The Cases of Blue Ploermell by James Thurber

Author:James Thurber [Thurber, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peschel Press
Published: 2021-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

Reputation of Chinese Servants

In the nineteenth century white employers imagined that Chinese immigrants to California had an innate, racial disposition to servility.

Andrew Urban, Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor During the Long Nineteenth Century, 2017.

The Chinese are excellent domestic servants, and when honest, which is a quality not common among them, they are invaluable. … Every European resident at Canton and Macao has Chinese servants, which on the whole, are preferable to any other race of Orientals.

William Alexander, Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the Chinese, 1814.

Treated with kindness and consideration, they are the most docile, faithful, and affectionate people in the world; for skill as cooks, nurses, butlers, and in fact, every department of the domestic ménage, they are unsurpassed by any other nation … I regard the introduction of Chinese domestics as one of the great blessings that could possibly be conferred on American housekeepers.

Mrs. Fannie R. Feudge, The Lady’s Friend, May 1870

Whatever the reason, a look through contemporary accounts — memoirs, biographies, and travel books — reveals a marked preference for Chinese servants over any other nationality, including Indian servants. A guidebook for wives following their husbands to India presented a bleak picture of what they might find: “The kitchen is a black hole, the pantry a sink. The only servant who will condescend to tidy up is a skulking savage with a reed broom; whilst pervading all things broods the stifling, enervating atmosphere of custom, against which energy beats itself unavailingly, as against a feather bed.”

The Complete Indian Housekeeper & Cook (1893) suggested that the problem was not limited to India (“dirt, slovenliness, and want of method are not confined to one hemisphere”) and reassured the nervous wife that it is possible to instruct your servants on the proper way to run a British household, so long as you “make the most of the patience, good temper, and old-fashioned sense of servitude.”

This is a far different attitude than William Howard Taft encountered in the Philippines. Sent there to take up his post as civilian governor of the U.S.-occupied Philippines in 1900, the future president found a half-dozen Chinese servants, including a cook, waiting for him, courtesy of Admiral George Dewey. Dewey had asked his servant, Ah Man, to find the men, so he wrote to Ah Sing, a steward on board the Brooklyn:

“My dear Ah Sing … The Admiral asked me to write to you and ask if you please find som [sic] good Chinese servants for Mr. Taft. He like to have a very good cook just like myself, the Admiral said, and two men to wait on the table, a butler and a second man just like you. Now, would you be so kind as to try and find some very nice people that will take good care and understand their business.”

There might have been another reason why Chinese servants were preferred in Manila: the Philippines were an occupied country. The Spanish had taken over in 1565 and while the U.

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