Yosemite Chinese Laundry

Friday night, September 20, 2024

Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA

            Marian and I went back to Yosemite last week, for six days, and were brought back again to the otherworldly power and beauty of that place.  The two-thousand-year-old Giant Sequoias in the Mariposa Grove.  The sublime vision of water falling 300 feet, 500 feet and 600 feet over the cliffs of Vernal, Nevada, and Bridal Veil Falls.  And the immense glacier-carved rock faces of El Capitan and Half Dome.  For Marian and me, Yosemite is also the starting point from which we set out in August 2013 on our three-week backpacking journey through the High Sierras which changed our lives.  Last week, we returned to the Glacier Point trailhead, and remembered our fear and our excitement as we set out into the unknown eleven years ago.

            But our best discovery in this visit to Yosemite, was a hidden gem, the Chinese Laundry of the Wawona Hotel, which features a tiny but perfectly executed historical presentation of the history of the Chinese immigrants and their contributions and their struggles in the early history of Yosemite. 

            Their story feels strangely familiar and similar to our Jewish story in America.  It’s a mixed bag of opportunity, of contribution, of suspicion and of hatred.  Like so many others, the first Chinese immigrants came to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada during the Gold Rush of 1848.  They called California Gum Saan, meaning Gold Mountain.  But the old human hatred of strangers led the new State of California to pass special taxes targeting Chinese and Mexican miners.  So the Chinese gave up on gold and went to work as laborers building roads, and working in restaurants and hotels, as cooks, cleaners, and running the laundry.  It wasn’t easy.  An 1854 court case ruled that Chinese were not allowed to testify in court.  In 1863 Chinese children were banned from public schools.  In 1871 there were race riots against the Chinese in Los Angeles.  Eighteen Chinese men were murdered in those race riots.  And in 1882, the United States congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting all further Chinese immigration.  That act was renewed ten years later in 1892 and was not repealed until 1943.

But it was Chinese labor that built the transcontinental railroad, between 1864 and 1869, opening up California to the rest of the United States.  And in 1874 the new owners of the Wawona Hotel, hired Chinese laborers to build the 23-mile-long road from Wawona to Yosemite Valley, which they did in four and a half months.  Using only handpicks, shovels, blasting powder and wheelbarrows.  In the winter.  That remains to this day one of two main roads in and out of the magical valley of Yosemite.

One of the most significant characters in the history of the Chinese in Yosemite is a man named Tie Sing, born in Nevada to Chinese immigrants.  Tie Sing came to Yosemite as a cook for the geologists and mapmakers of the US Geological Survey and acquired a legendary reputation as a wilderness cook.  He would prepare amazing banquets in the wilderness for dozens of people.  He was hired to cook in the summers of 1915 and 1916 for a party of national lawmakers who were visiting Yosemite and Sequoia and as a result of those visits, and his cooking, those lawmakers established the National Park system.  He has a mountain in Yosemite named after him, Sing Peak. 

In one particularly poignant corner of the exhibit, a sign explains that Tie Sing would bake a personalized note into each pastry he served…a real fortune cookie…and the exhibit invites visitors to write their own notes to Tie Sing and to leave them on a bulletin board there.  I read the notes with interest.  One visitor wrote: Thank you for paving the way for other Chinese immigrants like my grandfather.  And another wrote: You were of value.  You made a difference. 150 years in the future, we see you.

As I have already mentioned, the exhibit set me thinking about our grandparents and great-grandparents’ Jewish immigrant experience, both the profound contribution they made to the American story, and also the fear and suspicion, and intense discrimination that they encountered.  I keep thinking about how America has for its entire history been a place of both opportunity and hatred for immigrants.

I majored in American History in college, but if I ever learned of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882…which remained in effect for 61 years…I had completely forgotten about it.  But I think we all know that the questions of whether to welcome newcomers to this country, and how many to welcome, and who should be welcomed have surfaced in our national politics over and over and over again.  At times the doors have swung wide open and at other times they bang shut.  In the past ten or fifteen years, no issue has aroused more passion and no issue has had more impact on our presidential politics than the question of immigration policy, refugees, and the border.  We keep asking ourselves and arguing with each other about: what kind of country is this?  What kind of country do we want it to be?

I want to recommend to you all a wonderful article in this morning’s New York Times, by Mike DeWine, entitled “I am the Republican Governor of Ohio. Here is the Truth About Springfield.”  Every sentence of the article is worth reading, and I only have time to share with you a few key points.  First of all, DeWine explains that he was born in Springfield and he represented Springfield in the US House and Senate.  He loves the place.  It has a long history of being a place of refuge, all the way back to pre-Civil War days when it was a stop on the Underground Railway.  It was built by immigrants from many different countries and had a strong economic history.  Then in the 1980’s and 1990’s, DeWine explains that Springfield experienced a downturn with the loss of manufacturing jobs and rail commerce.  But now, he says, Springfield is enjoying a resurgence, due in part to the Haitian immigrants who have arrived in the past three years.

DeWine shares that he supports former President Donald Trump and JD Vance in the upcoming election, and that he agrees with their criticisms of President Biden’s handling of the southern border.  But he says, “I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield.”  And he adds “Their verbal attacks against these Haitians, who are legally present in the United States dilute and cloud what should be a winning argument about the border.”

After describing the many trips that he himself has taken to Haiti, his affection and admiration for its people and his sorrow about what has happened to that country, he says: “On Monday, I met with Springfield manufacturing business owners who employ Haitians. As one of them told me, his business would not have been able to stay open after the pandemic but for the Haitians who filled the jobs.”

DeWine acknowledges that many tough challenges face the people of Springfield, as they work to absorb this new wave of immigrants from Haiti, but he ends his article declaring with pride and optimism: “Springfield today has a very bright future. The people who live there love their families, value education, work hard, care about one another and tackle the challenges they face head-on, just as they have done for over 200 years.  I am proud of this community, and America should be, too.”  I’m grateful to Governor DeWine for his article.

In our living room in Goleta, we have a framed facsimile copy of Emma Lazarus’ manuscript of the sonnet she wrote in 1883, entitled “The New Colossus,” to help raise funds for the pedestal for the new Statue of Liberty.  In concluding tonight with the last lines of that young American Jewish woman’s poem, I invite you in your mind’s eye, to picture the faces of today’s Haitian immigrants in Springfield, walking behind the Russian Jewish immigrants of Emma Lazarus’ time, who are walking behind the Chinese men, women and children who worked in the Wawona Chinese Laundry and who built by hand the great roads of Yosemite National Park, and the transcontinental railroad.

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Shabbat shalom.