A Digital Newspaper for Chinese Americans
In The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, Columbia University historian Mae M. Ngai shows that Western anxieties about Chinese migrants stretch back to the gold rushes of the nineteenth century, when Chinese laborers crossing oceans became both essential to economic expansion and objects of fear and exclusion.
October 7 marks the birthday of Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, a pioneering Chinese American advocate for women’s rights. Born in 1896 in Guangzhou, China, Lee grew up in a turbulent era: the final years of the Qing dynasty, when China faced foreign aggression, women endured systemic subordination, and Chinese immigrants in the United States suffered intense discrimination.
In 1886, the United States Supreme Court ruled on what appeared to be a local dispute, but the case, Yick Wo v. Hopkins became a critical milestone in the practical application of the constitutional principle of equal protection.
Who was the “John Doe Chinaman”? In 19th-century America’s West, this label appeared in court records, immigration documents, and tax files as a catch-all reference to countless Chinese immigrants, erasing their names and identities and rendering them “nameless” in historical narratives. In her recently published book, John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese life Under American Racial Law, Princeton University history professor Beth Lew-Williams uncovers this overlooked history through dusty archival records, revealing the struggles and resilience of Chinese immigrants under the pressures of racialized legal systems.
