Chinese Laborer

""I advertised extensively for men, wanted several thousand, and was never able to get over 700 or 800 white men at one time. We increased finally to 10,000. A large number of men would go on to the work under those advertisements; but they were unsteady men, unreliable. Some of them would stay a few days, and some would not go to work at all. Some would stay until pay-day, get a little money, get drunk, and clear out. Finally, we resorted to Chinamen. I was very much prejudiced against Chinese labor. I did not believe we could make a success of it. I believe Chinese labor in this country on that kind of work never had been made a success until we put them on there; but we did make a success of them. We worked a great many of them, and built the road virtually with Chinamen.""

- James H. Strobridge, Central Pacific Railroad foreman, testifying before the US Congress in 1876

The California Gold Rush of the mid-Nineteenth Century coincided with a time of dire economic conditions in China. So it was natural that when they got wind of the gold rush across the Pacific, thousands of young Chinese men migrated to the United States to mine the gold fields. Their industry and teamwork were at first admired and appreciated, but as viable gold strikes played out and fresh mines became scarce, the white majority resented the foreigners (who were forbidden by law from becoming citizens) and laws were passed in an attempt to force the Chinese out of the mining business.

However, a new economic opportunity opened up in the form of the Transcontinental Railroad. This project required many low-paid laborers for dangerous and arduous work; and the head of the Southern Pacific end of the Transcontinental project decided to hire the lean and hungry Chinese of California. They did such a good job that more Chinese labor gangs were hired directly from the homeland.

After the Transcontinental line was built, railroad construction continued to boom in the Western United States, and the now experienced Chinese eagerly took on these new jobs. The population of Chinese men in America swelled.

Unfortunately, this large population was largely bachelors and stuck out considerably. Relatively few Chinese women chose to immigrate for various reasons, and of those many were blocked by laws theoretically in place to prevent prostitution. As anti-miscegenation laws barred Asian men from marrying white women, they had to seek companionship and diversion in other, extra-legal ways. The distinctive queue worn by Chinese men was made mandatory by their homeland's government, and they were barred from re-entry if they had lost it, meaning that most of the immigrants to the U.S., who planned to someday return, could not adopt less conspicuous hairstyles. And as many Chinese immigrants were essentially forced to live in "Chinatowns" for their own safety, many did not learn English very well if at all.

This very distinctive and poorly-assimilated minority stirred fears of a Yellow Peril, and racist discrimination and attacks against the Chinese were common, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of the late 1880s, which banned Chinese immigration entirely.

In the fiction of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century, the Chinese Laborer is often a sinister figure who fills the ranks of a Secret Society and lusts for the pure white women that the hero must protect. About the time of World War Two, when China became the United States' ally, the depiction shifted, and the Chinese laborer tended to be shown as the victim of prejudice and needing the help of a white hero to save him from bigots. Modern depictions tend to be a bit more nuanced... we hope.

The generic term for exported Asian laborers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was "coolie." This word was often used as a pejorative, and many people of Asian heritage find it offensive, so it should only be used in its historical context.

Advertising

 * A Canadian Heritage Moment depicted an old Chinese man telling his grandsons in Flash Back about building the Canadian Pacific Railroad. He volunteered to place a nitroglycerin charge, which went off prematurely. Fortunately, he survived. He goes on to tell his grandsons the legend of "one dead Chinese man for every mile of that track."

Comic Books

 * Popped up in Lucky Luke once or twice.

Film
"[Chinese Laborer working on railroad tracks falls to the ground from exhaustion] Lyle: Dock that Chink a day's pay for napping on the job."
 * A bunch of them feature in Shanghai Noon.
 * Chinese laborers also appear in the remake of 3:10 to Yuma on a railroad construction site.
 * Blazing Saddles


 * Miniature Chinese laborer figures come to life and attack Ben Stiller's character in a wild west diorama in Night at the Museum.
 * One turns up in For a Few Dollars More, who The Man With No Name orders to clear the Colonel's (the other bounty hunter) room out and to take his stuff out of town. The Colonel intercedes, and a back-and-forth ensues until the laborer freaks out, drops the baggage and bolts into the hotel.
 * There's a scene in the Robert Altman film McCabe and Mrs. Miller where a mining company operative details an elaborate mineral extraction scheme involving Chinese laborers and lots of explosives. As you might imagine, the laborers weren't expected to survive.
 * Death to Smoochy has Edward Norton's pacifist character explain, "When my brothers played Cowboys and Indians, I was always the Chinese railroad worker."
 * While they don't have a presence in the story, in Unforgiven, we are informed that English Bob made a living out of killing them for the railroads.
 * A number of them are seen as incidental characters in The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin.

Literature

 * A monk travelling with a group of them in the old West gets to show his zombie-killing talents in The Zombie Survival Guide.
 * There's a Laurence Yep series called Tales Of The Golden Mountain, after the Chinese nickname for California. It's a series that follows a Chinese-American family over a number of generations, and the protagonists of some of the earlier books were Chinese laborers working on the railroads.
 * Chinese miners have a significant role in Stephen King's novel, Desperation: they accidentally discover the entryway to an another dimension, where the Big Bad comes from.
 * This troper read a Dear America diary-novel from the POV of one of these characters.
 * The Journal of Wong Ming-Chung?
 * The works of Bret Harte, set during the Gold Rush in California, have a fair number of these, including a Hop Sing in a play who is the trope originator or codifier of the Chinese Launderer.
 * East of Eden has Lee, a Chinese cook and valet (also a stereotype at one time in California), who has a horrible backstory about how his mother disguised herself as a man so she could live and work alongside his father on the railroad, hiding her pregnancy when it came about, until the day she gave birth. Her husband wasn't nearby to help her, and when the other workers realized there was a woman in their midst they basically gang-raped her to death.
 * The hardships suffered by Chinese railway workers plays a major part in Henning Mankell's Yellow Peril novel "The Man From Beijing".

Live Action TV

 * Kwai Chang Caine tended to run into a lot of these while Walking the Earth in Kung Fu; not surprising given his ethnicity.
 * On the Pushing Daisies episode "The Fun In Funeral", Wilfrid Woodruff's ancestor was a runaway Chinese laborer who found a Confederate uniform and gave rise to a long line of Asian-American good ol' boys.
 * The boomtown of Deadwood features its own little Chinatown, ruled by the ruthless Mr. Wu, whose side business is feeding dead troublemakers to his ravenous pigs.
 * Mr. Wu is still a pretty nice guy compared to a competitor he gets later in the story, who brings in Chinese women by the wagonload to act as prostitutes, and keeps them drugged and starves them, since it's cheaper to get new ones than to feed them properly.
 * Have Gun — Will Travel features hotel porter Hey Boy (and for one season his sister Hey Girl) as a major recurring character.
 * In The Wild Wild West, Chinese laborers showed up quite a bit (with The Wild West as the show's setting and all), specifically in the episode "The Night the Dragon Screamed" in which Jim and Artemus have to solve the mystery of Chinese laborers disappearing as soon as they get to America.
 * Chinese rail workers figure into the plot of The Adventures of Brisco County Jr as the ones who find the series' MacGuffin.

Music

 * The Brian Wilson/Van Dyke Parks song "Cabinessence," originally written for the ill-fated Smile album, then later resurrected for both a Beach Boys album and the 2004 Brian Wilson Presents Smile album, was apparently an abstract, Word Salad song about Chinese railroad workers.

Radio

 * An episode of the Radio Drama Have Gun — Will Travel had Paladin attempting to keep his friend/servant "Hey Boy" from taking bloody vengeance on a white railroad construction supervisor who'd killed one of his relatives (as there were laws preventing Chinese from testifying against whites in criminal cases, it was nearly impossible to prosecute white-on-Chinese violence in the courts).

Tabletop Games

 * Deadlands example: the Iron Dragon Railroad is staffed almost completely with these, plus some kung-fuists and the Fu Manchu ripoff, Warlord Kang.

Theater

 * Lee Zen in Paint Your Wagon, who speaks mostly in his native Cantonese.

Video Games

 * The video game Shadow Warrior features undead coolies as a type of enemy. They try to blow you up with dynamite, and sometimes come back as ghosts when they die.
 * Red Dead Redemption has a few of these for western flavor, as well as a side mission to free a worker from his servitude.

Western Animation

 * The Jackie Chan Adventures episode "Showdown in the Old West" has Jackie's ancestor as one of these, likely referencing Shanghai Noon. The episode itself follows the plot of Blazing Saddles.

Real Life

 * British Columbia had a similar labour and immigration situation with regards to abusing the Chinese immigrant workers who helped build the Canadian Pacific Railroad.
 * During World War I the British government recruited the Chinese Labour Corps. Though the men served under British officers, were subject to military discipline, and took casualties from enemy fire, they were not dignified with the status of soldiers, in the same way as normal military engineers. The French government hired Chinese laborers in a similar manner. In total, something like 140,000 Chinese citizens served on the Western front, and are now almost totally forgotten.
 * Chinese laborers and work teams were not unknown in the more geographically close Australia either, and many of them participated in the Gold Rush and dealt with the usual amounts of racism. Similar to the US and Canadian situation, the early Australian railways were basically built with Chinese labour.
 * The controversial use of Chinese labour in South Africa during and after the Boer War helped bring down a British government when allegations of abuse came out.
 * Chinese laborers (along with Japanese, Korean, and Filipino Laborers) were common in the sugar plantations of Hawai'i and the primary reason why to this day, the majority of the State's population is of Asian ancestry.
 * Some workers were taken captive in vendettas and warlord quarrels in the Chinese interior and would have been effectively slaves. The railroad seems to have simply dumped them in with voluntary workers (the same way shipping barons put Shanghaied sailors willy-nilly with the rest of the crew) and may not even have known at first where they came from though someone down the line must have. In any event there was a scandal about that during the Civil War, enough to cause a Congressional investigation.
 * As has happened with other waves of immigrants, the descendants of Chinese clawed their way to the top and often became powerful and prosperous. They were helped along the way by their clannishness and perhaps their value for work. In any case Overseas Chinese are a formidable minority in many countries and not just the US.