Founded during the Gold Rush years, San Francisco's Chinatown became the largest and most vibrant Chinese community in America, and helped shape white America's view of Asians in general. This is a detailed social and cultural history of the Chinese in San Francisco, relating the development of social and cultural institutions, from brothels to the powerful 'Six Companies'. Recapturing in vivid detail both the community's collective mentalities and some of its individual personalities, the author challenges myths of Chinese poverty driving emigration to California in the mid-nineteenth century, and of the prevalence of prostitution amongst Chinese women. Making imaginative use of a wide range of materials, including Chinese language newspapers, advertisements, handbills, and personal diaries, the author offers multidisciplinary analyses of such documents, showing the possibilities of extracting rich historical information from texts created for very different purposes.
Yong Chen is Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Introduction 1. Revisiting the pre-emigration Old World Part I. The Rise of Chinese San Francisco: 2. The 'first city' locating Chinese San Francisco 3. The social landscape of Chinese San Francisco 4. 'China in America': the world of ah Quin 5. Collective identity Part II. The Arrival of a True Trans-Pacific Community: 6. A time of anger and a time of hope: the 1905 boycott 7. A changing mentality, 1906 to 1913 8. The Americanness of the Trans-Pacific community between the wars 9. Persistence of Trans-Pacific ties 10. The road to 1943 Conclusion.
"Chen gives us new insights into the San Francisco community, its inhabitants and their lifestyles, and trans-Pacific connections... Highly recommended." - Western Historical Quarterly "A rich and nuanced account of key events in San Francisco Chinatown." - Choice "General audiences will enjoy this vivd depiction of Chinatown politics and insider perspectives on tourism. Experts will find this an illuminating ... encounter with a tantalizing new array of sources." - California History "This impressively researched study of San Francisco's Chinatown is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the history of the Chinese in America." - The Journal of American History "Chin has produced one of the finest first-person narratives available on the Chinese experience in America, and it will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike. As K. Scott Wong notes, Paper Son is much more than a story of one man's life in the United States; it "gives voice to thousands of paper sons." - Journal of American Ethnic History
