Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home – Basic review and reflections

Madeline Y. Hsu’s Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 tells the complex story of Chinese migration between the city of Taishan in China’s Guangdong province and the United States. Reading this book has been very interesting and I’ve been taking my time to enjoy the details (the perks of presenting my book last, one might say). Hsu’s writing is quite beautiful at times and very lucid. She has a firm grasp of the people and events that make up her narrative, and her personal investment in these subjects is clear in the book’s even-handed but sympathetic descriptions of Chinese migrants.

Location of Taishan in the Guangdong Province

Hsu opens her book with a discussion of how Taishanese immigrants made their way across the Pacific Ocean to find themselves in California. She discusses the various factors that contributed to emigration, including political unrest, numerous floods, droughts, earthquakes, typhoons, and epidemics. Economic distress contributed to and was exacerbated by many of the political troubles in the Guangdong province, especially after the first Opium War from 1839-1842 (Hsu, 24-25). Thus, by the 1850s, many Chinese immigrants came to the United States in search of jobs mining gold in California.

Hsu discusses the early experiences of these Chinese migrants in America and how they maintained connections with their families back home. These immigrants typically had dreams of return and sent remittances home that helped establish Taishan as an economically successful and well-developed town. She then discusses the intricacies of immigration law and how Chinese immigrants were able to “slip through the Golden Gate” despite the Chinese Exclusion Act. Family is a major theme in this book, and Hsu focuses on how the intense loyalty that immigrants and their families had for each other helped them mitigate the traumas of separation. An analysis of print culture forms a large segment of Hsu’s narrative because it furthered communication and a sense of community between Chinese who were abroad and those in their homelands.

This book is a welcome addition to recent works in migration that have moved beyond the “immigrant paradigm” that Donna R. Gabaccia decries in her article, “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of the United States.” Her goal was the “question the tyranny of the national in the discipline of history” (1116), a goal that Hsu pursues in her own work. The immigrant paradigm is something we’re all probably familiar with from any of our readings on America’s immigrant heritage: poor people with a solidified identity came from *nations* overseas to the United States in search of economic opportunity, experience intense hardships, and eventually adapt. Gabaccia’s experience with studying Italian immigration led her to argue that this paradigm is too simple to capture the more complicated history of immigrants. When Gabaccia stopped looking at “Italian immigration to the United States” but instead started focusing on “Italian migration,” she began to find previously unnoticed connections. Gabaccia’s solution to the immigrant paradigm is doing transnational history, and Hsu’s book is an example of a recent work that uses the transnational approach. Gabaccia’s article has been helpful for allowing me to see why Hsu’s approach is superior to – and much more interesting than! – the kind of works I’ve previously read about Chinese immigrants.

I have a whole lot of questions regarding the transnational trend which has become the watchword of migration studies (and most of the historical field, really). I’ve spent most of this semester reading theoretical works on transnational history but there is so much more to look at. Therefore, I’m going to read Ian Tyrrell’s Transnational Nation next to get a better grasp of transnational theory.

Madeline Yuan-Yin Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford University Press, 2000).

Donna R. Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere?  Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History,”Journal of American History, Vol. 86 (1999), 1115-34.