The Debate Over Chinese Settlement, 1886

Chan Hon Fan, a Chinese resident of Portland, wrote his letter to the Oregonian in response to an inflammatory article by the Reverend E. Trumbull Lee published days earlier in the Portland Daily News. “The Chinese must go,” Lee had written, and charged that, as a group, they were “unclean and immoral.” Racism and Chinese competition with whites for jobs contributed to Lee’s hostility. “Chinese laborers,” he wrote, “live on these shores at the expense of white laborers.” In his response, Fan asks how Lee, a Christian preacher, could encourage resentment against the Chinese. He also argued that Lee’s discrimination against Chinese created “stumbling blocks” for Chinese who might otherwise become Christians.

Portland’s newspapers showed a mixed reaction to anti-Chinese sentiment. The Daily News tended to side with the agitators, while the Oregonian editorialized against agitators and condemned lawlessness and violence. The Oregonian, however, sold advertising to anti-Chinese businesses, and Portland merchants often placed advertisements in the Oregonian to promote the boycott of Chinese businesses.

In 1873, the Portland City Council passed a “500 cubic feet of air” ordinance that made it a crime to live in the cramped housing commonly inhabited by Portland’s Chinese. As a result, many Chinese residents were forced to leave the city. Other attempts to forcibly remove Chinese from Portland occurred throughout the 1870s and 1880s in the Albina, Mount Tabor, and Guilds Lake neighborhoods. Chinese residents from these neighborhoods fled to Chinatown in downtown Portland or migrated to other areas in the state.