Most Chinese immigrants to Singapore fare far…

Most Chinese immigrants to Singapore fare far less well than Seah or Hoo.

If they survive the rigors of the voyage, they are forced to work at hard labor for a year or more to pay off their passage.

Some are sent directly to the gambier plantations or even to the tin mines of the Malay Peninsula.

Others are sent to toil on the docks or become construction workers.

After paying off their passage, they begin earning a meager wage, which, unless diverted for opium or gambling debts, is sent as a remittance to families back in China.

Wives are in short supply, since very few Chinese women had come to Singapore in the first few decades of the settlement.

Even by the mid- 1860s, the ratio of Chinese men to women will be fifteen to one.