Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and China, 1882-1943 (review)

In this book, Chinese American studies comes of age. As Madeline Hsu notes early on, the fields of Asian American and Asian studies have as yet been "critically unlinked" (p. 4). This highly detailed study of the Taishan County transnational community in China and the United States provides a model for how that linking can be creatively effected, and charts a welcome new course in Chinese American studies. As Hsu's analysis demonstrates so powerfully, "The histories of Taishan and American Chinese . . . cannot be considered complete unless they are written to encompass each other" (p. 92).

Taishan is, of course, the county of Guangdong Province from which the Chinatowns of North America were most frequently populated prior to the liberalization of U.S. immigration laws in 1965, at which time émigrés from Taishan constituted "well over half of all Chinese in the United States" (p. 3). Hsu documents dimensions of the social life of Taishan residents on both sides of the Pacific, as well as the "pre-electronic" institutions that mediated the relations between those at home and their expatriate relations.

In Taishan itself, her analysis reveals how dependence on remittances from abroad had become a way of life by the 1890s. That dependence allowed many households to build new houses and live high on the hog. Some of these households were headed by "Gold Mountain wives" (Jinshanpo), those "lucky" enough both to land a man with a job overseas and to live to survive their parents-in-law. Such women were envied for their relative wealth but also often became the object of local gossip, "as young women living without a husband in the house" (p. 44). Overseas remittances also allowed local schools to be constructed in large numbers, and the county town to install a variety of modern utilities and services.

But dependence also contributed to waste and ostentation and rising prices for all, as well as an overall decline in agricultural production and "a disturbing imbalance between the ability of Taishan residents to spend and the willingness to work" (p. 41). Finally, the concentrations of wealth in the county attracted large numbers of bandits for whom "Gold Mountain guests and their families were favored targets" (p. 50).

Dependence on overseas remittances also made Taishan particularly susceptible to world economic crises. The author documents how the Great Depression of the 1930s rippled through Taishan, causing great financial hardship, and led to the coining of a new term, nanqiao (literally "hardship expatriate"), to describe the unsuccessful overseas returnee. The county government of Taishan, "in a reversal of the accustomed flow of aid, raised money to establish a relief center" for unemployed returnees (p. 52).

The story of life in the "bachelor" communities of the United States is by now familiar. Their members were isolated from the mainstream by their often questionable immigration status, denied the right to naturalization as citizens even if legally admitted, forbidden to vote or marry "white" women, subjected to long hours of physical labor and economic hardship, and so on. But that story is given entirely new significance by Hsu's inclusion and analysis of the Taishan transnational dimension.

Regarding the institutions that embodied and maintained that transnational community, Hsu's account of the "Gold Mountain firms" (Jinshanzhuang) is noteworthy. Usually based in Hong Kong, these firms purveyed Chinese preserved foods, condiments, herbal medicines, books, and magazines to the Chinese communities in the United States, and were also the first institutions to handle the transfer of remittances and correspondence on behalf of Taishan expatriates there. Hsu's exceedingly detailed description of the process by which these firms effected remittance payments across the Pacific to the small towns and villages of Taishan is a major contribution to scholarship (pp. 35 ff.). Her analysis also demonstrates how these firms were able to resist efforts by...