-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
K. Scott Wong, Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943: A Trans-Pacific Community. By Yong Chen. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. xviii, 392 pp. $45.00, isbn 0-8047-3605-7.), Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 3, December 2001, Page 1103, https://doi.org/10.2307/2700474
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
This impressively researched study of San Francisco's Chinatown is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the history of the Chinese in America. Using a wide variety of Chinese and Englishlanguage sources, including local gazetteers from China, diaries, newspaper articles and advertisements, and a wealth of secondary sources, Yong Chen attempts to reconstruct the social and cultural world of Chinese immigrants from the gold rush era through the exclusion period, which ended in 1943 when the United States and China were allies during World War II. Most important, Chen provides a Chinese immigrant perspective of Chinese America rather than focusing on white Americans' impressions of the Chinese American community, as did many earlier studies.
Chen presents San Francisco Chinatown as a transPacific community with its residents in frequent contact with their home villag es. This transPacific contact allowed for a degree of continuity among separated families, the exchange of goods and ideas, and knowledge of and involvement in sociopolitical developments in both China and San Francisco. This can best be seen in the Chinese and Chinese American participation in the 1905 Chinese boycott of American goods in China in response to American mistreatment of Chinese immigrants in America, the Chinese revolution of 1911, and World War II. He also attempts to refute two commonly held assumptions about early Chinese immigration: first, “that Chinese emigration to America was a desperate flight from impoverishment and other problems at home, and, second, that nearly all Chinese women in America were prostitutes.” By selectively citing local g azet teers, he depicts a south China that supported a vibrant economy, one that enabled the scope of emig ration to the United States and elsewhere. As for the question of prostitution, Chen points out that the antiChinese movement chose to depict all Chinese immigrant women as prostitutes while many, in fact, worked as “shoe binders, servants, tailors, launderers, and gardeners.”
