Remaking Chinese America

Remaking Chinese America PDF Author: Xiaojian Zhao
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813530116
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
In Remaking Chinese America, Xiaojian Zhao explores the myriad forces that changed and unified Chinese Americans during a key period in American history. Prior to 1940, this immigrant community was predominantly male, but between 1940 and 1965 it was transformed into a family-centered American ethnic community. Zhao pays special attention to forces both inside and outside of the country in order to explain these changing demographics. She scrutinizes the repealed exclusion laws and the immigration laws enacted after 1940. Careful attention is also paid to evolving gender roles, since women constituted the majority of newcomers, significantly changing the sex ratio of the Chinese American population. As members of a minority sharing a common cultural heritage as well as pressures from the larger society, Chinese Americans networked and struggled to gain equal rights during the cold war period. In defining the political circumstances that brought the Chinese together as a cohesive political body, Zhao also delves into the complexities they faced when questioning their personal national allegiances. Remaking Chinese America uses a wealth of primary sources, including oral histories, newspapers, genealogical documents, and immigration files to illuminate what it was like to be Chinese living in the United States during a period that--until now--has been little studied.

Remaking Chinese America

Remaking Chinese America PDF Author: Xiaojian Zhao
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813530116
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
In Remaking Chinese America, Xiaojian Zhao explores the myriad forces that changed and unified Chinese Americans during a key period in American history. Prior to 1940, this immigrant community was predominantly male, but between 1940 and 1965 it was transformed into a family-centered American ethnic community. Zhao pays special attention to forces both inside and outside of the country in order to explain these changing demographics. She scrutinizes the repealed exclusion laws and the immigration laws enacted after 1940. Careful attention is also paid to evolving gender roles, since women constituted the majority of newcomers, significantly changing the sex ratio of the Chinese American population. As members of a minority sharing a common cultural heritage as well as pressures from the larger society, Chinese Americans networked and struggled to gain equal rights during the cold war period. In defining the political circumstances that brought the Chinese together as a cohesive political body, Zhao also delves into the complexities they faced when questioning their personal national allegiances. Remaking Chinese America uses a wealth of primary sources, including oral histories, newspapers, genealogical documents, and immigration files to illuminate what it was like to be Chinese living in the United States during a period that--until now--has been little studied.

The New Chinese America

The New Chinese America PDF Author: Xiaojian Zhao
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813549125
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The 1965 Immigration Act altered the lives and outlook of Chinese Americans in fundamental ways. The New Chinese America explores the historical, economic, and social foundations of the Chinese American community, in order to reveal the emergence of a new social hierarchy after 1965. In this detailed and comprehensive study of contemporary Chinese America, Xiaojian Zhao uses class analysis to illuminate the difficulties of everyday survival for poor and undocumented immigrants and analyzes the process through which social mobility occurs. Through ethnic ties, Chinese Americans have built an economy of their own in which entrepreneurs can maintain a competitive edge given their access to low-cost labor; workers who are shut out of the mainstream job market can find work and make a living; and consumers can enjoy high quality services at a great bargain. While the growth of the ethnic economy enhances ethnic bonds by increasing mutual dependencies among different groups of Chinese Americans, it also determines the limits of possibility for various individuals depending on their socioeconomic and immigration status.

Transpacific Articulations

Transpacific Articulations PDF Author: Chih-ming Wang
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824839161
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
In 1854 Yung Wing, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Yale University, returned to a poverty-stricken China, where domestic revolt and foreign invasion were shaking the Chinese empire. Inspired by the U.S. and its liberal education, Yung believed that having more Chinese students educated there was the only way to bring reform to China. Since then, generations of students from China—and other Asian countries—have embarked on this transpacific voyage in search of modernity. What forces have shaped Asian student migration to the U.S.? What impact do foreign students have on the formation of Asian America? How do we grasp the meaning of this transpacific subject in and out of Asian American history and culture? Transpacific Articulations explores these questions in the crossings of Asian culture and American history. Beginning with the story of Yung Wing, the book is organized chronologically to show the transpacific character of Asian student migration. The author examines Chinese students’ writings in English and Chinese, maintaining that so-called “overseas student literature” represents both an imaginary passage to modernity and a transnational culture where meanings of Asian America are rearticulated through Chinese. He also demonstrates that Chinese student political activities in the U.S. in the late 1960s and 1970s—namely, the Baodiao movement that protested Japan’s takeover of the Diaoyutai Islands and the Taiwan independence movement—have important but less examined intersections with Asian America. In addition, the work offers a reflection on the development of Asian American studies in Asia to suggest the continuing significance of knowledge and movement in the formation of Asian America. Transpacific Articulations provides a doubly engaged perspective formed in the nexus of Asian and American histories by taking the foreign student figure seriously. It will not only speak to scholars of Asian American studies, Asian studies, and transnational cultural studies, but also to general readers who are interested in issues of modernity, diaspora, identity, and cultural politics in China and Taiwan.

Making and Remaking Asian America

Making and Remaking Asian America PDF Author:
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804766304
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This is the first comprehensive study of how U. S. immigration policies have shaped--demographically, economically, and socially--the six largest Asian American communities.

American Paper Son

American Paper Son PDF Author: Wayne Hung Wong
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252072634
Category : Chinese Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
During the height of racist anti-Chinese U.S. immigration laws, illegal aliens were able to come into the States under false papers identifying them as the sons of those who had returned to China to marry and have children. American Paper Son is the story of one such Chinese immigrant who came to Wichita, Kansas, in 1935 as a thirteen-year-old "paper son" to help in his father's restaurant there. This vivid first-person account addresses significant themes in Asian American history through the lens of Wong's personal stories. Wong served in one of the all-Chinese units of the 14th Air Force in China during World War II and he discusses the impact of race and segregation on his experience. After the war he found a wife in Taishan, brought her to the US, and became involved in the government's infamous Confession program (an amnesty program for immigrants). Wong eventually became a successful real estate entrepreneur in Wichita. Rich with poignant insights into the realities of life as part of a very small Chinese American population in a Midwestern town, this memoir provides an important new view of the Asian American experience away from the West Coast. Benson Tong adds a scholarly introduction and useful annotations.

The China Mystique

The China Mystique PDF Author: Karen J. Leong
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520244230
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Focusing on three women, Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong & Mayling Soong, this book studies the shifting images of China in American culture, particularly during the 1930s & 40s.

Chinese America

Chinese America PDF Author: Peter Kwong
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781595581198
Category : Chinese Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The definitive portrait of the Chinese experience in the United States, Chinese America charts 150 years of American history from the Chinese frontiersmen of the Wild West to the high-tech transnationals of today. In this magisterial, panoramic narrative, based on years of research and reporting across the United States and Asia, Kwong and Miscevic take us inside nineteenth-century mining camps, Chinese American nightclubs of the 1930s and 1940s, and today's booming "ethnoburbs," among other places. Hailed by Margaret Fung, the executive director of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, as "quite simply, the best book about the history of exclusion and injustice against Chinese immigrants and the role of Chinese Americans today," Chinese America is a fascinating and entirely original examination of an immigrant story too often rendered as a simple tale of triumph over adversity. Book jacket.

The First Suburban Chinatown

The First Suburban Chinatown PDF Author: Timothy Fong
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1439904634
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Ethnicity issues fuel internal strife as a community faces change.

Chinese and Americans

Chinese and Americans PDF Author: Xu Guoqi
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674966902
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Using culture rather than politics or economics as a reference point, Xu Guoqi highlights significant yet neglected cultural exchanges in which China and America have contributed to each other’s national development, building the foundation of what Zhou Enlai called a relationship of “equality and mutual benefit.”

Shaping and Reshaping Chinese American Identity

Shaping and Reshaping Chinese American Identity PDF Author: Jingyi Song
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739143093
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Shaping and Reshaping Chinese American Identity: New York's Chinese in the Years of the Depression and World War II explores the role played by Chinese Americans in New York in the 1930's who laid the foundation for future generations to fight for civil rights as American citizens. The stories of Chinese Americans during the Depression years and World War II are under-represented in the existing literature that has been confined to the early days of the settlement of Chinese Americans on the west coast of the United States. They were usually depicted as passive victims of exclusion as a result of Chinese Exclusion Laws. This book focuses on the active participation of the Chinese American in New York City in mainstream political, economic, and social life that helped them to forge new identity as Chinese Americans. Their active participation in federal and local elections as a means of claiming their rights as American citizens demonstrated their growing political consciousness. Chinese New Yorkers' support of both China and United States during the war reflected their dual identity as both Chinese and Americans. Their contributions to the war front and to the home front after Pearl Harbor eventually forced the reconsideration of the Chinese Exclusion Laws. The book concludes by relating the active participation of the Chinese in New York during the war years to the national movement for racial equality that resulted in new federal civil rights legislation.