Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home

"I love this book because it upends how we think about immigration. It focuses on Chinese immigrants coming to the United States from Taishan, a region in southern China, and how they found ways to live lives that were very transnational. We tend to think about immigrants leaving one place and beginning their lives anew in the United States. We don’t take their pre-migration experiences seriously and we don’t consider how they continue to maintain connections with their home countries. This book is a really fantastic example of how Chinese immigrants led lives that spanned two continents and transformed lives back in Taishan by sending remittances back to China, while building lives in the United States. It’s a fantastic example of the overall trend in the study of immigration to think about migrants’ lives as not being bounded by the nation-state, but rather lived across national borders. We need to think about the challenges they faced in China to understand why immigrants found the opportunities in the United States compelling. A number of circumstances—political conflict, economic troubles, the lack of available arable land—made life really difficult for people in this region of China at that time. In the United States, the discovery of gold and the promise of opportunity to prosper that it seemed to offer, drew immigrants. Even during exclusion, which began in the late 19th century, Chinese immigrants creatively circumvented the law and sent one family member to take advantage of opportunities in the United States to support relatives back in China."