I Can Boil Sugar Too

On paper there were rules. In 1864 China and Spain signed a treaty with a clause forbidding Spain to lure or traffic Chinese. In 1866 recruitment regulations followed: when a labourer signed his contract and boarded, officials of both countries had to be present; anyone under twenty going abroad needed a written consent from his parents, sealed by the local magistrate; and Macao was not among the ports where recruiting was allowed.

What the three commissioners found was this: not one signing had taken place with those officials present, and not one parental consent had ever been produced; after Macao was excluded, another thirty-five thousand people were shipped from Macao. From this they judged that of the Chinese carried to Cuba, eight or nine in ten had been taken against their will.

Cuba had regulations of its own, one of which said that an employer could not work a man more than twelve hours a day on average. The report says these articles were never observed and in practice did not exist. As for why no complaint succeeded, the labourers wrote it themselves. Cai Heng (蔡恒) and seventy-nine others said in their petition: without papers on our persons we cannot take a step; we swallow our grievances and have nowhere to appeal. Lin Jin (林金) and fifteen others put it more plainly: the abuses are of every kind and too painful to tell; if the magistrate shows the least awareness, the master bribes the foreign official, and above and below they cover for each other.

They wrote too: it is plain that the foreign officials look on the Chinese as a rare commodity for their own profit, and our wrongs have nowhere to be laid.

When they wrote those words, Britain, France, Russia, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Italy and several other countries all kept consuls in Havana. China had none.

The plantations had also prepared for the questioning. Chen Abao (陳阿保) said that when they heard the commissioners were coming, ten old men with lame legs had been sent off to the countryside two days before. Li Aneng (李阿能) said that the new clothes on his back had been issued the day before, and that the men in leg irons had only been unshackled the day before as well.

The commission printed all of this and sent it to Peking.

One of the fifty questions asked whether the Chinese who were examined could speak the whole truth, or whether someone had frightened them so that they dared not. Five men told what became of them after they spoke: three were later in prison; one had complained to a higher office and been sent back to the plantation under guard; the fifth was a petition signed by five men, saying that the authorities had already been bought by the planters.

The Zongli Yamen asked whether the labourers dared to speak. Under that question there is not one sentence about whether they dared. What is written there is where the men who had spoken ended up.

Fifty men had been sold into that mill with him. By the day he spoke to the three commissioners, eighteen of the fifty were dead: three had drowned themselves and two had hanged themselves, unable to bear it any longer; the other thirteen had died of beatings.

When the eight years ended he was not able to leave. He was first sent to do four months of government labour without pay, then signed three further contracts of a year each. After another three years and more of this, a foreigner in the town hired him, through the authorities, to drive an ox-cart at eight dollars a month, and he worked the full eight months.

He went to ask for those eight months' wages. The manager refused and beat him. He went to the authorities to complain; the manager followed him into the courtroom and accused him in turn of stealing hay from the stable, and the court locked him up on the spot: two months first, then a year's imprisonment, then two years sweeping the streets in chains. On the day the commissioners met him he was still sweeping, and had been for a year and ten months.

Han Yanpei was a man who wanted justice. Eight dollars a month for eight months was the agreed sum, and it was owed to him for work done. The master would not pay and the authorities would not act, and he refused to accept that this was how things should be. He knew what came of complaining to the authorities, and went anyway; he was beaten, and complained a second time. On the day the commissioners questioned him, with the three-year sentence not yet served out, what he still said was that he had not stolen the hay, and that the manager had falsely accused him.

The commissioners recorded the scar because it proved how far the men on the plantations had been driven. Why he had wanted to die, no one asked.

He did not say it himself either. The commissioners questioned him on two other occasions. Asked about conditions on the plantation, he said: by day we work in irons and at night we are locked in the stocks; the plantation has three lock-ups, one of iron and two of wood; the iron one usually holds thirty men and the wooden ones several dozen each. Asked how the sick were treated, he said: some report sick, saying they have sores on their feet, and the master tells them this is no illness and lays about them with a stick. Both times he spoke of others, and never once of himself.

Huang Abing and Lin Lunmei, in the same column, did not leave even that much. The commissioners examined the scars on their throats and asked nothing more, and the two names never appear in the book again. They are like the other forty-six: a name on the injury register, one line for the wound, and not a word anywhere else. What Qu Danke has more than they is those two passages about other people.

Qu Danke was a man who had wanted to die once and later wanted to live. He cut his own throat, did not die, and when the wound healed went back to work. He described the iron lock-up and the beatings in such detail because he had been shut in that lock-up himself, had reported sick himself, had felt that stick himself. Why he wanted to die, my guess is that he was ashamed to say: a man who had tried to kill himself and failed had already been seen once by his companions, and did not want to tell it again before officials from Peking. Having survived, what he thought about was no longer dying but letting people know what that plantation was like. I pity him.

The second half concerns another man, who died of opium. The first half is all that remains of Huang Afang: his name, his native place Xinhui, that he worked at a sugar mill, that he was too drowsy to stay awake, that he was beaten first and then had a dog set on him that bit him to death.

The English report renders "drowsy" as "found asleep." Drowsy means that a man could not hold out any longer; "found asleep" means that he committed a fault and was caught at it. The difference of a word turns a man who could not hold out into a man who was shirking.

He was not shirking; he could not hold out. The men in this book speak again and again of the plantation hours: seven men together say from three in the morning until nine at night, and several dozen more say from three or four in the morning until eleven at night. A man who falls asleep on such a shift has reached the point where he cannot be woken.

Chen Hua was a man indignant on behalf of a fellow villager. He was kidnapped onto a ship at eleven, and on the ship saw the master kill four men. When the commissioners asked him about causes of death, it would have been enough to say that he had seen a man bitten to death by a dog; instead he said that the man was called Huang Afang, that he was from Xinhui, that he worked at a sugar mill, and that he was beaten because he was too drowsy to stay awake. He wanted the officials from China to know that the dead man was Huang Afang of Xinhui, and that he was beaten to death because he could not stay awake. I respect him. He did not let Huang Afang die without a name.

The Chinese version gives the cause. That page lists him with the five men in the same column: Wang Dacheng (王大成), Chen Yiyou (陳乙有), Cai Alu (蔡阿魯), Ou Zukang (區祖康), Lin Ziyou, Li Alü (李阿呂), legs and feet beaten to a pulp, submitted for examination. The English report translated all six names and dropped the word "beaten." A reader of the English does not know that his legs were beaten to a pulp; a reader of the Chinese does.

When the commissioners questioned him, he spoke of two dead men: a man from Yangjiang who could not bear the ill-treatment and hanged himself with a handkerchief, and a man from Nanhai whose eight-year contract had expired and who refused to sign a new one, and was jabbed in the chest with the butt of a stick by the head overseer, and died a few days later. He spoke twice, and neither time of the wounds on his own legs.

Lin Ziyou was a man who had survived and felt he had failed the dead. He gave the death of the man from Nanhai as his answer to the question "what happens when the contract expires." My guess is that his contract and the Nanhai man's expired at the same time, and both were told to sign again; the other man refused, was jabbed in the chest with the butt of a stick, and died a few days later; Lin Ziyou signed, and lived. Asked what happened when his contract expired, he told not what happened to him but how that man died. I think he felt guilt: the other man had refused, and he had not. I do not blame him.

He had seen both outcomes and chose to live; the only thing he could still do for the dead man was to tell his death before the officials from Peking.

Liang En was from Kaiping in Guangdong and had been a shoemaker. After a quarrel with his elder brother, someone urged him to look for work in Macao; he was taken into a coolie depot and held for more than a month, signed a contract, received one dollar, and boarded a ship in the third month of 1853. The day after reaching Havana he and fifteen others who had come with him were sold into a sugar mill. For the first three years the treatment was bearable and there was enough to eat; after a new master took over there was not enough to eat, the treatment was harsh, and beatings were frequent. Of the fifteen in his group, he said, four hanged themselves. Then comes this passage:

There was a man of Panyu, Liang Baisheng, working in the cane fields. The head overseer cursed him for not knowing how to work and whipped him. Liang Baisheng said, I not only know the cane-field work, I can boil sugar too. The overseer flew into a rage, beat him with a stick and broke his ribs and split his skull. We of his group, seeing the beating so savage, pleaded with the overseer together. The overseer then tied Liang Baisheng to a horse's tail and dragged him back before the master, saying that the men were making trouble. The master had all of us put in leg irons and locked up. Liang Baisheng died then and there, and his body was thrown on the rubbish heap.

"I not only know the cane-field work, I can boil sugar too." Thirteen Chinese characters: the whole of Liang Baisheng's voice, in two books and three languages.

Boiling sugar was a named trade in the mill, not cane cutting. Eight of the 279 depositions in the Chinese volume speak of it. The sugar boilers worked in two shifts, the first and second halves of the night, in turn; the second shift slept from about seven in the evening and rose at midnight. The cane cutters started at about three in the morning and stopped at midnight, with an hour and a half off for meals: eighteen hours a day. Long Achuan (龍阿川) put it most directly: I do the sugar boiling; I am not often beaten, only not given enough to eat. The other side must be said too: Li Hui (李惠) grew drowsy while boiling, the sugar burned, and the overseer beat him with a heavy stick.

Boiling sugar was a post with different hours and fewer beatings, not a post without beatings.

Liang Baisheng was a man who valued his craft. The overseer cursed him for not knowing how to work and whipped him. To be beaten less, all he had to say was "I know how"; what he said was, I not only know the cane-field work, I can boil sugar too, which is to say: you have put a man who can boil sugar to cutting cane, and you have used him wrongly. The overseer heard the meaning, broke his ribs with a stick, split his skull, tied him to a horse's tail and dragged him back to the quarters, and he died on the spot; his body was thrown on the rubbish heap. I think he was proud: he knew that he was a craftsman, and he would rather be beaten than admit in front of everyone that he was only a labourer who did not know how to work. I respect him.

He said no more than what he could do, and died for that sentence; I am indignant for him.

This was no fault of the commission. It did what it was sent to do, and tens of thousands of people were spared shipment to Cuba as a result. Evidence collected for a negotiation was never meant to record what a man himself wanted.

In the hundred and more years since, historians of the Chinese labourers have cited this report continually, each for a purpose of their own. In China, the Cuban labourers were written into the history of the coolie trade: kidnapped "piglets," Chinese oppressed by imperialism. That account has to prove the depth of their suffering, so when it cites the report it cites the 238 causes of death and the wounds on the injury register. In Cuba, some of the labourers later fought in the war of independence, and in 1892 a Cuban revolutionary wrote that there was not one Chinese Cuban deserter and not one Chinese Cuban traitor, a sentence later carved on the base of a monument to the Chinese in Havana.

That account has to prove the loyalty of the Chinese to Cuba, and what it needs is Chinese who fought; a man who went to prison for eight months' wages is not among them.

Both accounts are true, and I do not object to either. But they do the same thing as the report: first decide what is to be proved, then take from these men's lives the parts that prove it. The commission had to prove ill-treatment, Chinese history has to prove suffering, Cuban history has to prove loyalty. What Han Yanpei wanted was his wages, and what Liang Baisheng wanted was the sugar boiler's post. Neither was of any use to any of the three accounts, so three times over, no one wrote it down.

These things are recorded in the parts of the report that were never cited. The Chinese depositions follow a fixed form, from the kidnapping onto the ship down to the day of examination, and the clerk wrote each one from beginning to end according to that form; that is why the story of Han Yanpei's three years in prison survives, though the commission had no need of it. The Chinese injury register required the cause of the injury to be stated, and the clerk wrote "beaten" as the form required, though the English version later dropped it.

When Liang En told how the men of his group had died, he included the sentence Liang Baisheng spoke before he was beaten, and the clerk took it down as he said it, though the report cited only the beating and the death. When Chen Hua told how a man was bitten to death by a dog, he gave the man's name and native place as well, and the clerk wrote those down too.

These things were preserved not because anyone thought them important, but because the clerk, following the form, wrote everything down. For a hundred and fifty years no one read them, because those who write history read only the parts that bear on their own argument.

From these men I see a certain kind of person. They were bought as goods and driven as beasts; when their eight-year contracts expired they still could not leave; complaining to the authorities meant prison, and refusing to sign again meant being beaten to death. Yet in that condition they still kept their own sense of right and wrong, and knew what was due to them and what should not be borne. What Han Yanpei held to was the wages due to him; what Liang Baisheng held to was the place his craft deserved; what Qu Danke, Lin Ziyou and Chen Hua held to was that their companions should not have died as they did.

No one required these judgments of them, and making them was of no use whatever; the commission did not need them, and later history did not need them. They made them all the same, and when at last someone came to ask, they spoke them out, and what they told was mostly not their own suffering but the deaths of others.

I think this is their soul: a man can be bought and sold, beaten, imprisoned, written down as a number and an example, and yet his ability to judge right from wrong does not go with the rest, and his duty to his companions is not beaten out of him. We usually suppose that these belong to people who are comfortably off and educated; these five men show that it is not so. This is what I want to tell everyone, and it is why I do this research: every one of the people who survive in history as nothing but a number once judged their own condition in this way, and no one ever wrote their judgment down. I am indignant for them, and I respect them.

Leimma, The Cuba Commission of 1874: Human Nature at the Bottom, from the Archives. Page by Runo.