Cool Cool Coolie

A brief history of my favorite anti-Asian slur

Content warning: racial slurs

We were walking down Atlantic Avenue trying to salvage a rental car situation when I mentioned the word “coolie” as being a racial slur against East Asians. My Indian American boyfriend looked shocked and protested, “No, that’s a racial slur against South Asians.”

We debated for a block, drawing some stares from a coffee shop’s outdoor seating area before he pulled out his phone and Googled it. To our astonishment, we were both right.

In my short lifetime I’ve been called “chink,” “Oriental,” “ching-chong,” and of course, serenaded with the classic “me love you long time.” The stupider the slur, the more it hurts. The gap-toothed childhood bully pulling back their eyelids, the drunken Ohio State football fan yelling “Nihao” at me as I climb onto a yellow school bus — those moments sink into the folds of your brain.

But nobody has ever called me a “coolie.” It’s an old-timey slur I’ve only heard used in historical contexts to refer to Chinese workers in the Old West. And old-timey slurs feel like relics of a bygone era, more quaint and confusing than offensive, easily forgiven. But even now-impotent words once carried power, and the history of the power contained in “coolie” is surprisingly complex.

Contemporary China and India have little in common except very large populations, a keen interest in the Himalayas, and governments who want to quash religious minorities. They both hate the way the other country makes its rice (give me short grain or give me bread!) and the way the other country drinks its tea (put milk and sugar in Chinese tea and I will throw the teapot at you).

But not too long ago, China and India had one big thing in common: the British really wanted all their stuff. The British came to India and were like “wow, spices! Maybe this will brighten up our dreary, very boring boiled peas.” So in classic British fashion, they invaded India and violently exploited the vast majority of its population to produce the things that the British wanted from India, like spices.

At the same time, Britain had been trying to slide into China’s DMs for ages. Britain was like “hey girl gimme a sip of your hot, hot tea ;) ;)” and China was all “I don’t want no scrub, a scrub is an empire who can’t get no tea from me.” So naturally, Britain got China addicted to hard drugs and used that as an opportunity to seize its ports, destabilize its government, and go ham on its resources. 

Among the resources that the British Empire snatched up in India and China was labor: cheap or free indentured labor a step up from slavery only in name. Britain abolished slavery in 1833, but its grand colonial ambitions still required exploiting lots of people for free labor, so the British called their not-slaves “coolies.” 

“Coolie” derives from the Hindi/Urdu word quli, meaning “laborer,” itself a borrow word from the Turkish qul, meaning “slave.” Chinese and Indian coolies, though not technically slaves, were often tricked, kidnapped, or coerced into signing exploitative contracts, then transported all over the world to other parts of the British Empire and forced to work in dangerous, unforgiving conditions. They rarely lived to see the end of their contracts if they even made it across the ocean alive. Coolie trade was not legally defined as slavery, but in practice it pretty much was.

Then, when the American colonies dumped King George like yesterday’s monarch, Chinese seeking work and fleeing the poverty inflicted by the Opium Wars eventually made their way to America, where the formerly British folk naturally called them “coolies.” However, since most of these Chinese laborers came voluntarily instead of being kidnapped and brought over (though many were), Americans did everything they could to keep them out.

In 1862, California passed the Anti-Coolie Act, which taxed Chinese miners up to roughly 83% of their income. America decided that wasn’t enough, so in 1871, 500 white miners burned and lynched, en masse, the Chinese community of Los Angeles. And that wasn’t enough, because shortly afterward, Congress passed the Page Act in 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. And that wasn’t enough, because white settlers kept on massacring Chinese immigrants. And after a while, white Americans stopped massacring Chinese immigrants but started designing Orientalist clothes with the cute and quaint and totally-not-racist names “coolie hat” and “coolie coat.” Eventually, “coolie” fell out of use and racists decided they liked “chink” better anyway.

But “coolie” is still my favorite slur for two reasons.

First, there’s an incredible phono-semantic match for “coolie” in Chinese, kǔlì, which means “bitter strength” or “hard labor.” Phono-semantic matches are extra-fancy borrow words that translate both the sound and the meaning of a word into a language that’s adopting it. Chinese phono-semantic matches are always fun — Subway is translated into sàibǎiwèi, or “try a hundred flavors,” — but kǔlì feels pretty perfect. And secondly, even though “coolie” is a reminder of when Britain enslaved a bunch of Indian and Chinese people and called them mean names too, it’s also a reminder of what Asian Americans today have in common: we fucking won. 

The fact that I, a descendant of rural Chinese farmers, and my boyfriend, a descendant of Tamilian landlords were born in, met in, and make money in America is a huge victory for those who came before us. Yeah, racism is still a thing. China virus anyone? But we’re not walking uphill both ways anymore. Those who came before were taken from their homelands and denied their dignity and the fruits of their labor. When they tried to claim a morsel of the prosperity created by their countries’ stolen resources, they were met with every kind of racism, violence, and threat of expulsion. But we their descendants are still here. We are living. We are thriving, despite what names others may call us. And that’s pretty cool.

~~~

P.S.: kuli is also an imperative form of kul, the Moroccan Arabic word for “to eat.” Moroccans love to tell their guests to eat. When I lived in Morocco, people would tell me every day to “kuli kuli kuli,” and I would. I gained a lot of weight, but I had a lot of fun doing it. Maybe that’s part of why the word feels so fluffy and harmless to me. Like, are you calling me a laborer/slave or are you inviting me to eat more delicious food?

P.P.S: We did not salvage that rental car situation.