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The Chinese in America
A Narrative History
Iris Chang
Viking: 448 pp., $29.95
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It is a great story: With the 1849 Gold Rush, about 100,000 Chinese men came to what they called Gum San, "Gold Mountain," in the California gold fields. They stayed on, to build the western part of the intercontinental railroad, as Irish immigrants built the eastern part.
More Chinese came. They manned the developing agricultural fields of California's great Central Valley. More Chinese came. They created the Chinatowns of San Francisco, Los Angeles and smaller cities. Jammed in their officially enforced ghettos, they took up the laundry business and introduced Canton-style food to America. Crimped by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, they nevertheless endured and in their thrifty way mostly prospered.
Despite humiliation, discrimination and, for their differences from those Americans already here, derision, Chinese Americans -- for they were that now -- by the time of World War II had become, sometimes to their surprise, less Chinese and more American. Those who visited China during or after the war were as horrified by the desperate conditions of Chinese life as the Chinese were puzzled by the strangeness of their visiting cousins.
With the fall...