The Chinese Immigrant Experience in California

Harsh and demoralizing interposition Chinese immigrants received during the California Gold Rush and the hiting of the continental Railroad altered their self-image, their relationships with their families, and their perspective on career.

The unjust treat defecateforcet of Chinese immigrants was appalling. While European thrashers on the Transcontinental Railroad earned $30 per month plus board, which typically cost 75 cents to $1 per day a nitty-gritty of $22 to $30 per month Chinese workers were paid $30 per month without board. Chinese workers in the Gold Rush were the victims of the " unpeaceful racial attitudes" that secondern Gold Rush workers brought with them from the antebellum South and were oft driven out of mines by these men. In this respect, the Chinese were similar to blacks of the era free, solely barely free. Apparently perceive as a threat to whites, the Chinese were kept down, relentlessly worked, and treated more like chattel than free men.

Furthermore, Chinese men were viewed solely for their ability to work, with no regard presumptuousness to their families or family life:

[The the Statesn Capitalist economy] wanted Asiatic potent workers but not their families. TO ensure greater profitability from immigrants' labor and to decrease the cost of reproduction the expense of housing, feeding, clothing, and educating the workers' dependents employers often excluded "nonproductive" family members such as women and children.

In addition, although 90% of the railroad workers were Chinese, Chinese workers are mysteriously missing from the official photographs taken at Promontory Point, where the prospering stake was ceremonially driven to connect the east and the westbound by railway. The Chinese were missing not only from the photographs but also from "all official historical criminal records?Chinese American railroad laborers threaten to disappear irretrievably?." The Chinese were a silent majority a secret majority, allowed no recognition, no identity, and, essentially, no real life.

Kingston recalls, speaking to her father, "You screamed wordless male screams that jolted the house upright and staring in the mall of the night," a memory that suggests the terror that accompanied what was in belief a personal annihilation, an eradication of their identities, for the Chinese.

Kingston suggests that Chinese men were emasculated in America, and if this is so, it is easy to see why. Although Chinese workers were shining to whites in terms of hard work, persistence, and patience, they were treated as if they had no value beyond the monetary gain they represented to their employers. In the winter of 1866 one of the most severe winters on record Chinese workers on the Transcontinental Railroad were lowered from the crystalise of the cliff in wicker baskets into shafts in the snow to work in dark tunnels for long hours each day to build the railroad; snow slides buried many another(prenominal) of them, and "loss of life was heavy." In fact, "Over a thousand Chinese had their bones shipped back to China to be buried."

Although Kingston's father did not work on the Transcontinental Railroad, it is as if he did, because he gloss over bears the scars in his soul of the abuse suffered by his father and many more like him. The Chinese people in America still suffer from racial injustice, even today, all these long time later. As an expository of these issues, Kingston's book has tremendous historical value. It allows the contributor to
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