Still Climbing, Still Digging: A Review Essay

The Chinese in America: A History from Gold Mountain to the New Millennium, Edited by Susie Cassel (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2002);

At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943, by Erika Lee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003);

Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943, by Madeline Y. Hsu (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); and

Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown, by Nayan Shah (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

In recent years, a number of scholars engaged in the study of the Chinese immigrant and Chinese American historical experience have produced a smart pile of studies that have greatly enhanced our understanding of the Chinese American past. These scholars have pursued a variety of avenues of inquiry utilizing a range of disciplines from history and intellectual history, studies of material culture, gender and sexuality, cultural studies, literary analysis, and transnationalism. In addition, they have utilized a wealth of new sources, examining immigration records in newly-opened archives, diaries, newspapers, and increasingly, Chinese-language materials. This essay reviews a few of these new studies in order to provide an overview of how the field of Chinese American history has evolved in recent years and to suggest directions for future studies.

The Chinese in America: A History from Gold Mountain to the New Millenium, edited by Susie Lan Cassel, collects twenty-four essays from the Sixth Chinese American Conference held in San Diego (July 9-11, 1999), hosted by the San Diego Chinese Historical Society. Over the years, this conference, organized and hosted by local Chinese American historical societies, has attracted a welcomed diversity of participants ranging from community activists, public historians, archaeologists, literary scholars, and other academics. This compilation is a good example of the variety of areas in which researchers of the Chinese American experience are working. Arranged in six sociohistorical units, these essays trace Chinese migration to Canada, the United States, and Mexico as they variously offer studies in archaeology, labor history, anti-Chinese violence, literary studies, stereotypes and representation, Chinese social organizations, literary theory, and urban studies. Since space prohibits full treatment of all of the essays, I will touch mainly on those that offer new or particularly insightful historical perspectives on the Chinese American experience, especially those that acknowledge the transnational nature of those experiences.

In the first chapter, for example, Haiming Liu reminds us that Chinese immigrants of the nineteenth century were not "from the lowest social class" and that they did not necessarily come to America in a "desperate escape from poverty and hunger," nor can they be viewed in the same "assimilationist" model in which many European immigrants often are (21). He also rejects the notion that most early Chinese immigrants were illiterate, pointing out that scholars of Chinese history have long acknowledged that Chinese commoners in the nineteenth century were generally far more literate than many had previously believed. His assertion of higher levels of literacy than is often accorded to early Chinese immigrants reinforces the position that many of us have taken in encouraging our colleagues in Chinese American history to pay greater attention to Chinese history and the rich body of late-Qing scholarship. In order to have a fuller understanding of Chinese American history, we need to have clearer sense of the China from which the immigrants came. (This should apply to the study of other Asian American immigrant groups as well.) If Chinese American history starts only when Chinese arrive on these shores, we will fail to understand the complexity of their motivations to emigrate and the material and ideological backgrounds from which they came and which they brought to the United States, as well as the continued transnational relationship between immigrants and those in China.

Jane Leung Larson's essay on the Baohuanghui (which she translates as The Chinese Empire Reform Association, while...