Dreaming of Home

Chinese Immigrants Preserve Ties to Their Homeland

Published:
January 04, 2023

stolzeja

When Chinese immigrants came to the United States in the mid-19th century, they were looking for work and economic advantage. What they found was mostly hard physical labor, building the transcontinental railroad, mining coal, working on farms, and other difficult, low-paying jobs. Still, their contributions to the new nation were vast.

A researcher holds a small yellow artifact in their palm.
An archaeological artifact from the Evanston, Wyoming, Chinatown.

Despite the distance and the difficulty of travel, many maintained remarkably strong ties with their families back home. Assistant Professor of Anthropology Laura Ng, a historical archaeologist studying transpacific migration and Asian diasporic communities, calls them “transnational immigrants.” They never forgot their families and their homeland.

“They sent letters home and even returned to their villages to get married, visit family, and use their earnings abroad to build new homes,” Ng says. “Even Chinese Americans born in the United States were transnational.”

She adds, “We cannot study the archaeology of Chinese American communities without looking at the archaeology of Chinese home villages.”

We cannot study the archaeology of Chinese American communities without looking at the archaeology of Chinese home villages.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Laura Ng

It’s a subject of particular interest to Ng because her parents emigrated from a rural village in Toisan County — an area about the size of Rhode Island that was home to most of the Chinese immigrants who came to this country.

Ng is working with two Grinnell students — Evan Albaugh and George Matthes (both ’25) — to analyze and catalog artifacts excavated by archaeologist Dudley Gardner at several sites at the Chinatown in Evanston, Wyoming.

The artifacts offer insights into the daily lives of Evanston’s Chinese residents and visitors. Most worked for the Union Pacific Railroad Company or in nearby coal mines. Others became merchants, laundry operators, restaurant workers, and vegetable farmers.

“Cataloguing these artifacts will provide information on how Chinese migrants persisted in the face of overt racism,” Ng says. Anti-Chinese rhetoric was so prevalent, she says, that Congress passed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese immigrants from entering the United States. And at Rock Springs, Wyoming, rhetoric spiraled into physical violence when white coal miners killed 28 Chinese migrants and burned down most of Chinatown there. 

“The research we are doing provides an opportunity to discuss the history of anti-Asian racism — something that unfortunately continues to persist today,” Ng says. “But it also allows us to have an important conversation about the steps we need to take to create an anti-racist society.”

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