From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 72-74:
THE PROBLEM OF TRANSLATION shaped Chinese interactions with Euro-Americans from their very arrival at the two gold mountains. Among the earliest emigrants, those who were bilingual had usually acquired their linguistic skills in China or Southeast Asia. The San Francisco merchant Yuan Sheng went to a missionary school in Macao, and the Australian impresario Lowe Kong Meng attended an English private school in Penang; both men had experience in business dealings with Europeans and Americans before arriving on the goldfields. The first Euro-American missionaries in California and Victoria had previously served in China or Southeast Asia.
Chinese who went to the goldfields in groups often included one person who spoke English. Headmen accompanying Chinese emigrants to Australia all knew enough English to navigate their groups’ travel to and settlement on the goldfields. The same pattern existed in California. For example, the American miner Timothy Osborn wrote in his diary that a group of Chinese miners who were camped near him included a friendly English speaker, who wrote down various Chinese words and their translations for the curious American. Few Americans went so far as to learn Chinese. Jerome Millard was a rare exception.
Many Chinese merchants learned enough English to conduct business with local whites, or they employed a young clerk who learned enough to do so. Most were barely proficient in English, learning key words and phrases but rarely grammar. Often they inserted English words into Cantonese sentence structure. For example, Jung Ah Sing, a gold digger in Victoria, wrote a journal while imprisoned after a knife fight. Because the journal was actually a brief attesting to his innocence, he wrote in English: “My buy that hatchet that day months of January 1867 Cochran Diggings Chinamen gone away sell the my, my buy that hatchet that time my been Chinamen tent go home.” (“I bought that hatchet in January 1867 from Chinamen at Cochran Diggings. They were moving away and sold it to me. Then I left the Chinamen’s tent and went home.”)
Missionaries in California offered English classes to bring Chinese to Christianity, a strategy that attracted many students but few converts. The Rev. William Speer conceded that the young men who came for English classes stayed long enough to learn a few words and phrases. It would be fairer to say that, apart from well-educated men like Yuan Sheng and Lowe Kong Meng, most Chinese communicated with Euro-Americans not really in English but in pidgin. The limits of pidgin were most clearly displayed when Chinese tried to express themselves in the courtroom and in other legal matters, usually to sad outcomes.
It was necessary, therefore, to use interpreters when there was important business to conduct. The larger huiguan had “linguists” on their staffs to assist individual members as well as to represent the association to mainstream society. San Francisco’s police courts employed on an ad hoc basis not only Chinese but also French, German, Russian, and Spanish interpreters, reflecting the city’s international population. But even in San Francisco, few Chinese could speak English well enough to meet the needs of the police and the courts; the situation did not improve until a second generation of Chinese Americans came of age in the 1870s.
During the 1850s and ’60s, the city’s interpreters included Euro-American missionaries and educated Chinese merchants. Yuan Sheng frequently appeared in court when Chinese faced criminal charges and acted as both interpreter and as advocate. In one case of larceny, for example, Yuan successfully persuaded the judge to discharge A-He, who was accused of stealing ten dollars, on grounds that he was a “crazy man.” Yuan promised to send him back to China.
In Australia the goldfield commissioners in each district hired Chinese interpreters and “scribes” to support the heavy work of issuing mining licenses and compliance with goldfield regulations. Two brothers, Ho A Low (He Yale) and Ho A Mei (He Yamei), were typical of the first Chinese interpreters in Victoria. They had been educated at the Anglo-Chinese school at the London Missionary Society station at Malacca. Ho A Low first came to Victoria as a missionary worker in 1857 and was fast recruited to work as an interpreter by the Beechworth resident warden. Both brothers held positions as interpreters, but neither stuck with the job.
Far Outliers 