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1 results

  • Chapter 11 - Immigration: “The Chinese Question” in Economics, Law, and Literature

  • from Part II - Issues
  • Edited by John D. Kerkering, Loyola University, Chicago
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics
    Published online:
    06 March 2025
    Print publication:
    13 March 2025, pp 190-204

  • Summary

    Despite arriving in smaller numbers than other ethnic groups in the nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants to the United States were the central target of immigration restriction laws. Chinese laborers comprised the first and only demographic group to be denied entry to the United States based on ethnicity. In this chapter, I address the history of the Chinese in America, focusing on key economic issues and laws related to immigration. I then track the widely known literary trope of the “Heathen Chinee” through works of the 1870s and 1880s, highlighting how it directly mediated political and economic issues of the period, while also illustrating its shaping role in English-language writings by early Chinese immigrants Wong Chin Foo and Yan Phou Lee. The tension between these authors’ perspectives, I conclude, anticipates the later emergence of Asian American politics and the contemporary racialization of Asians as America’s “model minority.” Nevertheless, the anomalous circumstances of these two writers meant that they were not representative of most Chinese immigrants of the time.