti-Chinese movement, to begin with. The violence would spread from one town to another and often would forcefully remove Chinese migrants from their places of work[4]. Overall, this painting is to show how the hatred for Chinese migrants grew so large that all other nationalities worked together to build a wall stopping the Chinese from entering America
REFERENCES
[1] Graetz, F., 1882, Artist. The anti-Chinese wall–The American wall goes up as the Chinese original goes down / F. Grätz. United States China, 1882. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/96500349/.
[2] Shi, David Emory. 2019. America: A Narrative History, brief 11th edition, volume 2, ISBN 978-0-393-66897-1. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. .
[3] Wei, William. The Asian American Movement. Temple University Press, 1993. ProjectMUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/9523.
[4] Chung, Sue Fawn. Chinese in the Woods: Logging and Lumbering in the American West. University of Illinois Press, 2015. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/42047.