This article examines representations of Chinese laborers in the vitriolic anti-Chinese literature produced and consumed nationally in late-nineteenth-century America. Anti-Chinese literature's depictions of the Chinese as excessively frugal and unnaturally abstentious argued that Chinese immigrants contributed nothing to the American economy; indeed, they hurt it. Such depictions facilitated and reflected changing understandings of the relationship between the act of work and manhood, as the proprietary artisan disappeared and wage work became the norm for most working men. Though wage work threatened to sever connections between working men and masculinity both for society at large and for workers themselves, wage workers increasingly reasserted their status as family breadwinner by providing a disposable income for family consumption. In representing true labor negatively through depictions of the Chinese, Americans began to disassociate long-standing correlations between manliness and production. Instead, they suggested that white, working-class manhood might now be located in consumption instead.
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