《The History of Chinese Americans》教学资料.docVIP

The History of Chinese Americans For many years it was common in the United States to associate Chinese Americans with restaurants and laundries. People did not realize that the Chinese had been driven into these occupations by the prejudice and discrimination that faced them in this country.The first Chinese to reach the United States came during the California Gold Rush of 1849. Like most of the other people there, they had come to search for gold. In that largely unoccupied land, the men staked a claim for themselves by placing makers in the ground. However, either because the Chinese were so different from the others or because they worked so patiently that they sometimes succeeded in turning a seemingly worthless mining claim into a profitable one, they became the scapegoats of their envious compatitors. They were harrassed in many ways. Often they were prevented from working their claims; some localities even passed regulations forbidding them to own claims. The Chinese therefore started to seek out other ways of earning a living. Some of them began to do the laundry for the white miners; others set up small restaurants. (There were almost no women in California in those days, and the Chinese filled a real need by doing this womans work.) Some went to work as farmhands or as fishermen.In the early 1860s many more Chinese arrived in California. This time the men were imported as work crews to construct the first transcontinental railroad. They were sorely needed because the work was so strenuous and dangerous, and it was carried on in such a remote part of the country that the railroad company could not find other laborers for the job. As in the case of their predecessors, these Chinese were almost all males; and like them, too, they encountered a great deal of prejudice. The hostility grew especially strong after the railroad project was complete, and the imported laborers returned to California -- thousands of them, all out of work. Because there were