Sweet Cakes, Long Journey: The Chinatowns of Portland, Oregon

by Wong, Marie Rose

• ISBN13: 9780295983837
• ISBN10: 0295983833
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-06-30
• Publisher: Univ of Washington Pr

Summary

Around the turn of the twentieth century, and for decades thereafter, Oregon had the second largest Chinese population in the United States. In terms of geographical coverage, Portland's two Chinatowns (one an urban area of brick commercial structures, one a vegetable-gardening community of shanty dwellings) were the largest in all of North America.Marie Rose Wong chronicles the history of Portland's Chinatowns from their early beginnings in the 1850s until the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1940s, drawing on exhaustive primary material from the National Archives, including more than six thousand individual immigration files, census manuscripts, letters, and newspaper accounts. She examines both the enforcement of Exclusion Laws in the United States and the means by which Chinese immigrants gained illegal entry into the country.The spatial and ethnic makeup of the combined "Old Chinatown" afforded much more contact and accommodation between Chinese and non-Chinese people than is usually assumed to have occurred in Portland, and than actually may have occurred elsewhere.Sweet Cakes, Long Journeyexplores the contributions that Oregon's leaders and laws had on the development of Chinese American community life, and the role that the early Chinese immigrants played in determining their own community destiny and the development of their Chinatown in its urban form and vernacular architectural expression.Sweet Cakes, Long Journeyis an original and notable addition to the history of Portland and to the field of Asian American studies.Marie Rose Wongis an assistant professor specializing in urban design at the Institute of Public Service, Seattle University.

Author Biography

Marie Rose Wong is an assistant professor in the Institute of Public Service, Seattle University.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xix
Introduction	3	(6)
The Nineteenth-Century American City	9	(20)
The Chinese Presence in Oregon	29	(46)
Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in Oregon	75	(74)
Peopling the Chinese Community of Oregon	149	(55)
This Place Called Chinatown	204	(59)
Epilogue: Ghettos, Enclaves, and Non-Claves	263	(8)
Appendix: Occupations of Portland's Chinese, 1860--1910	271	(4)
Notes	275	(36)
Bibliography	311	(12)
Index	323