Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.2 | The History Cooperative

Surviving on the Gold Mountain: A History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives. By Huping Ling. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. xviii, 252 pp. Cloth, $59.50, isbn 0-7914-3863-5. Paper, $19.95, isbn 0-7914-3864-3.)

Huping Ling set out to write a comprehensive history of Chinese women in the United States. Starting from an avowedly woman's and multicultural point of view, she says she intended to cover a broad geographical, chronological, and class perspective. This study, she says, will be more than San Francisco, prostitutes, and a limited time period. A subtheme of the book, one that assumes greater significance as the book closes, is an engagement with the problems of the portrayal of Chinese in the United States as a model minority. Revising the traditional periodization of Chinese American history, she rejects the segmentation of 1840-1882 (open immigration), 1882-1943 (exclusion), and 1943-present (the postwar period) for what she asserts is one more reflective of women's concerns: 1830-1943, 1943-1965 (immigration reform), and 1965-present (the new immigrants). Her first period reflects the arrival of Chinese women in the United States and the difficult conditions they faced; the second, the upward mobility and adaptation of the second generation and their concomitant reorientation of family and social life; and the third, the issues and problems marking contemporary Chinese American women. . . .

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