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John M. Carroll, Elizabeth Sinn. Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1491–1492, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1491
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Anyone familiar with Hong Kong knows that the region's history has been closely linked to that of California. It was hardly a coincidence that director Wong Kar-wai interspersed the 1960s song California Dreamin' throughout his 1994 drama Chungking Express. In the film, two of the lead characters plan a dinner date at the California Restaurant in Hong Kong, but one is stood up because the other decides to try her luck in the real California, some 8,000 miles away. No one, however, has explored the historical links between Hong Kong and California as thoroughly and as innovatively as Elizabeth Sinn does in Pacific Crossing.
In the most important book so far on Hong Kong and Chinese emigration, Sinn shows both how the California Gold Rush changed Hong Kong's destiny and how much Hong Kong mattered for California. Expanding upon her concept of Hong Kong as an “in-between place,” Sinn examines three networks that linked Hong Kong with California: emigration, the export of opium, and the repatriation of human remains to China. The Gold Rush transformed Hong Kong “from a small-scale entrepôt of goods into a large-scale entrepôt of people” (p. 90). In the United States, Hong Kong quickly became associated with high-quality opium; almost every ship that left Hong Kong for San Francisco carried opium. California newspapers promoted “genuine” Hong Kong-prepared opium until the early twentieth century, showing how “crucial the Hong Kong stamp was for marketing the product” (p. 216). With Hong Kong serving as a “pivotal point” (p. 265) between emigrants and their home villages in China, where they hoped to be reburied if they died in the United States, the repatriation of bones became a possibility even for ordinary laborers and an important feature of Chinese emigration to California. “To a large extent,” Sinn concludes, “the Pacific became a Cantonese ocean” (p. 297).
