Chinese on the American Frontier

by Dirlik, Malcolm Yeung, Arif Dirlik

Chinese immigrants played a dynamic role in frontier America, yet scholars of Asian America have focused for the most part only on the Pacific Coast, especially California. This reader fills that gap by collecting memoirs, documents, and historical analyses from the other Western states-from the Cascades to the Great Plains-to provide a comprehensive overview of the Chinese in nineteenth-century America.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0847685330
• ISBN13: 9780847685332
• Release Date: November 2003
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Chinese Struggles on the American Frontier

This book is of importance and weight ( 506 pages) in Prof Dirlik research and collection for a comprehensive overview of Chinese in 19th Century America on American Frontier. A good collection of books on Chinese in America concentrated on America West. The Chinese explored east upon the bias and discrimination in California. This book is well organized into 4 parts, namely Chinese on Eastern Frontier, Chinese in the Southwest (Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas), Chinese in the Northwest (Oregon, Washington, Idaho), and Chinese in the Rocky Mountains (Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota. The esssays covered an extensive areas with many unknown stories of honor, horror, blood and tears the Chinese pioneers endured in the land of the brave and free. As Chinese were strangers in this strange Turtle Island, they were treated the same as their distant cousins of American Natives with the same law that Chinese could not testify in the court of law. The chicken oath was an acceptable form of testimonial in court for the truth. This book documented a few Chinese were able to speak Pima and Paiute. However, some Chinese were able to exercise the politcal right to vote after paying the poll tax. This was very unusual. Chinese were opium smokers as leisure drug as this dope was pushed by Americans and British. Many rich families and Ivy League Universities had the connection of these foreign mud trade dark money. The Snake River Massacre of Chinese Miners 1887 was horror and relatively unknown (a more detail account in the book, Massacred for Gold: The Chinese in Hells Canyon). Good as it is, this book got some typo error: p.93 Ch'en Lan-in, should be Lan-pin, p. 134, 1864 and not 1964, p.280 New Year, not New York, p.305 Francis L.K. Hsu not Hau, the Chinese words on p.431,434,436, 437, 438, 439, 443 and 444 are not what the explanations stand for with second half of the list printed upside down. It is interesting to read p.176: They came to realize that without a stronger regime in China, they could not expect any better treatment from the American government. It was then, and now with a stronger regime, history repeated itself in the spy case of Dr Wen Ho Lee of 1999. This book is a good American history lesson for all Americans. Interested reader is recommended to check out other titles on this subject : The First American, the remarkable life of Wong Chin Foo, and Driven Out: the Forgotten War against Chinese Americans .