BOOK REVIEWS

Chen Yong, Chinese San Francisco, 1850-1943: A Trans-Pacific Community

Far from being principally a work of research, this book is above all the writer’s homage to his own community, the Sino-Americans (Chen Yong is a recent immigrant to the US from mainland China); it is an act of citizenship, not so much American citizenship as Sino-American citizenship. The book covers two periods. Chapter one introduces us to the earlier period of immigration in waves and so to the central part of the study; its aim is to clarify the socio-economic, cultural and psychological conditions that have led the Chinese towards California. In Chapters two and three, which open the first part (1850-1905), the writer sets out to describe the birth of the Chinese quarter of San Francisco and its evolution over that period, together with the living conditions of its population. Chapter four offers an overview of America as it was seen and understood by a Chinese immigrant who arrived in 1863 at the age of 15 and who, throughout his life, kept a diary in English. The fifth chapter examines how the Chinese immigrants formed a collective identity over that period. The second part of the book covers the period 1905–43. So it begins with the 1905 boycott of American goods and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Chapters six and seven describe Chinese efforts to adapt; and the results of this process, acculturation, are described in chapter eight. Chapter nine looks at the links that the immigrant Chinese community maintains with China; and, lastly, chapter ten examines the process whereby some of the conditions that made second-class citizens of the Chinese immigrants have been removed.

The tone of the book is mainly anecdotal: when it goes beyond mere chronology it is sometimes redundant; it gives a constant impression of being disjointed. However interesting the facts set down may be, the book is all too often, it has to be said, a boring read. The writer (who, by the way, draws heavily upon Alexander Saxton’s book, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995) seems mainly intent on showing that America’s Chinese community, while exposed to the hostility of white people in general and ‘white Anglo-Saxon protestants’ in particular, was able to free itself of this “racial oppression” (p. 253), its success at doing so illustrated by the triumphal tour of America by Chiang Kai-shek’s wife in 1943.

Translated from French original by Philip Liddell