The Chinese in America A History from Gold Mountain to the New Millennium

by Cassel, Susie Lan; Liu, Haiming; Valentine, David; Jew, Victor; Rusco, Elmer R.; Lee, Nancy S.; Ling Tam, Shirley Sui; Bentz, Linda; Schwemmer, Robert V.; Young, Dolores; Bowen, William; Larson, Jane Leung; Chung, Sue Fawn; Zhang, Sheldon; Khaw-Posthuma,

• ISBN13: 9780759100015
• ISBN10: 0759100012
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-04-16
• Publisher: AltaMira Press

Summary

This new collection of essays demonstrates how a politics of polarity have defined the 150-year experience of Chinese immigration in America. Chinese-Americans have been courted as model workers by American business, but also continue to be perceived as perpetual foreigners. The contributors offer engrossing accounts of the lives of immigrants, their tenacity, their diverse lifeways, from the arrival of the first Chinese gold miners in 1849 into the present day. The 21st century begins as a uniquely Pacific Century in the Americas, with an increasingly large presence of Asians in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The book will be a valuable resource on the Asian immigrant experience for researchers and students in Chinese American studies, Asian American history, immigration studies, and American history.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	viii
List of Tables	x
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Chinese in America: The Politics of polarity	1	(20)
Susie Lan Cassel
PART I DEFYING STEREOTYPES: THE EARLIEST ARRIVALS
The Social Origins of Early Chinese Immigrants: A Revisionist Perspective	21	(16)
Haiming Liu
Chinese Placer Mining in the United States: An Example from American Canyon, Nevada	37	(17)
David Valentine
To Inscribe the Self Daily: The Discovery of the Ah Quin Diary	54	(23)
Susie Lan Cassel
PART II DISCRIMINATION AND EXCLUSION ACROSS AMERICA
Exploring New Frontiers in Chinese American History: The Anti-Chinese Riot in Milwaukee 1889	77	(14)
Victor Jew
Riot in Unionville, Nevada: A Turning Point	91	(15)
Elmer R. Rusco
Telling Their Own Stories: Chinese Canadian Biography as a Historical Genre	106	(18)
Nancy S. Lee
PART III LIVELIHOOD IN THE NEW WORLD
The Recurrent Image of the Coolie: Representations of Chinese American Labor in American Periodicals, 1900-1924	124	(16)
Shirley Sui Ling Tam
The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Fisheries in California	140	(16)
Linda Bentz
Robert Schwemmer
The Seaweed Gatherers on the Central Coast of California	156	(18)
Dolores K. Young
The Five Eras of Chinese Medicine in California	174	(21)
William M. Bowen
PART IV INFLUENCES: FROM OLD WORLD TO NEW WORLD
The Chinese Empire Reform Association (Baohuanghui) and the 1905 Anti-American Boycott: The Power of a Voluntary Association	195	(22)
Jane Leung Larson
Between Two Worlds: The Zhigongtang and Chinese American Funerary Rituals	217	(22)
Sue Fawn Chung
Family and Culture in the Control of the Delinquent Chinese Boy in America	239	(21)
Sheldon X. Zhang
Unbound Feet: A Metaphor for the Transformation of the Chinese Immigrant Female in Chinese American Literature	260	(14)
Bonnie Khaw-Posthuma
Nationalism, Orientalism, and an Unequal Treatise of Ethnography: The Making of The Good Earth	274	(19)
Zhiwei Xiao
PART V ESTABLISHING A CHINESE AMERICAN IDENTITY
The ``In Search of Roots'' Program: Constructing Identity through Family History Research and a Journey to the Ancestral Land	293	(15)
Albert Cheng
Him Mark Lai
Ah Quin: One of San Diego's Founding Fathers	308	(21)
Murray K. Lee
Contesting Identities: Youth Rebellion in San Francisco's Chinese New Year Festivals, 1953-1969	329	(22)
Chiou-ling Yeh
Mothers' ``China Narrative'': Recollection and Translation in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife	351	(14)
Yuan Yuan
Finding the Right Gesture: Becoming Chinese American in Fae Myenne Ng's Bone	365	(16)
Vivian Fumiko Chin
PART VI CHINESE AMERICA: SETTLED
Archaeological Investigations of Life within the Woolen Mills Chinatown, San Jose	381	(18)
R. Scott Baxter
Rebecca Allen
The Chinese Immigrants in Baja California: From the Cotton Fields to the City, 1920-1940	399	(17)
Catalina Velazquez Morales
The Urban Pattern of Portland, Oregon's First Chinatown	416	(18)
marie rose wong
The Diverse Nature of San Diego's Chinese American Communities	434	(15)
Ying Zeng
Index	449	(8)
About the Contributors	457