Book Talk: “John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law”

Beth Lew-Williams joins us to discuss her new book, a revelatory history of the laws that conditioned the everyday lives of Chinese people in the American West—and of those who negotiated, circumvented, and resisted discrimination.

Legal discrimination against Chinese people in the United States began in 1852, when California passed a tax on foreign gold miners that was explicitly designed to exploit Chinese labor. Over the next seventy years, officials in California, Oregon, Washington, and other western states instituted more than five thousand laws that marginalized and controlled their Chinese residents. Long before the Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese immigration, these laws constrained the activities and opportunities of Chinese people already living in the United States.

In this eye-opening account, Beth Lew-Williams describes a legal architecture redolent of Jim Crow but tailored specifically to people often referred to only as “John Doe Chinaman” or “Mary Chinaman” in official records. Enforced by police and tax collectors, but also by schoolteachers, missionaries, and neighbors, these laws granted the Chinese only limited access to American society, falling far short of equality or belonging. Cementing stereotypes of Chinese residents as criminals, invaders, and predators, they regulated everything from healthcare to education, property ownership, business formation, and kinship customs. Yet in the face of these limitations, Chinese communities reacted resourcefully. Many fought, evaded, and manipulated these laws, finding ways to maintain their prohibited traditions, resist unfair treatment in court, and insist on their political rights.

Drawing on dozens of archives across the US West, John Doe Chinaman reveals the depth of anti-Chinese discrimination beyond federal exclusion and tells the stories of those who refused to accept a conditional place in American life.

Beth Lew-Williams is Professor of History and Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America.