Displaced by society through both systematic and social oppression, the community formation of both the Chinese and Japanese immigrants in various enclaves throughout California can hardly be seen as the proper working of a community. Even the very notion of a “bachelor society” of San Francisco Chinatown proclaims the delinquency of a forged community. In fact, contrary to the myth of San Francisco’s Chinatown and its bachelor society, its members were not bachelors at all. The lack of demand for women from plant owners combined with the anti-Chinese immigration laws had prevented many wives from accompanying their husbands (Nee,1974). As a result, the husbands were forced to send the money they earned in order to support their families back home and visit whenever they could afford to do so (which wasn’t very often). Nevertheless, the outside world continued to see Chinatown as a bachelor society — enclave — filled with prostitutes, gambling, and other immoral activities. In fact, based on the idea that all Chinese women were prostitutes, in 1875 a federal law was passed known as the Page Law, which forbade the immigration of almost all Chinese women, thus further perpetuating the notion of the “bachelor society” (Nee,1974). As a result, while in most immigrant groups working-age men tended to precede women, children, or older people to the new land, in the case of the Chinese, legal exclusions were imposed just at the point when men might have sent for their wives and children; these exclusions truncated the natural development of the community.
As with the history of the immigration of Chinese women, the first Japanese women to arrive were prostitutes, but in time they were vastly outnumbered by wives. The history of the Chinese and Japanese community formation in California differed not because of any cultural differences between the two groups, but because, unlike Chinese exclusion, which was imposed rather suddenly, the U.S. government restricted Japanese immigration in stages, thus allowing more time for Japanese men to bring in their women. Still, the creation of a family was awkward and out of the ordinary. Unable to return home, many Japanese men had to resort to a phenomenon known as picture-brides. Despite this abnormal process, Japanese wives became important assets to Japanese farm workers, the wives providing unpaid family labor, thus helping them to be competitive. But later, even the immigration of picture brides would come to be challenged by anti-Japanese advocates who contended that the entrance of Japanese women violated the Gentlemen’s Agreement, an agreement in which the Japanese government promised the United States that it would stop issuing passports to laborers desiring to immigrate to America.