Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900-1936 (review)

Inspired by recent works on diasporas and cultural globalization, the author sought a deeper understanding of Chinese migration and Chinese communities overseas through a transnational perspective. Critiquing past approaches as establishing a polarization between concepts that privileged the perspectives of the nations framing the two ends of migrant journeys and describing migrations as a kind of monodirectional movement and relocation, McKeown points out that phenomena such as return migration, global patterns, and institutions that facilitated the transnational circulation of goods, money, and people were rarely incorporated into the stories of particular groups. He feels that a global approach is essential in order fully to understand Chinese migrations and changes in migrant demographics, or the ebb and flow of migrations.

The book focuses on the Chinese diaspora from the Pearl River Delta region in southeast China, with Hong Kong as a hub, that gave rise to networks consisting of transnational families, villages, and institutions, as well as personal connections that enabled the circulation of goods, people, information, and profit. These developments were also influenced by changes in the Chinese government's attitude and the growth of diasporic nationalism and ethnicization among the Chinese overseas. Social institutions in the migrant communities were transferred, adapted, and modified. Those in Peru, Chicago, and Hawaii were, on the surface, strikingly different from each other.

In Peru, the Chinese established themselves quickly as respectable foreign residents capable of productively exploiting the material and human wealth of the country. In contrast, the Chinese in Chicago were isolated from the mainstream, but by fashioning themselves as exotica, they forged a relatively secure niche in the area. In Hawaii, the deterioration of the status of the Chinese immediately after the American annexation led the migrant elite to be more interested in the politics in China, partially in the hope that a revived China would increase local respect. However, by the 1920s, the Chinese began to redefine themselves as local ethnics to promote their interests in the context of a multicultural Honolulu.

According to the author, migration networks and processes cannot be understood in isolation from their manifestations in particular locations. But even though each Chinese community was different due to its accommodation to local factors, each was also manifesting different aspects of the same global history and the same history of Chinese migration.

The author distilled information from a wide range of English-, Spanish-, and Chinese-language sources. However, the work is laden with academic jargon. The work is also marred by some factual errors: The historical facts connected with the derivation of the Ningyang (1853) and Hehe huiguan (1862) from the Siyi Huiguan were cited erroneously (79). Xinning became Taishan in 1914, not "the 1930s," and Xiangshan became Zhongshan in 1925, not "1924" (63). "Mui King Chan" should have been Mui King-Chau (267).