Chapter 9

Chinese

Chapter 9 reminded me a lot of an ethic studies class I took in fall 2010. We talked about Asian American immigrants and their push pull factors. Chapter 9 talks about Chinese Exclusion Act of suspended Chinese immigrants from coming into the U.S.  Before the exclusion act about 300,000 Chinese immigrants entered the U.S.  Just to come over here, Chinese immigrants who didn’t have enough money would borrow money and then have to pay 2x more repayment then the original payment. “Chinese were borrowing seventy dollars and obligating themselves to pay back two hundred dollars.” (241) According to the book their ticket was $50 and $20 for their expenses.  San Francisco was the “port” of entry for them.  Parts of San Francisco became Chinatowns.  The Chinatowns are where most of the immigrants lived, worked and socialized. Chinese immigrants born in U.S. were automatically a citizen.

Japanese

-Early years of Japanese Immigrants were mainly men

-worked as agricultural laborers

-Gentleman’s Agreement: according to wikipedia.org "an informal agreement between two or more parties. The essence of a gentlemen's agreement is that it relies upon the honor of the parties for its fulfillment, rather than being in any way enforceable. It is, therefore, distinct from a legal agreement or contract, which can be enforced if necessary."

·         Provided family unification, passports were only issued to people who has already been to America and to “parents, wives, and children of laborers resident there.” (255)

- After Gentleman’s agreement, about 20,000 adult Japanese women. Some were married, but other’s came as picture brides. This reminded me of the movie we saw called “Picture Bride” In that movie, the girl comes over as a bride as well. The only thing she has a picture of her husband.  She migrates over and her husband is a 40 yr old man. She gets mad, because she is a girl who’s probably no more than 16 thinking that the husband would be young too. This was what was happening. The men migrated first and were lonely so they would pay for a picture bride to come over. It’s a great movie that points out what it would like for lives of immigrants who worked in the fields. They worked pretty much all day and lived in tiny shacks and they had terrible wages in my opinion. I’m not sure in the movie if she migrated to Hawaii but it was definitely a similar situation.

-Other Japanese American were in wholesale, retail trade or personal services.

French Canadians

-“only ethnic group whose migration was chiefly accomplished by rail.”(258)

-French speaking population was in Quebec

- From what I understand mostly mill workers

            After doing the readings for each chapter, I keep seeing one thing they all have in common. I think I’ve mentioned this before too. Every ethnic group has suffered. But I think no matter what there will always be suffering.