Surviving on the Gold Mountain: A History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives

by Huping Ling

Book Overview

Surviving on the Gold Mountain is the first comprehensive work on Chinese American women's history covering the past 150 years. Relying on archival documents (many of which have never been used), oral history interviews, census data, contemporary newspapers in English and Chinese, and secondary literature, it unearths an unknown page of Chinese American history--the lives of Chinese immigrant women as wives of merchants, farmers, and laborers, as...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0791438635
• ISBN13: 9780791438633
• Release Date: July 1998
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

interesting account hits close to home

I really liked the way that this was done. Not only was it interestingly written, it included good facts and nice pictures. The use of statistics was not overblown for the common reader, and it really gave a good flavor of the subjects. (I believe in short and sweet reviews)

Excellent Depiction of the History of Chinese American Women

When I decided to do a term paper on the topic of Chinese American Women, I realized how little researched this particular topic is. I praise Ms. Ling for composing a book on a topic that is so important to so many Chinese Americans, Asian Americans, and everyone who wants to learn something important about Chinese American women. She is very detailed, thorough about her topic and also succinctly lucid. The amount of research that was done to write such a book must have been immense for Surviving on the Gold Mountain is a pure gem of a book. I have learned so much about the forgotten history of Chinese American women in the US. They are often overlooked by historians, especially the collective history of Chinese American women from 1850 to the 1990s. I applaud Ms. Ling for the detailed nature of her history and for her special research on certain important issues such as interracial marriage and the different occupations that Chinese American women have been forced to participate in in the past and in the present as well. This is by far the most comprehensive book published to date on the history of Chinese American women. Every issue one may need to know about the history of Chinese American women from the nineteenth and twentieth century is somehow encapsulated in this wonderfully written book.