Chinaman's chance
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Chinaman's chance means little or no chance at all, freighted with a particularly anti-Asian racism.[1] It is an American idiomatic expression first attested in 1903.[2]
Origins[edit]
The origin of the phrase is not well documented.
One explanation of the phrase Chinaman's chance traces it to the construction of the U.S. transcontinental railroad. During its construction, unstable bottles of nitroglycerine were used for blasting. Chinese workers would be lowered over cliffs by rope and boatswain's chairs to set the nitroglycerine in place. In this work, if they were not lifted back up before the blast, serious injury or death would result.[citation needed]
Another explanation is the California Gold Rush 1849. The travel time for news of the gold rush to reach China was quite long, and by the time Chinese from China arrived to prospect, many of the rich mines were already taken. These Chinese immigrants who missed out had to work with only those lands which had already been exploited or which were rejected by others, meaning these Chinamen had a slim chance of success. The historical record, however, indicates that many Chinese combined efforts with each other and did very well in the goldfields, introducing mining techniques then unknown to non-Chinese.[3][page needed]
Another unsubstantiated claim is that the phrase was cemented by murders of Chinese that were condoned by state law,[4][page needed][better source needed][5] thus giving them no chance of success in the courts.
In literature[edit]
- "Asia is rising against me. / I haven't got a chinaman's chance. / I'd better consider my national resources." — Allen Ginsberg, America[6]
In film[edit]
The phrase is used in Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once, Frank Capra's Lost Horizon and also in Rob Cohen's Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, when the character of Bruce Lee is on his way to America in a ship. This phrase is also uttered by James Dunn (Eddie Collins) in Bad Girl and Randolph Scott (Wyatt Earp) to Cesar Romero (Doc Halliday) in Frontier Marshal and in the film The People vs. Dr. Kildare (Alma Kruger as Molly Byrd).
See also[edit]
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Look up chinaman's chance in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
References[edit]
Notes
- ^ Patti Waldmeir (June 22, 2015). "The quest for the meaning of Chineseness from Beijing to US sitcoms". Financial Times. Retrieved January 1, 2016.
- ^ Google Books
- ^ Liping Zhu, A Chinaman's Chance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier, ISBN 087081575X
- ^ Stephen Ambrose, Nothing Like It in the World
- ^ People v. Hall
- ^ Ginsberg, Allen (1988) [1956]. "America". Collected Poems 1947-1980. Harper Perennial. ISBN 978-0-06-091494-3. Retrieved December 7, 2011.
Further reading
- The Chinese Question: political cartoon, print (1871).
- A Chinaman's Chance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier, Liping Zhu, University of Colorado Press, Denver (2000).
- Amazon.com reviews of "A Chinaman's Chance"
