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: 9780759100008
• ISBN10: 0759100004
• Format: Hardcover
• 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	p. viii
List of Tables	p. x
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Chinese in America: The Politics of Polarity	p. 1
Defying Stereotypes: the Earliest Arrivals
The Social Origins of Early Chinese Immigrants: A Revisionist Perspective	p. 21
Chinese Placer Mining in the United States: An Example from American Canyon, Nevada	p. 37
To Inscribe the Self Daily: The Discovery of the Ah Quin Diary	p. 54
Discrimination and Exclusion Across America
Exploring New Frontiers in Chinese American History: The Anti-Chinese Riot in Milwaukee, 1889	p. 77
Riot in Unionville, Nevada: A Turning Point	p. 91
Telling Their Own Stories: Chinese Canadian Biography as a Historical Genre	p. 106
Livelihood in the New World
The Recurrent Image of the Coolie: Representations of Chinese American Labor in American Periodicals, 1900-1924	p. 124
The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Fisheries in California	p. 140
The Seaweed Gatherers on the Central Coast of California	p. 156
The Five Eras of Chinese Medicine in California	p. 174
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	p. 195
Between Two Worlds: The Zhigongtang and Chinese American Funerary Rituals	p. 217
Family and Culture in the Control of the Delinquent Chinese Boy in America	p. 239
Unbound Feet: A Metaphor for the Transformation of the Chinese Immigrant Female in Chinese American Literature	p. 260
Nationalism, Orientalism, and an Unequal Treatise of Ethnography: The Making of The Good Earth	p. 274
Establishing a Chinese American Identity
The "In Search of Roots" Program: Constructing Identity through Family History Research and a Journey to the Ancestral Land	p. 293
Ah Quin: One of San Diego's Founding Fathers	p. 308
Contesting Identities: Youth Rebellion in San Francisco's Chinese New Year Festivals, 1953-1969	p. 329
Mothers' "China Narrative": Recollection and Translation in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife	p. 351
Finding the Right Gesture: Becoming Chinese American in Fae Myenne Ng's Bone	p. 365
Chinese America: Settled
Archaeological Investigations of Life within the Woolen Mills Chinatown, San Jose	p. 381
The Chinese Immigrants in Baja California: From the Cotton Fields to the City, 1920-1940	p. 399
The Urban Pattern of Portland, Oregon's First Chinatown	p. 416
The Diverse Nature of San Diego's Chinese American Communities	p. 434
Index	p. 449
About the Contributors	p. 457
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.