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.