The Children of Chinatown: Growing up Chinese American in San Francisco, 1850–1920 (review)

"Blind youngsters display ability before Senate Committee. Washington, D.C. April 9 [1937]. Blind children from the Maryland School for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind coaching Senator Claude Pepper, of Florida, in the art of operating a braille typewriter. The youngsters appeared before the senate subcommittee on education and labor, of which Senator Pepper is Chairman, as an example of what can be done for physically handicapped children if a bill sponsored by the International Society of Crippled Children is passed. The bill provides for the education of all types of physically handicapped children. It appropriates $1,158,000, of which $2,080,000 is an outright grant ($40,000 to each state), and $9,000,000 for matching; and $500,000 for administration of the act by the U.S. Office of Education. In the picture, left to right: Frances Wright, 8 years old, reading a braille book; Andrew Birmingham, 10 years old; Dr. John W. Studebaker, U.S. Commissioner of Education; […] Claude Pepper." Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Harris and Ewing Collection, LC-DIG-hec-22529.

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Wendy Jorae's The Children of Chinatown: Growing up Chinese American in San Francisco, 1850–1920 is more than a story of Chinese children's lives during this immensely destabilizing period of both Chinese and Chinese American history. In this ambitious and captivating study, Jorae demonstrates how diverse interests used representations of Chinese children and families for their broader agendas. This is as much a cultural history of the many meanings and uses of images of children of this period as it is a social history of children in San Francisco's Chinatown.

The Children of Chinatown is divided into six thematic chapters. Three of the chapters deal most directly with representations of children in the context of anti-immigration exclusion and the broader anti-Chinese lobby. The first chapter focuses on Chinese child immigrants. In this chapter, Jorae traces how tighter implementation of exclusion laws altered the demographics of child immigrants and argues that Chinese elites challenged these laws by drawing attention to the negative effects of quarantine and other enforcement procedures on Chinese children. Jorae's inquiries into the social and political uses of children continue in her second chapter, "Recentering the Chinese Family in Early Chinese American History," in which she challenges the prevailing assumptions about the social and cultural fabric of early Chinatown as a bachelor community of transient males with trans-Pacific loyalties. Jorae argues that Chinatown was populated with a numerically small but symbolically significant population of families with children who were celebrated by Chinese community leaders as examples of the shared values of Americans and immigrant Chinese. In both of these opening chapters, Jorae makes a convincing argument that representations of children played an important role in immigration and labor politics and also illuminates the immigration experience of Chinese and the effects of immigration policies on family life within San Francisco's Chinatown. In her final chapter, Jorae returns more directly to the theme of representation, arguing that Chinatown's commercial and political elites used images of Chinese children in their post-1906 earthquake reconstruction to promote an Orientalized image that would appeal to tourists, while simultaneously promoting the image of Americanized families of exemplary child-citizens.

The volume's other three chapters offer well-documented social histories of Chinese children's lives as experienced in three analytically discrete worlds: work, school, and the protectorate, or the reform institutions of missions and courts. Jorae is particularly intrepid in uncovering archival documents that give voice to children's experiences: she offers deft interpretations of sources which suggest agency on the part of children and parents seeking to defy obstacles to educational and economic opportunities. For example, by situating previously archived oral histories within the San Francisco Board of Education's...