Chinatown: Economic Adaptation and Ethnic Identity of the Chinese. Case Studies in Cultural Anthropogy: Chinatown. General Editors George and Louise Spindler, Stanford University.


By: Wong, Bernard P.

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Octavo, paperbound/softbound (stiff red, black & white photograph illus. wrappers), 110 pp. Very Good+, with lightly rubbed edges. From Foreword: The Chinese in the United States, like other nonAnglo-European minorities in this country, have experienced blatant prejudice and serious harassment. When they were no longer needed to build the western railroads in the 1870s, the Chinese were subject to flagrant attacks on their homes and business establishments (then just emerging) as well as on their persons -- in at least one instance in the form of an outright massacre. They have been subject to persistent legal harassment in the form of exclusionary legislation, starting with the Exclusion Act of 1882 in California. In the 1930s, when the Chinese hand laundry business became too successful in New York, they were subject to state legislation requiring license fees and posting of bonds that forced many of the smaller establishments into bankruptcy. Legal harassment continued into the 1970s, including a law that prevented Chinese Americans from working in government positions. Although the most blatant forms of discrimination have recently eased, lingering and more subtle forms still persist. This active prjudice and harassment stemming from mainstream American racism and fear of economic competition has resulted in the tightening of internal bonds within the minority group and the development of protective associations of one kind or another. The internal cohesiveness thus developed became the distinguishing characteristic of the Chinese American communities in cities like San Franciso and New York. These ÒChinatownsÓ continue to serve the growing Chinese population in the United States in the various ways that Dr. Wong explains in this case study... This case study analyzes the structural adaptations that Chinese American communities in general, and the New York Chinatown in particular, have made to survive in American society. The analysis will be of interest to students of social life in the United States and particularly to those interested in minority groups and their struggles to find security and satisfaction. Although the Chinese adaptation has been different from that of the various European populations migrating the United States after the Revolutionary War, and even from the Japanese and other Asiatic minorities, the Chinese exhibit much in common with other minorities in America. To udnerstand the adaptations of minorities in the United States is to understand our country, since minority groups constitute our population. Even the so-called majority, or mainstream, in American society is made up of at least a dozen ethnic components, and its largest constituency -- persons descended from the English, Scottish, Irish and Weslh (themselves minorities in Great Britain) -- is actually a minority of aout 27 percent of our total population...

Title: Chinatown: Economic Adaptation and Ethnic Identity of the Chinese. Case Studies in Cultural Anthropogy: Chinatown. General Editors George and Louise Spindler, Stanford University.

Author Name: Wong, Bernard P.

Location Published: Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., (1982).

Categories: American Culture

Seller ID: 50465bd