Many established Berkeley families with financial means employed Chinese “houseboys” for decades and often related to them as members of the family. In the United States at the turn of the 20th century, employment for Chinese men was limited to certain trades. (Though that story is a more complicated due to the Asian exclusion laws and leagues that worked hard to prevent Asian peoples from entering the country.) This was their “outsider” status on display, a status that survives through today, though in a modified form to fit the current times. The Chinese men who were killed in the explosion were not even given names in the newspaper article about them. There was no indication of danger when Dwyer and the squad of seven Chinamen went to work early this morning.
16, 1905, and many men were killed, the newspapers would proclaim something like this sentence from an article found in the book “ Berkeley 1900: Daily Life at the Turn of the Century.” One business that was happy to employ a majority of Asian men for the most dangerous jobs was the Judson Dynamite and Powder Works plant, located at the northern edge of Berkeley by the bay. They found jobs as laborers, often at highly dangerous professions. On their own, they could open laundries or operate truck farms. (These men were often “well-loved” and considered “part of the family” by the white families that employed them.) Asian men could also could find employment as cooks or waiters from Asian specialty employment agencies, like Mitonta’s Japanese and Chinese Employment Office at 2028 Center St. Berkeley, the current bastion of enlightened and progressive thought, was thriving in a period of growth and growing community at the turn of the 20th century, but opportunities for Asian Americans were limited.Īn Asian man in Berkeley could find work, but most often as a “houseboy,” the derogatory term for a male adult who keeps another’s household in order - including the cooking and cleaning. One period that illuminates this eruption of these held beliefs in the Bay Area is the time surrounding 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. Shining a light on these threads and the earlier Asian American history is, I believe, the most effective way to begin to lessen this illness in our one-and-three-quarter-century-old Bay Area American culture. There has been a continuous thread of beliefs incubated in American culture that have stood at-the-ready and have nourished the eruptions of violence against Asian Americans which we would do well to understand in more depth. Today the Bay Area is witness to an alarming rise in attacks on Asian Americans.
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