In this compelling study that will force readers to rethink the distinction between free and unfree migrations and the nature of the contract, Lisa Yun uncovers some of the “voices” of the tens of thousands of Chinese indentured laborers brought to Cuba in the nineteenth century. With the end of slavery looming, planters and capitalists turned to Asian indentured labor for their Caribbean colonies. Private merchants controlled the importation of Chinese to Spain's colony of Cuba, where African slavery did not end until 1886. From 1847 to 1874 over 142,000 Chinese indentured laborers were kidnapped or coerced into signing eight-year contracts for work in Cuba. Once at sea, one out of eight coolies died on the voyage from inclement weather, disease, cruel treatment, and suicide (the mortality rate was even higher than the African slave trade). Coolies worked mostly on sugar plantations and railroads, but also in small businesses and family households. Despite their legal contracts, they labored under conditions akin to slavery.

The Coolie Speaks provides background on the coolie trade and on the tradition of slave testimony, as well as a chapter on the life and writing of a Cuban-born author of Chinese and African descent. The centerpiece of this study is Yun's analysis of the coolie testimonies produced for an international commission sent to investigate the conditions of indentured laborers in Cuba in 1874. The commission's report reveals repeated violations of the contract. However, Yun moves beyond the official report to access the complete body of oral and written testimonies (depositions and petitions), which were eventually compiled and published in China. She explains that the original testimonies “reveal more radical views” than the 1876 published report, which “obscured the testimonies as whole narratives fashioned by the coolies” (106). The testimonies offer details of the coolies' social background, recruitment and passage, shipboard mutinies, treatment, and resistance. The Chinese also expressed concerns related to permanent separation from their homeland: obligations to elderly parents and young children, inability to communicate with family, betrayal by kin and acquaintances, loss of lineage, and debasement of proper death ritual.

Yun brings her training as a literary scholar to her analysis of the form of the petitions and addresses the possibility for human error in the transcription process. The coolies made use of Qing formal literary and judicial conventions and at times employed a flowery style, part of a “strategy to establish epistemic authority and persuade elite authorities to read their petitions” (76). For example, a group of ninety-six petitioners closed with a poetic description of themselves as “youths trapped in a land faraway from home; adults wasting their lives in a foreign country” (76).

For students of law and history, this book offers an important intervention into the nature of the contract in labor relations. In dialogue across disciplines with scholars such as Amy Dru Stanley, Robert Steinfeld, Carole Pateman, Tommy Lott, and Charles Mills, Yun demonstrates that the contract functioned as the main tool for disciplining and deferring freedom for Chinese laborers: “The contract, a representation of their allegedly voluntary participation in a scheme of labor, suggested the elusive promise of eventual freedom yet created conditions for continual bondage” (111). A major preoccupation of the coolie testimonies were the “recontracting” regulations that forced Chinese who completed their term of service or who came to Cuba after 1860 to sign another contract (or be placed in a depot). Contracts of dead Chinese were transferred to other coolies, Chinese were forced to take another Chinese person's name, and coolies were continually bought, sold, and circulated until death in a series of practices that resulted in a system of “mobile slaves.” Evidence of “rituals of terror and abasement” that Yun has extracted from the coolies' testimony further suggests a counternarrative to the interpretation of Asian migrants to the Americas as voluntary and transitional (155). Entrenched within Cuban slavery, white owners racialized the abuse and humiliation of coolies. One Chinese described being locked up and forced to “bark like dogs and bleat like sheep” (153). Another owner forced coolies who complained about being too sick to work to drink the urine of female black slaves.

The Coolie Speaks will be foundational for any scholar interested in the question of indentured laborers as a transition from a slave to free economy and the nature of the contract. We can also ask how deeper excavation in the historical archives of Cuba may reinforce the “coolie narratives” or uncover different aspects of the story. This study is an excellent addition to the curriculum in Latin American and Caribbean history, Chinese history, Asian American studies, international migration, legal history, and literary and textual analysis. The appendix offers a selection of translated testimonies that may be fruitfully used as primary sources in the classroom.