For many years it was common in the United States to associate Chinese Americans with restaurants and laundries. People did not realize that the Chinese had been driven into these occupations by the prejudice and discrimination that faced them in this country.
The first Chinese to reach the United States came during the California Gold Rush of 1849. Like most of the other people there, they had come to search for gold. However, either because the Chinese were so different from the others or because they worked so patiently that they sometimes succeeded in turning a seemingly worthless mining claim into a profitable one, they became their scapegoats of their envious competitors. Often they were prevented from making their claims; some localities even passed regulations forbidding them to own claims. The Chinese therefore started to seek out other ways of learning a living. Some of them began to do the laundry for the white miners; others set up small restaurants.
In the early 1860’s many more Chinese arrived in California. This time the men were imported as work crews to construct the first transcontinental railroad. They were needed because the work was so dangerous, and it was carried on in such a remote part of the country that the railroad company could not find other laborers for the job. As in the case of their predecessors, these Chinese were almost all males and like them too, they encountered a great deal of prejudice.
When times were hard, they were blamed for working for lower wages and taking jobs away from white men, who were in many cases recent immigrants themselves. Anti-Chinese riots broke out in several cities.
Most of today’s Chinese Americans are the descendants of some of the early miners and railroad workers. Those immigrants had come from the vicinity of Canton in southeast China, where they had been uneducated farm laborers. The same kind of young men, from the same area and from similar humble origins, migrated to Hawaii in those days. There they fared far better, mainly because they did not encounter hostility. Some married native Hawaiians, and others brought their wives and children over. They were not restricted to Chinatowns, and many of them soon became successful merchants and active participants in general community affairs.
The high regard for education which is deeply imbedded in Chinese culture, and the willingness to work hard to gain advancement, are other noteworthy characteristics of theirs. This explains why so many descendants of uneducated laborers have succeeded in becoming doctors, lawyers and other professionals. |
In the California Gold Rush the Chinese immigrants faced ______.
A．keen competition
B．serious prejudice and discrimination
C．bad weather and hard living conditions
D．language barrier