Exclusion and the Chinese American Story (Race to the Truth)

Buch 4 von 7: Race to the Truth

Blackburn, Sarah-SoonLing

 
9780593567647: Exclusion and the Chinese American Story (Race to the Truth)
ISBN 10: 0593567641 ISBN 13: 9780593567647
Verlag: Crown Books for Young Readers, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Until now, you've only heard one side of the story, but Chinese American history extends far beyond the railroads. Here's the true story of America, from the Chinese American perspective.

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

If you've learned about the history of Chinese people in America, it was probably about their work on the railroads in the 1800s. But more likely, you may not have learned about it at all. This may make it feel like Chinese immigration is a newer part of this country, but some scholars believe the first immigrant arrived from China 499 CE--one thousand years before Columbus did! 

When immigration picked up in the mid-1800s, efforts to ban immigrants from China began swiftly. But hope, strength, and community allowed the Chinese population in America to flourish. From the gold rush and railroads to entrepreneurs, animators, and movie stars, this is the true story of the Chinese American experience.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr. Sarah-SoonLing Blackburn is an educator, speaker and professional learning facilitator. She was born in Bangkok, Thailand into a mixed-race Malaysian Chinese and white American family. A classic “third culture kid,” she grew up moving between various East and Southeast Asian countries and the Washington DC area. Sarah moved to the Deep South in 2009, and she has now lived there longer than anywhere else. Her experiences first as a classroom teacher and then as a teacher educator inform her beliefs about the role that education can and must play in the realization of social justice.
She owes very much to her ancestors.
Sarah spent most of her years in the classroom teaching third and fourth grade. As a professional trainer, Sarah’s areas of focus have included workplace cultures, leadership skills, and diversity, equity and inclusion. Sarah has an M.A. in Social Justice and Education from University College London’s Institute of Education. Her doctoral research at Johns Hopkins University explored strategies for retaining rural educators, and her Ed.D. specialization was Instructional Design in Online Teaching and Learning. She is based out of Oxford, Mississippi.

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Chapter 1


Becoming Chinese American


What would make you leave your home and undertake a long, uncomfortable, and often dangerous journey across the ocean to an unfamiliar land? In the middle of the 1800s, the first major waves of Chinese people started arriving in a place called California. China and California were not only separated by thousands of miles of ocean, they were separated by differences in language, religion, and history. China was an ancient civilization, while the United States was a very young nation. In fact, California only became a state in 1850. Before the 1850s, the few Chinese people in America, like Afong Moy, were often making the much longer journey to the big cities of America’s East Coast. With Californian statehood, however, the United States seemed just a little bit easier to reach than it had before, even though it was still terribly far away. The Chinese people who immigrated to this new country were leaving behind their homes, their families, and everything else that had been familiar to them before. Most left home with the hope that they would one day return, but there was no guarantee that they ever would. Making the decision to leave must have been an emotionally difficult one.

The journey from China to the United States was also physically difficult. It required spending a month or more on a ship crossing the vast Pacific Ocean, and the voyage was uncomfortable. Most Chinese people who set off for America were not wealthy, and they had to borrow money from friends, family, or money lenders to help pay for their passage. Even with borrowed money, these passengers could only afford to travel in steerage, or the lowest class of travel. Traveling in steerage meant sharing sleeping quarters with the other steerage passengers, often including sharing bunk beds covered with thin, straw mattresses. The food on the journey was basic and unappetizing, and the sanitation was awful. Imagine the smells of all the people crammed in together for such a long time with no showers, no modern toilets, and no proper health care. Many people died on the journey. On one ship that made the journey from Hong Kong to San Francisco during that time period, one out of every five people aboard did not survive the voyage.

Now that you can imagine just how difficult the journey to the United States was for early Chinese Americans, ask yourself this question again: What would make you leave your home and undertake a long, uncomfortable, and often dangerous journey across the ocean to an unfamiliar land? The lure of what might await on the other end would have to seem worth the pain of leaving family, the discomfort of the voyage, and the risk of losing your life. The lure that finally pushed more Chinese people to take those risks was one that has lured people across human history--the lure of gold, and the better life that might come with it.


Gold


It was 1848 in what was soon to become the American state of California when a white sawmill worker named James W. Marshall reported finding gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The news that a fortune might be hiding in the great mountain range’s soil and streams quickly spread around the world. Thousands of people from across North America and the globe made their way to California, arriving from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and even as far away as Australia.

In the early years of the excitement, Native and Indigenous people from the region participated in the search for gold. Soon, however, many of the new settlers wanted the land for themselves. These settlers, sometimes turning to violence and even murder, forced many Native people to leave their lands. They did not want to share the wealth that might still be discovered, and to some of these settlers a Native person’s life was not as important as the possibility of digging up a fortune. And yet, the competition for gold grew. More and more people from more parts of the world continued to arrive to try their luck. The California Gold Rush had begun.


In China, the craze for gold started like this: Merchants had long traveled between the Americas and China to buy and sell goods, but now these merchants also spread tales of a place where gold could be picked up from the land and where poor people were becoming rich overnight. For people living in Guangdong Province on the coast of southern China, the news of gold was especially alluring. China is a large country, and different regions of China have different histories, languages, and ethnic groups. At the time, Guangdong Province was largely made up of people who spoke Chinese dialects--forms of language that are spoken in a certain region or by a certain group--like Taishanese, Cantonese, Teochew, and Hakka.

In the mid-1800s, Guangdong Province and other nearby areas had gone through years of extreme hardship. Flooding and droughts led to crop failures that led to famine. A war between the British and Chinese known as the Opium War had forced many farmers off their land. The Chinese wanted to end the trade in an addictive drug called opium because it was causing harm to too many people, but the British wanted to continue making money through opium. They wanted to keep the large port cities of the region, like Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, open to foreign trade. The British ultimately won the Opium War, continuing the traffic of opium through the province and taking the port city of Hong Kong as their own. The challenges of the war had led to high taxes and limited options for the future. All but the richest people were suffering.

When people in Guangdong Province started hearing stories of Gam Saan (or “Gold Mountain”), the hardships they might face trying to get there seemed like nothing in comparison to the hardships they were already facing at home. Then, in 1852, a massive crop failure was the last straw for many people. That year more than twenty thousand Chinese people arrived in San Francisco to seek a better life, about ten times as many as had arrived just the previous year. Almost all of these people were men, setting out to seek their fortune by looking for gold. For the next several years, more and more Chinese people arrived in California to try their luck at finding gold. By 1860 about one quarter of all the gold miners in the region were Chinese.

Like most tales of easy riches, however, the stories about Gold Mountain were much better than the reality. Life for Chinese people in California was not easy. While some lucky miners found a fortune in gold, many more barely scratched out a living. They had borrowed money in China to pay for their voyage to California. On top of what it cost to live, the miners had to earn enough to pay back what they had borrowed, plus interest, a fee for borrowing money that has to be repaid to the lender. Whatever gold was left over did not stay in their pockets either, as many miners felt a responsibility to send as much as possible home to their families in China.


A day in the life of the typical Gold Rush miner was brutal. They woke up at dawn and spent twelve to sixteen hours a day doing the backbreaking work of digging and washing dirt in the hopes of a glimmer of gold. American and European miners had realized that the numbers of Chinese miners would only continue to grow, and many started to speak out with hatred. They wanted to limit the chances that one of the large gold discoveries would go to the Chinese. Out in the gold fields, each miner had their own section called a claim. If a Chinese miner got lucky by finding gold and did not carefully guard his claim, it would be stolen by someone else. Sometimes Chinese miners had to work for white miners for only a small cut of any profits they might find. More often, Chinese miners had no choice but to work on claims...

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Verlag
Crown Books for Young Readers
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593567641
ISBN 13 
9780593567647
Einband
Bibliothekseinband
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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