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"Jorae, Wendy Rouse"
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The Children of Chinatown
Revealing the untold stories of a pioneer generation of young Chinese Americans, this book places the children and families of early Chinatown in the middle of efforts to combat American policies of exclusion and segregation.Wendy Jorae challenges long-held notions of early Chinatown as a bachelor community by showing that families--and particularly children--played important roles in its daily life. She explores the wide-ranging images of Chinatown's youth created by competing interests with their own agendas--from anti-immigrant depictions of Chinese children as filthy and culturally inferior to exotic and Orientalized images that catered to the tourist's ideal of Chinatown. All of these representations, Jorae notes, tended to further isolate Chinatown at a time when American-born Chinese children were attempting to define themselves as Chinese American. Facing barriers of immigration exclusion, cultural dislocation, child labor, segregated schooling, crime, and violence, Chinese American children attempted to build a world for themselves on the margins of two cultures. Their story is part of the larger American story of the struggle to overcome racism and realize the ideal of equality.
eBook
The Limits of Dress: Chinese American Childhood, Fashion, and Race in the Exclusion Era
This article explores the construction of Chinese American identities through fashion. Although Chinese clothing styles served as a symbol of Chinese identity, American-born Chinese youth often preferred Western styles as a means of disassociating themselves from Chinatown and refashioning their identities as Americans. Yet these youth soon discovered the limits of dress.
Journal Article
RECENTERING THE CHINESE FAMILY IN EARLY CHINESE AMERICAN HISTORY
Zona Gale, writing for theSan Francisco Chroniclein 1903, described her visit to the home of Foo Tai, a Christian Chinese woman and president of the Woman’s Society of the Baptist Mission. Curiosity about the home life of Christianized Chinese prompted Gale’s visit: “I longed to know Foo Tai, in her own home, and to try to break the silence that hangs over homes like hers. It was possible that, within its walls she simply swept and cooked and gossiped, like the rest of the Christianized world, but I doubted it. For some way there seemed to cling to
Book Chapter
THE IMMIGRATION OF CHINESE CHILDREN AND THE CHINESE QUESTION
Lee Him arrived in San Francisco on the SteamerRio De Janeiroon January 7, 1888.¹ The boy was only one of thousands of Chinese children who had passed through the port of San Francisco since the 1850s. Immigrants arriving from China in the 1850s and 1860s easily gained entry into the country. However, with the passage of the Page Act in 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the government erected substantial barriers to try to stop the immigration of Chinese prostitutes and laborers into the country. According to the 1882 law, only teachers, travelers, students, diplomats, and
Book Chapter
ARTICLES OF CONTENTION
Sensational articles about urban vice were common journalistic fare in American newspapers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and San Francisco’s newspapers were no exception. Tales of white slavery, detailing the sexual exploitation of women, proved especially popular.¹ Crime in San Francisco’s Chinatown seemed even more lurid and exotic, as articles appeared almost daily with scandalous new details to entice eager readers. This chapter focuses on some of Chinatown’s exceptional and rare cases by examining the experiences of Chinese children in the missions and the justice system. Once again, various groups manipulated the facts to further their own
Book Chapter
CHILDREN OF THE NEW CHINATOWN
In a 1902 article in theSan Francisco Chronicletitled “How to Show Your Eastern Cousins through Chinatown,” the reporter painted contrasting images of the children in Chinatown, beginning with a description of the following scene at Fish Alley: “[L]ittle groups of grotesquely decorated children scurry about among the horrid odors and heaps of decaying fruits, vegetables and fish. . . . And a howling mob of cats and dogs are fighting and chasing one another, the children and themselves in a sort of wild dance among the heaps of refuse.”¹ In this bit of imagery, the reporter relies on
Book Chapter
FOR THE FAMILY BACK HOME
San Francisco journalist and photographer Louis Stellman frequented China-town in the early twentieth century and attempted to capture images of daily life among its inhabitants. One of his photographs shows a young girl walking down the road carrying two pails of dried shrimp, bamboo, and beansprout stew. Stellman wrote in his notes that the girl was carrying dinner to the Chinese men in the goldsmith shops. She may have worked in the family restaurant or labored as a domestic servant in the home of a Chinese family. Included among Stellman’s other photographs are images of child domestic servants weighed down
Book Chapter
CHALLENGING SEGREGATION
Ah Beng was a student at the Presbyterian mission school in 1886 and his reference to the Bible and Jesus in this letter reflected the Christian emphasis of his education. At first glance, Ah Beng’s letter, written at the request of his schoolteacher, appears as a child’s simple recitation of the day’s events. However, upon closer examination, this letter reveals the variety of competing interests at work in San Francisco’s early Chinatown and hints at the impact of a segregated society on Chinese children. Mission schools arose to meet the Chinese American community’s desire for education. Public education for Chinese
Book Chapter
The children of Chinatown: Growing up Chinese American in San Francisco, 1850–1920
Historians have traditionally identified San Francisco's early Chinatown (1850–1920) as a \"bachelor society,\" or more recently as a \"split-household\" community. While statistically accurate, this narrow designation ignores the variety of domestic structures in Chinatown and the role of Chinese children in creating a Chinese American community. Competing interests in San Francisco created contrasting images of childhood and family life in Chinatown to meet their own political agendas. In this way the debate over Chinese immigration and the future of the Chinese in America became not just an economic or political issue, but a cultural conflict. Anti-Chinese politicians and labor leaders constructed images of filthy, diseased, and inherently inferior Chinese children to support their efforts at exclusion and segregation. Missionaries and social reformers, believing in the malleability of youth, constructed more favorable images of family life and childhood in Chinatown that reflected their emphasis on the power of reform. The Chinese elite understood that the development of a normative family life in Chinatown appealed to middle-class American sensibilities about proper domesticity. Recognizing the significance of this, Chinese merchants challenged the claims of the anti-Chinese movement by pointing not only to the Americanization of their children but to shared middle-class values of domesticity. Writers, photographers, and artists created exotic and romantic images of Chinese children that catered to the tourist's ideal of Chinatown. The children themselves struggled with the differing stereotypes in a reality far removed from the images created by the competing groups. The success of anti-Chinese propaganda reinforced a social hierarchy that placed Chinese American children at a severe disadvantage. Although American citizens by birth, second-generation Chinese children still felt compelled to legitimate their citizenship status. Facing barriers of immigration exclusion, cultural dislocation, child labor, segregated schooling and crime and violence in Chinatown, these children attempted to break the barriers of segregation and exclusion while building a world for themselves on the margins of two cultures.
Dissertation