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Patrick J. Healy and Ng Poon Chew. A Statement For Non-Exclusion (San Francisco, 1905) 255pp. First Edition. Original printed wrappers. Illustrated with photo of “Chinese Detention Shed, San Francisco”. Rare. WorldCat shows only three holdings, all in California state institutions.

Probably the first comprehensive argument against exclusion of Chinese immigrants by a Chinese-American who had himself immigrated to California from his native Canton to become the leading journalist of San Francisco Chinatown, founding editor of the Chung Sai Yat Po (Chinese Western Daily) newspaper, voice of the city’s affluent, literate Chinese merchant elite.

More than just a polemic, the book is a virtual history of troubled Chinese life in America from the Gold Rush to the “Era of Demagogism and Persecution”. A convert to Christianity, a Presbyterian minister in his youth, soon to become a devotee of Sun Yat Sen’s democratic Chinese revolution, Chew probably wrote the bulk of this book, though he may have thought it politic to have a Caucasian co-author. Healy was an enigmatic figure, a Irish-American who was both a shoemaker and would-be lawyer and the only white man to publicly speak in Sacramento against the exclusion legislation of the 1870s.