A Heathen Appeal | Under Gods

(1880)
A HEATHEN APPEAL

Kathryn Gin Lum tells the story of Wong Chin Foo, author of “Why Am I a Heathen?” and self-described First Confucian missionary to the US, through his long-running antagonism with anti-Chinese labor leader Denis Kearney, in the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The slight man leaned over his desk on Chatham Street, now Park Row, in New York City. Brow furrowed, he drew occasional puffs from a cigar as he wrote. The July sun streamed through the window as he wiped perspiration off his forehead. Two years ago he had cut his queue, the long braid that Manchu rulers had imposed on Han Chinese men, and grown out the front part of his hair, previously shaved. Now, he sported cropped black hair in a western ‘do that matched his western clothes. On hot days, he relished the air on his neck.

The man, a Chinese immigrant, public speaker, and newspaperman named Wong Chin Foo, was thinking carefully about how to respond to a snub from Irish labor leader Denis Kearney. Kearney was in town to give a speech. He’d become notorious for his rabble-rousing harangues, invariably ending with the catchphrase, “The Chinese must go.” Kearney took proud credit for passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act a year earlier, in 1882.

But for Wong, Kearney was the one who had to go. How were the Irish any different from the Chinese? They, too, were recent immigrants, many of whom had come to the US to work. The Chinese might be “heathens,” but the Irish were Catholics, and Wong knew that to America’s Anglo-Protestant establishment, that was just as bad, if not worse. Actually, Wong thought that the Irish were far beneath the Chinese. China was thousands of years old and home to hundreds of millions of people, an empire, he had written, “superior in social administration and social order” to even the United States. This was in no small part due to the sage teachings of Confucius, which Wong aimed to spread to Americans. And the Irish? Why, they were “the most dependent and ill-treated nation of serfs ever deprived of its liberties.” Wong still held out hope that the Chinese Exclusion Act might be repealed; that if he could only expose Kearney for the ignorant demagogue that he was, he might win back some of the public sentiment that Kearney had swayed. So when he heard that Kearney was in town, Wong had sent his clerk, Ah Koon, to invite him to a public debate. Wong hadn’t held back in his invitation to Kearney, closing with the memorable line: “if you fail to offer me a chance to combat the puerile vituperation you intend to heap on my people, I shall post you as an empty bladder, afraid of being punctured and relieved of the fetid wind it contains.”

Now, Ah Koon had brought back Kearney’s angry reply. “I shall not recognize Mr. Wong,” he fumed. “He writes like a blackguard. When he writes like a gentleman I shall answer him like a gentleman. But he cannot write English, anyhow.”

Wong was incensed. While he’d dictated the earlier invitation to Ah Koon, this time, Wong took pen to paper himself. Now, he didn’t just challenge Kearney to a debate: he upped the ante. “The law against challenging to a duel protects you from being called to account elsewhere for your insults to my people, but should it be possible for you to waive that protection, I should not shrink from meeting you with your own weapons,” he scribbled, furiously. But how to close this letter? It would be hard to top the “empty bladder” line from his initial volley.

Wong took a deep puff from his cigar. Ah Koon was waiting, and so were reporters from the American papers, always eager for a story.

Ah! He had it.

He signed: “Contemptuously, Wong Chin Foo.”

Wong Chin Foo

Unidentified Artist
from a photograph by George Gardner Rockwood

Harper's Weekly
(26 May 1877)

By the time this exchange took place, Wong had already made a name for himself as a self-proclaimed Confucian missionary to the United States, traveling the lecture circuit to tell white Americans how superior Confucianism was to the Christianity they professed. His speeches were regularly reported on by the national press and reprinted with great interest in local papers from Chicago to Arkansas, as if he were the first Confucian to come to these shores.

But of course, he wasn’t. By the time Wong first came to the States as a twenty-year old in 1867, Chinese immigrants had already been coming to the US for decades by the tens of thousands: first to prospect for gold, and then to work on the railroads. Some 20,000 Chinese people had come between 1848 and 1852; by the time Wong arrived, that number had risen by roughly threefold.

These immigrants, mostly men from the Pearl River Delta region of southern China, brought their gods with them: deities like Guan Di or Guan Gong, the god of war and brotherhood; Tian Hou, the Empress of Heaven and goddess of the sea; Guanyin, a Buddhist bodhisattva believed to be a patron of seafarers and of the sick and desperate; and Suijing Bo, a deified military general known as the “Pacifying Duke.” Though separated from their own ancestors by thousands of miles, migrants also continued traditional rituals for their deceased, purchasing paper money and incense to burn, and offering sacrifices of food and drink. For these migrants, “Daoism,” “Buddhism,” and “Confucianism” were not separate religions with clearly drawn boundaries between them. They were instead a fluid set of practices mixed with folk beliefs that provided migrants with an anchor to the home they’d left behind—the home to which the vast majority wished to return.

By the time Wong came to the States, these earlier migrants had already established temples not only in cities but also in mountainous forests and along the coast to worship their deities and perform rites for their ancestors. They had constructed Chinatowns where they carried out festive celebrations for the Lunar New Year and processions to honor their dead. In some cases they’d brought brightly colored carved or ceramic deities with them, but when those couldn’t be procured or when they were lost or destroyed, they turned to local soil and clay to make their own.

The Won Lin Temple

Exterior, at the Joss House State Historic Park Weaverville, California

photograph by Frank Schulenburg

CC BY-SA 4.0

One missionary happened on such a scene at Won Lin Temple in Weaverville, California. First constructed around 1855, the temple had already been rebuilt once when it burned down in 1873. Unfazed, the local Chinese population had sent for an elderly artist from San Francisco, who, in the words of the missionary, “had gone to the side of a hill nearby and taken his pick of the clay of the soil of this Christian land of ours and made it into three big Chinese gods and now here they were almost ready to be worshipped, baking hard in that bright morning sun of our Christian land.”

The missionary’s repetition of “our Christian land” betrayed what he really felt: how dare these “heathens” make idols out of American soil? To the missionaries, “America” and “Christian land” were, or at least should be, synonymous. Missionaries had inherited and perpetuated lore about America as “God’s new Israel,” a promised land given to their forebears just as God had given the Israelites the land of the unbelieving Canaanites. As much as they criticized the Chinese for their ancestor worship, Christian missionaries uplifted their own ancestors as the reason for their claim to the land. In their eyes, their ancestors—those pious Puritans—had subdued the “wilderness” and the “heathen” inhabitants on it, and so their descendants had an obligation to do the same as they moved from east to west.

As much as they believed the land to be the inheritance of godly Christians, missionaries also—at least initially—didn’t necessarily think those Christians had to be white. In fact, when the Chinese began arriving in greater numbers in the mid-nineteenth century, they welcomed them. For if America was “Gold Mountain” to the Chinese, China was a golden opportunity for American missionaries, too: an ancient land full of millions of souls to be won for Christ. Yet it was so far away, so hard to get to, and its people so entrenched in “heathenism.” Here was their chance to convert the “heathen” on American shores. Unmoored from their temples, their ancestors’ bones, and their superstitions, and situated in the midst of a Christian people, Chinese immigrants would be easier to reach from this position of strength. And then, once these migrants converted, they could return to China to spread the word there, ushering in the conversion of the vast Chinese empire and jumpstarting the salvation of the world. Or so the missionaries hoped. But lest they put all their eggs in one basket, they took a two-pronged approach. Some set off for California and the West Coast to evangelize the Chinese living there; others continued to be posted to China.

“You send your missionaries to us and we listen to them. Is it unfair for me to ask them to hear what we have to say? They say that we, heathens, are to be eternally damned, no matter how honest, moral and sincere we may be. We think Christians will be damned if they behave like very wicked Buddhists”

Wong Chin Foo himself had been converted in China by Southern Baptist missionaries, Sallie and Landrum Holmes, who’d arrived in his home province of Shandong in 1859. Just two years after their arrival, they took in the young teenager at the bequest of his father who, once well-to-do, had been reduced to poverty. Landrum was murdered soon after, but under Sallie’s tutelage, Wong learned English and learned about Christianity. In 1867 he was baptized in Dengzhou, and later that same year, he accompanied Sallie as she returned to the US.

There, he spent a few years studying: first at Columbian College Preparatory School in Washington, DC and then at Lewisburg Academy, now Bucknell University, in Pennsylvania. Still a baptized member of the church, he began to give lectures on Chinese culture to raise money for his education. He found interested audiences for his lectures in places ranging from the Washington, DC area, to Salem, Massachusetts, to Charleston, South Carolina. The Chinese population was much smaller in these eastern cities than it was on the West Coast, and his lectures piqued curiosity.

By 1870, Wong had returned to China, where he married and had a son, and took a job as an interpreter in the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Soon, though, Wong ran afoul of the Qing government for suspected revolutionary activity. Back in China, he also began to question the foreign faith to which he’d converted, to the point that he was excommunicated from the Shanghai Baptist Church sometime in 1871 or 1872. In 1873, he came back to the US, and by 1874, he was back on the lecture circuit: this time not as a missionary’s convert, but as a Chinese missionary to white Americans, seeking to convince them of the superiority of Confucianism to the hypocritical Christianity he believed them to practice.

This Christianity, he claimed, was characterized by outward displays of piety and charity that masked deep selfishness, money-grubbing tendencies, and an unjust ethical system where a last-minute conversion could save the worst of men, providing little incentive for good behavior in the here-and-now. As he explained it in an 1877 New York Herald blurb for one of his lectures, “You send your missionaries to us and we listen to them. Is it unfair for me to ask them to hear what we have to say? They say that we, heathens, are to be eternally damned, no matter how honest, moral and sincere we may be. We think Christians will be damned if they behave like very wicked Buddhists, and on Monday night I will tell the reason why.”

That “great Divine law which Christians and heathen alike hold, but which the Christians ignore. This is what keeps me the heathen I am! And I earnestly invite the Christians of America to come to Confucius.”

Unlike the Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist blend practiced by his compatriots on the West Coast, the Confucianism Wong presented to his audiences was not tied with the worship of deities whom, Wong knew, white Americans mocked as false idols. As a former Christian convert raised by missionaries, he knew that trying to convert Americans to the worship of Guan Gong and Guanyin wasn’t likely to be a winning proposition. He himself looked down on the folk beliefs and practices of the Chinese immigrants who came to work on the mines and railroads. Though his family had fallen on hard times, they had originally been well-to-do Mandarin-speaking Northerners, unlike the mostly Cantonese-speaking men from the south, who were less educated and less originally prosperous.

The Cantonese migrants by and large saw America as a temporary post, a place to make some money before returning to China for good. Many kept to themselves, learned minimal English, and didn’t aspire to citizenship, unlike Wong, who became a US citizen just a year after returning to the US from China, at a time when naturalization for Chinese immigrants was both unusual and a lengthy process. Wong fudged his birthdate in order to take advantage of an exception for minors, and was declared a citizen on the same day he filed his Declaration of Intent.

While Wong may have rejected Christianity, he adamantly did not reject Americanness. He believed in the US’s political experiment and appreciated its founding documents. Making the case for other western educated immigrants like himself who shared his elitist views, Wong would write, on behalf of the Chinese Equal Rights League in 1897, that “we have absolutely no sympathy for those of our countrymen who persist in their own civilization and refuse to become Americanized.” Despite having a family in China, Wong was determined to make the US his home, and he was determined to make it accept others like him: Chinese who wanted to become Chinese American.

Wong understood that one of the primary ways the Chinese were smeared as incompatible with American life was their so-called heathenness. Seeing that the Chinese brought their deities with them and were not as easily converted as had once been hoped, some of their former supporters had turned against them. “Where Americans have converted one Chinaman to Christianity, the Chinese… have converted ten Americans to real heathenism,” the Reverend S. V. Blakeslee griped. Anti-Chinese demagogues like Blakeslee claimed that the Chinese spread disease and immorality, and that they were coming to the US so quickly that they threatened to heathenize Americans faster than Americans could Christianize them.

Where some immigrants who sought belonging thought that conversion to Christianity might offer a path in, Wong—having tried that and rejected it—went for a different approach. In an 1887 article that he published in the North American Review, a literary magazine with a circulation of over 75,000 by 1890, Wong presented the arguments he’d been honing on the lecture circuit. He defended Chinese “heathenism” by presenting it not as “superstitious” folk beliefs that white Americans viewed with suspicion and disgust, but as a highly evolved and ethical “philosophical religion” rooted in Confucian precepts. Dubbing Confucius “our great Reasoner,” he explained that Confucianism had “succeeded in making society better and its government more protective,” undergirding China’s stability and longevity. Explaining “Why I Am a Heathen,” Wong presented Confucianism as a foil to a Christianity that failed to observe the golden rule, that “great Divine law which Christians and heathen alike hold, but which the Christians ignore. This is what keeps me the heathen I am! And I earnestly invite the Christians of America to come to Confucius.”

Not only did Christians ignore the golden rule, Wong said, they let people into heaven who maltreated their neighbors, as long as they had a deathbed conversion. “I began to think of my own prospects on the other side of Jordan,” Wong wrote. “Suppose Dennis [sic] Kearney, the California sand-lotter, should slip in and meet me there, would he not be likely to forget his heavenly songs, and howl once more: ‘The Chinese must go!’ and organize a heavenly crusade to have me and others immediately cast out into the other place?” To Wong, a religion that allowed one as evil as Kearney to reap the rewards of heaven was fundamentally twisted.

Front Cover

Appeal of the Chinese Equal Rights League of the People of the United States for Equality of Manhood
published by the Chinese Equal Rights League (1892)

Patricia D. Klingenstein Library
The New York Historical Society

Wong and Kearney would finally meet face to face in October 1887, some four years after Wong’s initial volley to Kearney, and a couple months after publication of Wong’s piece in the North American Review. Kearney had steadfastly refused Wong’s earlier invitation, so Wong had gone to the press to ensure that his invitation, Kearney’s angry reply, and Wong’s contemptuous handwritten response, all got a broad public airing.

This time, Kearney was back in town to “gin up support for a new bill pending before Congress aimed at plugging loopholes that remained after passage of the Exclusion Act.” The New York World saw his visit as a chance to stir up a story, asking him and Wong to a debate at their offices. By the late 1880s, Kearney’s fifteen minutes of fame were firmly over. East Coast papers largely considered him an also-ran. Accepting the New York World’s invitation was a chance to gain back some publicity.

They met at the newspaper’s offices, with reporters from various other papers present to witness and weigh in on their confrontation. Though the same age, the men were of different heights and builds, with Kearney towering over Wong.

The men tussled over Wong’s citizenship status. When Wong called the Constitution’s framers “our fathers,” Kearney “snorted violently and shoved back his chair from anything like proximity to Wong’s.” “Your forefathers,” he scoffed, “sure, what had your forefathers to do with it? Nothing at all. You can’t call the framers of the constitution your forefathers. Hah!”

Wong retorted, with a “wrathful” but “cool” smile, “I call them my forefathers, because politically they were.”

Kearney would have none of it. “Under the law,” he said, “Chinamen couldn’t possibly become American citizens.”

“That law is unconstitutional,” argued Wong. “Our Constitution provides that any man may become an American citizen regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

“O ho!” Kearney came back. “That applies only to the black man.”

This back-and-forth reveals Wong’s and Kearney’s conflicting visions of what it meant to be American and who got to stake a claim to that identity. For Kearney, an immigrant as much as Wong, American citizenship was racial, and the only people who could claim it were white or Black. For Wong, the US political experiment was open to all, and he showed how much he’d bought into it by calling the Constitution’s framers his “forefathers.” It’s not a stretch to think that he may have seen the freethinking founding fathers along the lines of his own country’s “great Reasoner,” Confucius. Where people like the Weaverville missionary believed America to be “our Christian land,” Wong articulated an American identity based on reason and free from Christianity.

Kearney then “launched into a torrid description of the big Chinese procession he saw in San Francisco, where thousands of men marched behind a fat, greasy joss [idol], to whom they offered ‘baked snails, roast rats, cats, dogs and diseased pork.’” Tapping into old stereotypes of Chinese men as idol worshippers, Kearney claimed that the Chinese were “a peculiar people.” “They might stay here 1000 years and they’d never assimilate.” To which Wong answered, “There are 2000 Chinamen like me in New York, who eat, dress and live in all respects like Americans.”

Kearney was fully aware of the disrepute that dogged Irish Catholic laborers, to the extent that some Anglo-Protestants didn’t even see them as white. By portraying the Chinese as unassimilable “joss” worshippers, Kearney tried to paint the Irish, by contrast, as God-fearing, hard-working white patriots and pioneers. In his earlier sandlot speeches, he’d lauded the “glorious, gallant sons of toil… whose brawny arms and developed brains and force of intellect have built and made up a nation.” Like Wong, Kearney had also tried to stake a claim to the founders as his people’s forebears. “If our forefathers 101 years ago voted to throw tea overboard, let us take and throw the teamakers overboard,” he said in those earlier speeches, to great applause and laughter. Kearney had called on white workingmen to “pool their issues,” regardless of whether they were “Irish, English, Scotch, nor Dutch.” Where Wong articulated an American identity free from Christianity, Kearney articulated an American identity grounded in a whiteness elastic enough to include the Irish and a Christianity elastic enough to include the Catholic.

The volley at the New York World ended with Wong once again asking Kearney to engage in a more “public debate on the Chinese question,” and Kearney again refusing, on the grounds that “I don’t consider you my equal [in] any way.” Wong retorted, “Far be it from me to call such as you my equal.” According to the reporters, he accompanied that riposte with “a queer smile.” In their estimation, Wong won the joust.

Dennis Kearney addressing a meeting of sand lotters

painting by G. W. Peters

Fresh off his spat with Kearney at The World’s offices, Wong considered. The eastern reporters seemed to favor him over Kearney, their anti-Catholic and anti-Irish prejudices showing through. But a debate in front of reporters wasn’t the same as a debate in front of the public. He knew that Kearney was scheduled to give a speech at Cooper Union that very night. With the Exclusion loophole bill before Congress, Wong wanted a chance to publicly humiliate Kearney, the man so responsible for passage of Exclusion in the first place. What if Wong just… showed up? Surely Kearney couldn’t refuse to engage in a public debate if Wong challenged him in front of an audience. The man had too big an ego, was too much of a showman.

I’ll do it, Wong thought. He called on his friends Tom Lee, a former sheriff, Yuet Sing, a wealthy merchant, and Wong Hoc, a Mott Street cigar dealer, and asked them to join him in the audience.

The four men put on their best suits. Immaculately dressed, they entered Cooper Union’s Great Hall just as Kearney was about to speak. The high ceilings, grand columns and arches, and large stage of the Great Hall, where eminent speakers from Frederick Douglass to Abraham Lincoln to Elizabeth Cady Stanton had spoken, only served to highlight how few people were in attendance. It was a far cry from the crowds that used to gather for Kearney’s speeches.

No matter: reporters were there and this was another chance for publicity. Plus, the sparse crowd meant that there were empty seats right at the front of the hall. Fully aware of the audience’s eyes on them (it was, after all, one of the reasons they’d dressed to the nines), the four men paraded to the front and sat right below the stage.

Kearney couldn’t miss them as he strode out. He flushed, “gleaming with perspiration,” setting into a typical harangue. Kearney didn’t speak from notes but “strode back and forth over the platform,” trying the “gems of his sand lot oratory” as he pumped his arms “vigorously,” removing his coat and unbuttoning his collar.

But the audience didn’t respond the same way they did back in California, or back in the days leading up to exclusion. In fact, the main thing Kearney could hear was loud laughter. Every line he tried—every mocking snipe against the Chinese—was met by mockery from Wong and friends. Kearney could see reporters scribbling in their notebooks after every jeering exchange. Later, a reporter from the Sun would write that “When he made fun of the habits of the Chinese the Chinese laughed at him, and when he pitched in seriously to tear them to pieces they laughed again.”

Kearney upped the antics, at one point taking a swig of water and “ma[king] a sprinkler of himself” to imitate how Chinese laundry workers supposedly washed clothes. “That’s the way they do it,” he said, “out of their mouths, and if they’ve got leprosy or the small-pox it’s all the same…. Imagine a male Pagan occupying the position of chambermaid in an American household.”

Wong flinched as water came flying out of Kearney’s mouth, onto his immaculate suit. But he laughed again, and his friends joined in. Kearney was making a fool of himself. Criticizing Chinese laundrymen while four “male Pagans” sat in front of him in the nicest suits in the room? It was rich.

To everything Kearney said, Wong came back with a schoolyard “back atcha.” The Chinese “burrow in the ground like rats,” Kearney claimed. “So do the Irishmen,” taunted Wong. “There is a law which says that no Chinaman shall become a citizen,” thundered Kearney. “It must have been an Irishman who made that law,” Wong heckled. This was going better than he’d hoped. He was making a fool of that lout.

“There is a law which says that no Chinaman shall become a citizen,” thundered Kearney. “It must have been an Irishman who made that law,” Wong heckled.

Finally, Kearney had run out of talking points. Now was Wong’s chance to corner him into a live audience debate. He stood up from his front-row seat. “If you will permit me,” he said.

But Kearney would do no such thing. He was already livid about Wong and friends' mockery throughout his speech, and angry that the East Coast papers seemed to side with Wong. “I don’t want no pro-Chinee business here,” he shouted. “Mr. George Blair and myself paid for this hall!” Kearney wouldn’t give up a stage he’d paid for to be further heckled by Wong. But he was also not beneath trying to recoup some of his expenses from the audience. Still flushed, maybe a little embarrassed, he harrumphed, “And oh, that makes me think, I want to take up a collection.”

But by 1887 there were no longer eager audiences lined up to hear the famous sand-lot orator and willing contribute to the cause. Hearing the word “collection,” the audience got up to leave. Wong watched as they filed out, Kearney’s voice still echoing through the grand hall.

By tomorrow, the papers would recount what had happened at Cooper Union. But even though they largely belittled Kearney by this point, his vision outlasted him. The idea of America as a broadly white, broadly Christian nation, built by and for European immigrants and their descendants, would endure long after his sandlot speeches fell to the dustheap of history. The Chinese Exclusion Act remained law for over sixty years, and more restrictions on Asian immigration would follow.

Wong’s call to the “Christians of America” to “come to Confucius” would be largely forgotten, too. But his vision deserves remembering. Against a white Christian America, he offered the possibility of a Confucian America. Wong’s vision was as elitist as Kearney’s was populist. But he forced Americans to confront questions that cut to the core of national identity and belonging: Could a “heathen” be American? Could the “great Reasoner” offer a better foundation for the republic than the Christian God? Wong had made it his life’s mission to argue yes to both questions, publicly and provocatively. He may not have been the first to bring Confucius to these shores, but he was the fiercest advocate for including Confucius as one of America’s gods.

SOURCES & FURTHER READINGS

The opening narrative was compiled from newspaper accounts: Boston Daily Advertiser 142, no. 25 (July 30, 1883), Chicago Daily Tribune (July 20, 1883), and Chicago Daily Tribune (July 25, 1883). The Closing scene is compiled from a description in The Sun, October 19, 1887. For more on Chinese Exclusion and religion, see Gin Lum, “Religion on the Road: How Chinese Migrants Adapted Popular Religion to an American Context,” in The Chinese and the Iron Road, eds. Gordon Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin; and Chapter 6 “Exclusion” in Gin Lum’s Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022). For biographical background on Wong, see Scott D. Seligman, The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo (Hong Kong University Press, 2013), from which the biographical details in this article draws.