Chinese American Identity in Literature (Identities and Issues in Literature)
Introduction
The Chinese began to immigrate to the United States in 1820, but their numbers remained small until the late 1840’s, when the decaying empire of China was defeated in 1848 by Britain in the First Opium War. The California gold rush (1849) started shortly after the United States acquired California as a result of the Mexican-American War (1848). These events coincided to produce a wave of Chinese immigration. When the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) put a halt to Chinese immigration, more than 100,000 Chinese had settled in the United States. As a result of the...
[The entire page is 2560 words long]
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