History of Chinese Americans

Chinese immigration to the United States has come in three major waves with the first beginning in the early 19th century. For almost two centuries, the history of Chinese immigration to the United States has seen both hardship and success.

The Chinese were the earliest Asians to arrive in large numbers from the mid-19th century, principally as laborers, notably on the transcontinental railroad (such as the Central Pacific Railroad) and the mining industry, and were long victims of racial discrimination. While industrial employers were eager to get this new and cheap labor, the ordinary white public was stirred to anger by the presence of this "yellow peril." Political party caucuses, labor unions, and other organizations railed against the immigration of yet another "inferior race." Newspapers condemned the policies of employers, and even church leaders decried the entrance of these aliens into what was seen as a land for whites only. So hostile was the opposition that in 1882 the U.S. Congress finally passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which forbade the immigration from China first for ten years. Later this law was extended through the Geary Act in 1892. The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by Congress in 1882, was the only U.S. law ever to prevent immigration and naturalization on the basis of race. Korean, Indian, and Japanese laborers then later replaced the Chinese. These laws also prevented the reunion of families as the thousands of Chinese men already living in America had left China without their wives and children; anti-miscegenation laws in many states prohibited Chinese men from marrying whites.

In 1924 the law barred further entries of Chinese; those already in the United States had been ineligible for citizenship since the previous year. Also by 1924, all Asian immigrants (except people from the Philippines, which had been annexed by the United States in 1898) were fully excluded by law, denied citizenship and naturalization, and prevented from marrying Caucasians or owning land. Only by 1943 was Chinese immigration again allowed to the USA — by way of the Magnuson Act — thereby repealing 61 years of official racial discrimination in U.S. immigration history against the Chinese, although large scale Chinese immigration did not occur until 1965 when the Immigration Act lifted national origin quotas.

After World War II, general anti-Asian prejudice diminished, and Chinese, along with others such as the Japanese and Vietnamese, have adjusted and advanced. Today, the Chinese now make up the largest ethnic group of Asian-Americans (about 22%), and have confounded earlier expectations that they would form an indigestible mass in American society. For example, many Chinese Americans have American nationality but many may know little or nothing about traditional Chinese culture, just as European Americans and African Americans may know little or nothing about the original cultures of their ancestors.

Expedition of Chinese missionaries in the 5th century

A group of Chinese Buddhist missionaries, led by priest Hui Shen, undertook a sea voyage to the east in the 5th century. Hui Shen’s descriptions of this trip was later documented in the Book of Liang (compiled in 635) part of the Twenty-Four Histories. Hui Shen described in it his discovery of a land mass called "Fusang". Some historians today say that it is an almost near certainty that this journey led the group to the west coast of the North American continent, although others have contended that Hui Shen went only as far as Korea or Japan.

Chinks

First wave (1800s to 1949)

Early to mid 19th century

File:Chinese Emigration to America b.jpg

Chinese emigration to America: sketch on board the steam-ship Alaska, bound for San Francisco

In the early 19th century, Chinese American history started in the United States of America with the Sino-U.S. maritime trade. Only a handful of Chinese, mostly sailors, started to come into the United States. Around [[1820], t]he first Chinese arrived in the United States. Subsequent immigrants that came from the 1820s up to the late 1840s were mainly men. This was much later followed by thousands - mostly from Guangdong province - who wanted to make their fortune in the 1849-era California gold rush. The Chinese did not however only come for the gold rush in California, but helped build the first transcontinental railway and for working the southern plantations after the Civil War.

Up until then, very few Chinese felt compelled to move to the United States. Life in China was generally sufficient and the North American west coast lay far away and with its sparseness offered very little incentive for a better existence. Nevertheless, in China, as well as in America, circumstances soon changed dramatically. After losing the First Opium War in 1840-1842, China was made give up its trade protectionism and to concede land settlements to the victorious foreign powers. With economic collapse, natural disasters and further foreign imperial expansion the situation in China deteriorated sharply by events most notably by the Second Opium War (1856-1860) and the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864), which led to more than 20 million deaths. The continued mass poverty and destruction drove many millions into exodus, with nearly all settling in Southeast Asia. Once the Cantonese sailors and merchants told stories to the inland Chinese about the Gold Rush that began in 1848, Chinese immigrates looking for gold from the SE Asia region began arriving in 1849. In the beginning, only a moderate amount of immigrates were heading to the "Gold Mountain", which the Chinese used to describe California.

In 1852, the ratio of Chinese males to females in California was 1,685:1. Due to the lack of Chinese women in the United States at that time, a number of men intermarried with Americans of European descent. However, the majority of male immigrants lived as bachelors.

Departure from China

Leaving China was illegal under the Qing Dynasty and any attempt to do so was punishable by death. As the power of the Qing Dynasty declined in the mid-19th century, the leaving of the country was still banned by law but was no longer widely enforced. In order to avoid as much as possible the troubles of leaving, most of the Chinese gold-seekers embarked on their transpacific voyage from the British colony of Hong Kong. More seldom they left from the Portuguese colony of Macau, which was a large transshipment center for bonded, unfree laborers (called ‘coolies’ as their contracts specified conditions which were approximated to servitude, slavery or peonage). Only merchants were able to take their wives and children overseas. The vast majority of Chinese migrants were peasants, farmers and craftsmen. Young men, who were usually married, left their wives and children behind since they at first had the intention of only staying in America temporarily. Wives also had another major reason for staying behind as they had a traditional role in looking after her parents-in-law. From the money which the men earned in America they sent a large part back to China. Because it was usual in China at the time to live in very socially confined social nets of families, unions and guilds, sometimes whole village communities and even regions (for instance, Taishan) sent nearly all or every of their young men to California. From the beginning of the California gold rush to 1882 – when an American federal law ended the Chinese influx – approximately 300,000 Chinese had arrived in the United States. Because the chances to earn more money were by far better in America than in China, these migrants often remained considerably longer than they had at first planned, despite of the increased xenophobia and hostility that was being directed against them.

Arrival in the USA

The Chinese emigrants booked their passages on ships with the Pacific Mail Steamship Company (founded 1848) and the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company (founded 1874). The money needed to fund their journey was mostly borrowed from relatives, district associations or from commercial lenders. The "credit-ticket system", used by immigrates who could not pay the travel expenses, can be described as advancing money to the immigrates by the agencies to cover the cost of the passage. Then, it was paid back by the laborers through their wages until the debt was liquidated. The credit-ticket system had long been used by indentured migrants from South China who left to work in what Chinese called Nanyang (South Seas), the region to the south of China that included the Philippines, the former Dutch East Indies, the Malay Peninsula, and Borneo, Thailand, Indochina, and Burma. The Chinese who left for Australia also used the credit-ticket system.

The entry of the Chinese into the U.S. was, to begin with, legal and uncomplicated and even had a formal judicial basis in 1868 with the signing of the Burlingame Treaty between the United States and China. But there were differences compared with the policy for European immigrants, in that if the Chinese migrants had children that were born in the USA, those children would automatically acquire American citizenship, but the immigrants themselves would remain as foreigners indefinitely. Unlike that with European immigrants the possibility of naturalization was withheld from them.

Although the newcomers arrived in America after an already established small community of their fellow compatriots, they experienced many culture shocks in what to them was a strange country. The Chinese immigrants neither spoke and understood English nor were familiar with western culture and life; they often came from the rural lands in China and therefore had difficulty in adjusting to and finding their way around big towns like San Francisco. The racism which they had met from the European Americans from the outset of their arrival increased continuously to the turn of the century and prevented with lasting effect their assimilation into mainstream American society; this in turn led to the creation, cohesion and cooperation of many Chinese benevolent associations and societies whose existence in the U.S. remained far into the 20th century as a necessity both for support and survival for the Chinese in America. There were also many other reasons that laid within the Chinese themselves that had obstructed and hindered their assimilation, notably their appearance. Under the rule of the Qing Dynasty, Han Chinese men were forced under the threat of beheading to follow the Manchu custom of dressing including shaving the front of their heads and combing the remaining hair into a queue. Historically, to the Manchus, the policy was both an act of submission and, in practical terms, an identification aid of friend from foe. Because Chinese immigrants returned as often as they could to China to see their family, they could not when in America cut off their often hated braids and then legally enter China again.

The first Chinese immigrants usually remained faithful to traditional Chinese beliefs, which were either Confucianism, ancestral worship, Buddhism or Daoism, while some others adhered to any of the various ecclesiastical religious doctrines. The number of the Chinese migrants who converted to Christianity remained at first low. They were mainly Protestants who had already been converted in China where foreign Christian missionaries (who had first come in the 19th century) had introduced Christianity with relatively minor success. Christian missionaries had also worked in the Chinese communities and settlements in America, but nevertheless their religious message found few who were receptive. It was estimated that during the first wave until the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, less than 20 percent of Chinese immigrants had accepted Christian teachings. Their difficulty in being integrated was also exemplified by the end of the first wave in the mid-20th century when only a minority of Chinese living in the U.S. could speak English.

Of the first wave of Chinese who came to America, few were women. In 1850, the Chinese community of San Francisco comprised of 4018 men and only 7 women. In 1855, women made up only two percent of the Chinese population in the U.S., and even in 1890 it had increased to only 4.8 percent. The lack of visibility of Chinese women in the general public was due partially to factors such as the cost of making the voyage when there was a lack of work opportunities for Chinese women in America, harsh working conditions and having the traditional female responsibility of looking after the children and extended family back in China. The only women who did go to America were usually the wives of merchants. Other factors were cultural in nature, such as having bound feet and not leaving the home. Another important consideration was that most Chinese men were worried that by bringing their wives and raising families in America they too would have been subjected to the same racial violence and discrimination which they themselves had faced. With the heavily uneven gender ratio, prostitution grew rapidly and the Chinese sex trade and trafficking became a lucrative business. From the documents of the 1870 U.S. Census, 61 percent of 3536 Chinese women in California had been classified as prostitutes as an occupation. The existence of Chinese prostitution was detected early, after which the police, legislature and popular press singled out Chinese prostitutes for criticism and were seen as further evidence of the depravity of the Chinese and the repression of their women by their patriarchal cultural values.

Laws passed by the California state legislature in 1866 that sought to curb the brothels and missionary activity by the Methodist and Presbyterian Churches helped reduce the number of Chinese prostitutes and in the 1880 U.S. Census documents only 24 percent of 3171 Chinese women in California were classified as prostitutes. Many of these women married Chinese Christians and formed some of the earliest Chinese-American families in mainland America. Nevertheless, American legislation used the prostitution issue to make the immigration of Chinese women far more difficult. On March 3, 1875, in Washington, D.C., the United States Congress enacted the Page Act that forbade all Oriental women who were considered "obnoxious" by representatives of U.S. consulates at their origins of departure. In effect, this lead to American officials to class many women as prostitutes, who actually were not, which greatly reduced the opportunities for all Oriental women to enter the United States.

Formation of Chinese American associations

See also the List of Chinese American Associations.

Societies in pre-1911 revolutionary China were distinctively collectivist – they were composed of close networks of extended families, unions, clan associations and guilds, where people had a duty to protect and help one another. Soon after the first Chinese had settled in San Francisco respectable Chinese merchants – the most prominent members of the Chinese community of the time – made the first assiduous effort to form social and welfare organizations (Chinese: "Kongsi") in order to help immigrants to locate others from their native towns, socialize, receive monetary aid and raise voices in community affairs. At first, these organizations only provided interpretation, lodgings and job finding services for newcomers. In 1849, the first Chinese merchants’ association was formed, but it did not last long. In less than a few years it petered out as its role was gradually replaced by a network of Chinese district and clan associations when more immigrants came in greater numbers. Eventually some of the more prominent district associations merged to become the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (more commonly known as the "Chinese Six Companies" because of the original six founding associations). It quickly became the most powerful and politically vocal organization to represent the Chinese not only in San Francisco but for the whole of California. In other large cities and regions in America similar associations were formed.

The Chinese associations mediated disputes and soon began participating in the hospitality industry, lending, health, and education and funeral services. The last being especially significant for the Chinese community because many of the immigrants for religious reasons laid value to burial or cremation (including the scattering of ashes) in China. In the 1880s many of the city and regional associations united to form a national CCBA, an umbrella organization, which defended the political rights and legal interests of the Chinese American community, particularly during times of anti-Chinese repression. By resisting overt discrimination enacted against them, the local chapters of the national CCBA helped to bring a number of cases to the courts from the municipal level to the Supreme Court to fight discriminatory legislation and treatment. The associations also took their cases to the press and worked with governmental institutions and the Chinese diplomatic missions to protect their rights. In the San Francisco Chinatown, the CCBA had effectively assumed the function of an unofficial local governing body, which even used privately-hired police or guards for protection of inhabitants at the height of the anti-Chinese excesses.

A minority of the Chinese immigrants did not join the CCBA as they were outcasts or lacked the clan or family ties to join more prestigious Chinese surname associations, business guilds, or legitimate enterprises. As a result, they organized themselves into their own secret societies - called Tongs - for mutual support and protection of their members. These first tongs modeled themselves upon the triads, underground organizations dedicated to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, and adopted their codes of brotherhood, loyalty, and patriotism.

Marginalized, poor, low educational levels and lacking opportunities than the wealthier Chinese, the tongs (unlike the triads) had formed without any clear political motives and soon found themselves involved in lucrative criminal activities, including extortion, gambling, people smuggling, and prostitution. Prostitution proved to be an extremely profitable business for the tongs, due to the high male-to-female ratio among the early immigrants. The tongs would kidnap or purchase females (including babies) from China and smuggle them over the Pacific Ocean to work in brothels and similar establishments. The tongs constantly battled over territory, profits, and women in feuds known as the tong wars, occurring between the 1850s to the 1920s, notably in San Francisco, Cleveland and Los Angeles.

California Gold Rush

Chinese, Gold Mining in California [illustration]: From Roy D. Graves pictorial collection

The first major immigration wave started around the 1850s. The West Coast of North America was being rapidly colonized during the California Gold Rush, while southern China suffered from severe political and economic instability due to the weakness of the Qing Dynasty government, internal rebellions such as the Taiping Rebellion, and external pressures such as the Opium Wars. As a result, many Chinese emigrated from the poor Toisanese- and Cantonese-speaking area in Guangdong province to the United States in order to work. The Chinese population rose from 2,716 in 1851 to 63,000 by 1871. 77% were located in California, with the rest scattered across the West, the South, and New England. Those in California tried their hand at mining for gold. Eventually, protest rose from white miners to eliminate the growing competition from foreign miners. From 1852 to 1870 (when the Civil Rights Act was passed), the California legislature enforced a series of taxes aimed at foreign miners who were not U.S. citizens. Given that the Chinese were ineligible for citizenship at that time and constituted the largest percentage of the non-white population, the tax revenue was generated almost exclusively by them.

Chinese immigrant workers building the railroad in the snow.

Chinese came to America in large numbers as individual miners during the 1849 California Gold Rush with 40,400 being recorded as arriving from 1851-1860, and again in the 1860s when the Central Pacific Railroad recruited large labor gangs, many on five year contracts, to build its portion of the Transcontinental Railroad. The Chinese laborers worked out well and thousands more were recruited until the railroad's completion in 1869. Chinese labor provided the massive labor needed to build the majority of the Central Pacific's difficult railroad tracks through the Sierra Nevada mountains and across Nevada. In the decade 1861-70 64,301 are recorded as arriving, followed by 123,201 in 1871-80 and 61,711 in 1881-1890.

Transcontinental railroad and Sacramento levees

Portrait of Chinese-American men who include Wa Chin and Tang Ya-Shun in Georgetown (Clear Creek County), Colorado. Dated 1890-1910.

After the gold rush wound down in the 1860s, the majority of the work force found jobs in the railroad industry. For the Central Pacific Railroad, hiring Chinese as opposed to whites kept labor costs down by 1/3, since the company would not pay their board or lodging. This type of steep wage inequality was commonplace at the time. Laborers used to enduring poor living conditions in their homeland were willing to sign up for prepaid long-term labor contracts to work in the U.S. Many gave the sum of money to their family and did not expect to be able to return home alive.

After construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869, many workers relocated and looked for employment elsewhere, such as in farming, manufacturing firms, garment industries, and paper mills. However, widespread anti-Chinese discrimination and violence from whites, including riots and murders, drove many into self-employment.

During the 1870s, thousands of Chinese laborers played an indispensable role in the construction of a vast network of earthen levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in California. These levees opened up thousands of acres of highly fertile marshlands for agricultural production. Many of the workers stayed in the area and made a living as farm workers or sharecroppers, until they were driven out during an outbreak of anti-Chinese violence in the mid-1890s.

Most came from Southern China looking for a better life; escaping a high rate of poverty left after the Taiping Rebellion. This immigration may have been as high as 90% male as most immigrated with the thought of returning home to start a new life. Those that stayed in America faced the lack of suitable Chinese brides as Chinese women were not allowed to emigrate in significant numbers after 1872. As a result, the mostly bachelor communities slowly aged in place with very low Chinese birth rates.

Settlement

1892 certificate of residence for Hang Jung: From Papers relating to Chinese in California

Across the country, Chinese immigrants clustered in Chinatowns. The largest population was in San Francisco. Some estimated over half of these early immigrants were from Taishan. At first, when surface gold was plentiful, the Chinese were well tolerated and well-received. As the easy gold dwindled and competition for it intensified, animosity to the Chinese and other foreigners increased. Organized labor groups demanded that California's gold was only for Americans, and began to physically threaten foreigners' mines or gold diggings. Most, after being forcibly driven from the mines, settled in Chinese enclaves in cities, mainly San Francisco, and took up low end wage labor such as restaurant work and laundry. A few settled in towns throughout the west. With the post Civil War economy in decline by the 1870s, anti-Chinese animosity became politicized by labor leader Dennis Kearney and his Workingman's Party as well as by Governor John Bigler, both of whom blamed Chinese "coolies" for depressed wage levels.

Discrimination

The flow of immigration (encouraged by the Burlingame Treaty of 1868) was stopped by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. This act outlawed all Chinese immigration to the United States and denied citizenship to those already settled in the country. Renewed in 1892 and extended indefinitely in 1902, the Chinese population declined until the act was repealed in 1943 by the Magnuson Act. Official discrimination extended to the highest levels of the U.S. government: in 1888, U.S. President Grover Cleveland, who supported the Chinese Exclusion Act, proclaimed the Chinese "an element ignorant of our constitution and laws, impossible of assimilation with our people and dangerous to our peace and welfare."

Many Western states also enacted discriminatory laws which made it difficult for Chinese and Japanese immigrants to own land and find work. Some of these Anti-Chinese laws were the Foreign Miners' License tax, which required a monthly payment of three dollars from every foreign miner who did not desire to become a citizen. Chinese could not become citizens because they had been rendered ineligible to citizenship by the 1790 federal law that reserved naturalized citizenship to white persons. This remained in place until voided by the Civil Rights Act of 1870. By then, California had collected five million dollars from the Chinese. Another was "An Act to Discourage Immigration to this State of Persons Who Cannot Become Citizens Thereof", which imposed on the master or owner of a ship a landing tax of fifty dollars for each passenger ineligible to naturalized citizenship. "To Protect Free White Labor against competition with Chinese Coolie Labor and to Discourage the Immigration of Chinese into the State of California" was another law that imposed a $2.50 tax per month on all Chinese residing in the state, except Chinese operating businesses, licensed to work in mines, or engaged in the production of sugar, rice, coffee or tea. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it unlawful for Chinese laborers to enter the United States for the next 10 years and denied naturalized citizenship to Chinese already here. Initially intended for Chinese laborers, it was broadened in 1888 to include all persons of the Chinese race.

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake allowed a critical change to Chinese immigration patterns. The practice known as "Paper Sons" was instituted. Chinese would declare themselves to be United States citizens whose records were lost in the earthquake. They would then prove children who would have the right of entry into the United States as citizens by birth.

The Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 banned all immigrations from Japan, China and most of Asia. Other laws included the Cubic Air Ordinance, which prohibited Chinese from occupying a sleeping room with less than 500 cubic feet of breathing space between each person, the Queue Law, which forced Chinese with long hair worn in a queue to pay a tax or to cut it, and Anti-Miscegenation Act of 1889 that prohibited Chinese men from marrying white women, and the Cable Act of 1922, which terminated citizenship for white American women who married an Asian man. The majority of these laws were not fully overturned until the 1950s, at the dawn of the modern American civil rights movement.

Second wave (1949 to the 1980s)

With the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and later the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, a second wave of Chinese immigration began. There was an increase in immigration of professionals from Mainland China, which began to allow for emigration in 1977. This group of Chinese tended to cluster in suburban areas and to avoid urban Chinatowns and speak fluent Mandarin in addition to their native dialects.

A third wave of recent immigrants consisted of undocumented aliens, chiefly from Fujian province who went to the United States in search of lower-status manual jobs. These aliens tend to concentrate in urban areas such as New York City and there is often very little contact between these Chinese and higher-educated professionals. While most speak some Mandarin, they mostly use Min, a group of dialacts used in Fujian province, which includes Taiwanese or Min Nan. The amount of immigration from this group has begun to decrease as the economic situation in Fujian improves. Typically, an immigrant from Fujian will pay a snakehead several tens of thousands of dollars to be transported to the United States, as well as room and board. The funds for the trip are provided by the immigrant's family and village. The immigrant will usually work for three years, the first two to pay off the debt and the third as profit.

Ethnic Chinese immigration to the United States since 1965 has been aided by the fact that the United States maintains separate quotas for Mainland China and Hong Kong. Absent from the list of Chinese Americans are immigrants from Hong Kong, who because of immigration law, tended to immigrate to Canada.

Third wave (1980s to today)

In the 1980s, there was widespread concern by the PRC over a brain drain as graduate students were not returning to the PRC. This exodus worsened after the Tiananmen protests of 1989.

Many immigrants from the PRC benefited from the Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992 which granted permanent residency status to immigrants from the PRC. One unintended side effect of the law was that the primary beneficiaries of the law were undocumented Fujianese immigrants, who unlike the Chinese graduate students would have had no chance to gain permanent residency through normal means.

Statistics of the Chinese population in the United States (1840-2004)

Chinese population % in U.S. states (Year 2000); locations of the largest Chinatowns of the USA - (click to enlarge). Source: US Census 2000.

The table shows the ethnic Chinese population of the USA (including persons with mixed-ethnic origin).

Year	Total U.S. population	Of Chinese origin	Percentage
1840	17,069,453	not available	n/a
1850	23,191,876	4,018	0.02%
1860	31,443,321	34,933	0.11%
1870	38,558,371	64,199	0.17%
1880	50,189,209	105,465	0.21%
1890	62,979,766	107,488	0.17%
1900	76,212,168	118,746	0.16%
1910	92,228,496	94,414	0.10%
1920	106,021,537	85,202	0.08%
1930	123,202,624	102,159	0.08%
1940	132,164,569	106,334	0.08%
1950	151,325,798	150,005	0.10%
1960	179,323,175	237,292	0.13%
1970	203,302,031	436,062	0.21%
1980	226,542,199	812,178	0.36%
1990	248,709,873	1,645,472	0.66%
2000	281,421,906	2,432,585	0.86%
2004 (Estimation of the US Census)	285,691,501	3,353,486	1.17%

See also

• Asian American Immigration History
• Chinese emigration, Overseas Chinese
• Immigration to the United States

Further reading

Introductions and general history:

• Chinese Immigration and the Chinese in the United States, Records in the Regional Archives of the National Archives and Records Administration. Compiled by Waverly B. Lowell. Reference Information. Paper 99. 1996.
• Jean Pfaelzer. (2007) Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans. (Random House). ISBN 1400061342
• Michael Teitelbaum (Author), Robert Asher (Editor). (2004) Chinese Immigrants (Immigration to the United States). ISBN 0816056870
• David M. Brownstone, The Chinese-American Heritage: New York, Oxford (Facts on File), 1988, ISBN 0-8160-1627-5
• Iris Chang, The Chinese in America. A Narrative History: Penguin, 2004 (Nachdruck), ISBN 0142004170
• Ruthanne Lum McCunn, An Illustrated History of the Chinese in America, San Francisco (Design Enterprises) 1979, ISBN 0-932538-01-0
• Him Mark Lai, Becoming Chinese American. A History of Communities and Institutions: AltaMira Press, 2004, ISBN 0759104581
• Dana Ying-Hui Wu, Jeffrey Dao-Sheng Tung, Coming to America. The Chinese-American Experience, Brookfield, CT (The Millbrook Press) 1993, ISBN 1562942719

Specific time periods:

• Lucy M Cohen, Chinese in the Post-Civil War South: A People Without History: Louisiana State University Press, 1984, ISBN 0807124575
• Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006, ISBN 0807854484
• Xiaojian Zhao, Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940–1965: Rutgers University Press, 2002, ISBN 0813530113

Special topics:

• Huping Ling, Surviving on the Gold Mountain. A History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives: State University of New York Press, 1998, ISBN 0791438643
• Judy Yung, Unbound Feet. A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco: University of California Press, 1995, ISBN 0520088670

Autobiographies and novels:

• Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Vintage 1989 (Neuausgabe), ISBN 0679721886
• Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club, Putnam Adult 1989, ISBN 0399134204
• Laurence Yep, Dragonwings. Golden Mountain Chronicles. 1903, (HarperTrophy) 1977, ISBN 0064400859
• Teresa Le Yung Ryan, Love Made of Heart, Kensington Publishing Corporation (Neuausgabe), ISBN 0758202172

Documentaries

• Becoming American. The Chinese Experience (a three-part documentary film by Bill Moyers about the history of the Chinese immigration into the USA), 2003 Website

External links

• Chinese Historical Society of America
• Chinese Historical and Cultural Project, founded in 1987 as a non-profit organization to promote and preserve Chinese American and Chinese history and culture through community outreach activities.