Miyako Hotel

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the numbers and experiences of Chinese Americans have grown far beyond the dreams of gold and railroads that conditioned nineteenth century lives.  Multiple generations of ethnic Chinese now claim and define America in ways unimaginable to their Cantonese forbears.  Even as American laws and attitudes broadened to encompass more immigrants from more lands, Chinese through grit and ambition staked out an expanding realm of possibilities.  Through explorations of history, literature and the arts, community activism, sociology, economics, ethnography, politics, and geography, this conference seeks to update and re-map the increasingly complex roles played by Chinese Americans in American life. 

The year 2005 marks the anniversary of many Chinese American milestones, some tragic and some laudable.  It commemorates a century since passage of California’s first anti-miscegenation law explicitly banning marriages between Mongolians and Caucasians.  One hundred years have also passed since Chinese protested the Exclusion laws (1882-1943) by boycotting American goods.  More recently, the country’s oldest Chinese American historical society, the Chinese Historical Society of America (CHSA), will celebrate its forty-second birthday and the thirtieth anniversary of the first Chinese American Studies conference.  The distance between discrimination and resistance, between exclusion and accomplishment, demarcated by these events highlight the many directions and multitude of paths tracking through present-day Chinese America.  

The face of Chinese America now include not just southern Cantonese, but immigrants from all parts of China and from the hybrid societies of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, South and Central America, Australasia, and Europe.  Chinese Americans live and work, scattered across all fifty states and have made inroads into every profession, including the once unattainable realm of electoral politics.  Artists, writers, and scientists stand tall on the national stage.  Despite these accomplishments, discrimination still lurks in the ongoing portrayal of ethnic Chinese as perpetual foreigners and national security risks. 

This conference is cosponsored by the Chinese Historical Society of America and the Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University.  For more information, contact Russell Ow at (415) 391-1188 x104, e-mail [email protected] or check the CHSA website at www.chsa.org

Chinese Historical Society of America