| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Yong Chen. Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943: A Trans-Pacific Community. (Asian America.) Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2000. Pp. xvi, 392. $45.00.

Yong Chen's book sets out to examine the forces that informed the creation and evolution of San Francisco's Chinatown. To this end, Chen does a masterful job of explaining the multiple perspectives that contributed to the trajectory of this community. 1

The first half of the book details the material conditions of the Chinese in San Francisco up to 1906. This section avoids the standard tracking of the history of racial oppression visited upon the Chinese in America and instead offers the reader a glimpse into the everyday lives of Chinese people in San Francisco. Gleaned from personal accounts of the era, the text portrays work issues, postal service, food preferences, travel habits, and entertainment. In doing so, Chen demonstrates how the very features that provided a sense of home life for the Chinese in America became the evidence used by nineteenth-century white racists to attack the alleged "yellow peril." Accordingly, the community's Chinese medicine shops, a source of comfort and security for the residents, could be used by racists to prove the immutable foreignness and "inferiority" of Chinese life. . . .

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