Immigration and Diasporavoices from overseas chinese communitie

  1. Sai-Kin Lee Tsang
Libro:
Evolving origins, transplanting cultures: literary Legacies of the news Americans
  1. Laura Alonso Gallo (coord.)
  2. Antonia Domínguez Miguela

Editorial: Universidad de Huelva

ISBN: 978-84-95699-70-1 84-95699-70-2

Año de publicación: 2002

Páginas: 213-220

Tipo: Capítulo de Libro

Resumen

The initial wave of Chinese immigration began as a result of the discovery of gold in San Francisco in the 1850s. Disruptions brought about by foreign invasions and t a.. internal revolts as well as problems of declining farm productivity and rising population, forced many Chinese in the coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian to migrate overseas. The first Chinese settlers created Chinatown for their cultural transfer overseas t and the dynamics of social organisation and community stratification in the new environments. Cantonese folk rhymes were written in vernacular writing by the first Chinese immigrants and had been published among the Chinese themselves to overcome their nostalgia, loneliness and hardship in North America. Like the idea of a Chinese race in the 1930s, novels written by Pearl S. Buck such as The Good Earth represented "Chineseness." The novel was made into a film using white actors and actresses, as racial discrimination was strong at that time. Ever since the proclamation of the Republic Popular of China in 1949, political persecutions have forced many Chinese intellectuals such as Nien Cheng and Wu Ning Kun to live in the Diaspora. The Open Door Policy started by Deng Xiao Ping made China recover its international prestige as a world power. As a result, many third or fourth Chinese-Americans decided to write about the sagas of their Chinese ancestors, people that they had never met and places they had never been to. Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan or Fae Myenne Ng alongside with many other writers of Chinese origin have the ability to inhabit imaginatively other places and times, to render the feel of manufacturing incense sticks in the 1920s or running from the invading Japanese in the 1930s.