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The Chinese in America : A Narrative History | 
| Author: Iris Chang
Publisher: Amazon Remainders Account
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $9.34
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Avg. Customer Rating:  38 reviews
Sales Rank: 596088
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.6
ASIN: B000EXYZK4
Publication Date: March 31, 2003
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Product Description
In an epic story that spans 150 years and continues to the present day, Iris Chang tells of a peoples search for a better lifethe determination of the Chinese to forge an identity and a destiny in a strange land and, often against great obstacles, to find success. She chronicles the many accomplishments in America of Chinese immigrants and their descendents: building the infrastructure of their adopted country, fighting racist and exclusionary laws, walking the racial tightrope between black and white, contributing to major scientific and technological advances, expanding the literary canon, and influencing the way we think about racial and ethnic groups. Interweaving political, social, economic, and cultural history, as well as the stories of individuals, Chang offers a bracing view not only of what it means to be Chinese American, but also of what it is to be American.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 33 more reviews...
Coming to America November 8, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
The Chinese in America
"Chinese workers were prevented from immigrating to America by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Its passage was a watershed event in American history. Besides identifying for the first time a specific group of people by name as undesirable for immigration to the United States, the act also marked a fateful departure from the traditional American policy of unrestricted immigration." By William Wei
Professor of History, University of Colorado at Boulder
However, it was not the first, or the last, time that ethnic groups were singled out for ostracism or exclusion. Native Americans were the object of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which led to the dispersal of the indigenous population throughout the Southwest and set the stage for The Trail of Tears-- the dispersal of the Cherokee Nation.
Andrew Jackson's record regarding Native Americans was horrendous. He led troops against them in both the Creek War and the First Seminole War and during his first administration the Indian Removal Act was passed in 1830 which resulted in the massive relocation of Native Americans.
The Acadians of Canada were expelled, becoming Louisiana's Cajuns, the Inuit people of Canada were given their own homeland, Nunavut, after decades of discrimination, and the Japanese, Irish and hordes of other immigrants faced adversity in assimilating. Today, the Hmong of Laos, El Salvadorans, Mexicans and others join the list. Cuban emigres from Castro's regime created a vibrant society in Miami and Tampa, Florida.
Russians, Armenians, and Iranians help populate Los Angeles. There is a Southeast Asian community in Portland, Maine--about as far away from Laos or Cambodia as you can get.
Against this background, Iris Chang has produced a memorable narrative history of the Chinese experience in America. Chang, who wrote the best-selling "The Rape of Nanking", committed suicide in 2004. Her writing on the experience of the Chinese Americans from the Gold Rush to the Internet follows in the tradition of Irving Howe's "World of our Fathers"; Dee Brown's "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee", and other histories of American diasporas.
I make it a practice not to read other people's reviews before writing mine. Going back to them now I find some are understandably critical of Chang's emphasis on the worst-case-scenarios.
But she can hardly be blamed for chronicling the overt racism that including blaming Chinese women for spreading syphillis and a "Doctor" for labeling the whole population a vector for disease. On the whole, a constructive view of a bad time in our history.
 Interesting but fatally flawed March 20, 2007
9 out of 13 found this review helpful
The book is interesting and highly readable. I do not read much nonfiction intended for a mass market, so I found it at times condescending, simplistic, and repetitious, but it is much less so than the "how-to" books I have been given in the past.
The book is written in an engaging style and has numerous interesting and revealing stories. It attempts what few books do, and it is valuable to the casual reader. However, it suffers from a number of flaws.
1) The distortion of facts to prove a point. Chang often makes a big deal out of facts in a way that utterly distorts their meaning. For example, she makes a huge deal out of the fact that the a Chinese worker on the transcontinental railroad was paid less than half what was spent on each horse, apparently in order to point out that mere animals were valued more than people. She entirely ignores the declaration she had made just a few paragraphs back that the white workers were paid half again as much as the Chinese workers--therefore much less than the horses as well! This factoid, thrown in for shock value, is simply silly to anyone with the slightest knowledge of historic economics and particularly the sheer cost of maintaining horses. She makes blunders like this once every ten pages or so, and it leaves me in grave doubt about her overall comprehension of the history she is attempting to explain in the book.
2) The creation of a victimology. She rightly notes patterns of racism and records atrocities committed upon Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans, but she selects among the history of the people in order to form the ideology of a racial victimology without aknowledging, for example, the universality of certain kinds of atrocities (claim-jumping was hardly restricted to whites against Chinese, for example, even if race was part of what a particular group of whites used to justify a particular claim jump) or the commonness of certain patterns of behavior.
3) The confusion of stupidity and racism. Chang routinely identifies all ignorance and stupidity as racism. Sometimes, stupid and ignorant people are racist. Other times, they are merely stupid and ignorant. People ask my husband all the time if he's from "China or Japan"--since he's clearly East Asian, he must be an immigrant, and because those are the only two contries that such people even know about, those are the ones they list. He had also been asked--often!--if his family "eats Chinese all the time--even for breakfast!" These are in line with the questions we get about New Mexico ("Why did you move out of the US?") and that I get about being from Texas ("So do you ride horses everywhere there? Do you have cars?") rather than being fundamentally racist. There's a difference between dumb people and racist people. Chang can't see it.
4) Her deep ignorance about China and universal patterns of immigration. Chang fundamentally does not comprehend the horrific quality of life that drove people from China from the 1800s through the 1980s. Her muddled explanations of reasons for immigration focus mostly upon the exchange rate--but that's only a fraction of the story. And this makes her miss the biggest piece of the Chinese labor puzzle. The reason that the Chinese were willing to undersell so many other immigrant groups in the US (and so a major reason for early resentment) is because the quality of life that they were accustomed to was so horrible that they would unthinkingly accept wages that even people from other poor countries would reject. As a result, poor Chinese drove down labor prices wherever they went. The anti-Chinese feelings on the West Coast were mirrored by anti-Irish feeling on the East Coast and anti-Mexican feeling today. All these groups have embraced, in various points in history, an average quality of life that someone accostomed to the US rejects. Chang also fails to recognize that Chinese immigrants knew intimately about bureaucracies and had usually been treated very badly by their social superiors in China and so were prepared to navigate the legal system with ease while at the same time taking abuse largely in stride. (Watch the fine jockeying for status among supposed equals in China, the extreme focus on class, and the treatment by professionals of people in the service industries!) Chang is a third-generation Chinese American, and it shows badly in her misunderstanding of China and Chinese culture.
5) Her conflation of different groups of ethnically Chinese people living in America into a monolithic body. Chang regularly ignores the extremely important generational issues when discussing the position of Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants. She flatly does not recognize the great lack of English skills that many of even the very well-educated first-generation immigrants have. She doesn't recognize that many cannot speak or write fluent English after being in the country for decades--not because of unwillingness but because the language is so different from CHinese--nor that many of them do not ever understand American culture. While American students at my university were finding Chinese TAs obnoxious, braggadocious, rude, loud, and untrustworthy, these same TAs were being told by other first-gen Chinese that Americans respect people who brag and who are "clever"--cleverness being what in American eyes is underhanded and sly! The obnoxiousness, loudness, and rudeness (in AMerican eyes) is directly traceable to Mao's rejection of the Four Olds during the Cultural Revolution. Good citizens were supposed to reject all of the behaviors that had been honored in previous generations, including quietness, reserve, good table manners, politeness, etc., etc. Fortunately, China is returning more and more to more ingrained cultural patterns, but the good citizen of the Cultural Revolution is flatly incompatible with American culture. First-gen immigrants are seen as often dressing inappropriately and have culturally "wrong" body language, and they often say--with the best intentions--sentiments deeply offensive to American culture. This enormous cultural clash definitely goes both ways. For example, an American wife's behavior toward a husband or a younger person toward an elder or an American empoyee's behavior toward his boss is downright repulsive in Chinese culture, and Americans' inability to engage in expected complementing behaviors and prentended self-deprecation is seen as blatantly crass. However, the context here isn't cultural Americans trying to "get ahead" in China but of cultural Chinese trying to succeed in the US. There will be very, very few first-generation Chinese immigrants who become upper managers in American firms simply because there are very few who have the cultural awareness and skill and the English language abilities to succeed. What they see as prejudice against their Chinese origins is really, often enough, a rejection of their cultural and linguistic limitations in an American setting. A much, much better study than to lump all Chinese togather would be to see how second and third generation Chinese Americans do compared to average Americans of the same education. Then you would be comparing two culturally American populations! Chang also completely ignores the deep racism of Chinese culture by emphasizing the choice of some Chinese to identify themselves with blacks in Civil Rights issues. To put it succinctly: the Chinese side of our family would be OUTRAGED, and that would be by far the most common reaction of culturally Chinese people to such a suggestion. As a white person, I am tolerated, though a disappointment, and I'm sure the family back in China sighs over the fact that my husband married one of those white devils. If he had tried to marry a black woman, he would have been cut out of the family completely.
Even with these flaws, the story is so lively and the anecdotes so diverse that the book is fully deserving three stars.
 An American Story March 1, 2007
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
As a naturalized citizen originally from China, I particularly appreciate Chang's closing remarks that hopefully most readers can come to see the stories in The Chinese in America as ultimately stories of Americans. I'd imagine an Irish immigrant 100 years ago, or a Mexican immigrant today, could tell me many parallel stories like those in this book. Would love to read about their storeis too, and hope that one day these are all seen as true American stories as ones about the Plymouth Rock and Lewis and Clark.
By the way, I listened to the audio version. The reading is a bit dry, but good enough.
Chang's book a good place to start, but not a rigorous, scholarly account December 29, 2006
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Iris Chang's narrative history of the Chinese in America is engrossing and involving. It provides a generalized history of China and the Chinese that spans two continents -- by no means an easy feat to do. It is well researched, and has definitely stoked my interest in reading more about Chinese (and Chinese-in-America) history.
My problems with the book, however, lie mainly with her characterization of this text as a "narrative history", and the authorial liberties she takes as a consequence. Clearly, history is a subjective narrative from the get-go, and calling "The Chinese in America" a narrative history gives Chang leeway not otherwise allowed by a more rigorous, scholarly work. While this adds to the readability of the work, it detracts from its credibility.
For one thing, she infuses 21st century moral judgements onto historical occurrences and eras in which it was not even a question. In one instance, she calls Manifest Destiny "arrogant". I'm not arguing that it wasn't, but an outright moral judgement like that does not belong in a work of non-fiction, even if that work is a narrative history. Judgement like that is akin to calling Nazi Germany a period of deranged lunacy. Few would disagree with your assessment, but from a point of historical understanding, its benefits are at best minimal. It's just not good scholarly writing.
Similarly, why should I believe what "one Chinese woman" says from such and such a time, or an oral history as told to so and so who told Chang herself? And what is a floating quotation, supported by no evidence from the author, supposed to tell the reader?
What also bothers me about Chang's book is her use of (for lack of a better term) 'common sense wisdom'. The chapter on the Great Depression opens with a generalized statement about how people in times of trouble tend to turn to groups different from themselves in order to lay blame for all their woes and ills (in this case they turned to the Chinese), and she hearkens it back to caveman tribal instincts. Where is the basis for this anthropological assessment, and why is it applicable here in particular?
To Chang's credit, she was not a scholar at all and to have written the books she did and researched them the way she did without graduate training is an impressive achievement. Also, she was clear from the beginning that this was a narrative history, and not some scholarly work published by Yale or some such other academic institution. I enjoyed this book, and I would definitely recommend it as a starting point to further explorations in Chinese and Chinese American history. All I am saying is that it is by no means a perfect work.
Little known history of the Chinese in America November 10, 2006
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
The Chinese are very much in the news. My son is dating a Taiwanese girl and I have been doing some reading about the Chinese. They are a very industrious people. The only thing I ever learned about the chinese in school was that they worked on the first intercontinental railroad but there is a great deal more to their history in the U.S.
Iris Chang is an excellent writer.
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