Book Description
"Among the many groups of Chinese who migrated from their ancestral homeland in the nineteenth century, none found a more favorable situation than those who came to Hawaii. Coming from South China, largely as laborers for sugar plantations and Chinese rice plantations but also as independent merchants and craftsmen, they arrived at a time when the tiny Polynesian kingdom was being drawn into an international economic, political, and cultural world. Between the extremes of enthusiastic welcome and bitter prejudice, the migrants made their way into the mainstream of Hawaiian life. Caucasians dominated the sugar industry, banking, and the larger businesses, and increasingly controlled the government, but they were too few to preempt the openings in crafts, trades, and smaller businesses resulting from the expansion of the Island economy: Although more than half of the migrants returned to China after a few years' sojourn, those who remained moved successfully into these openings. As the first major Asian migrant group in the area (followed by Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos) they had little competition. By the time the monarchy was overthrown in 1893 and Hawaii was annexed to the United States in 1898, Chinese settlers were well established and were helping their Hawaii-born children move on to greater achievements, political and social as well as economic. Sojourners and Settlers traces the waves of Chinese immigration, the plantation experience, and movement into urban occupations. Important for the migrants were their close ties with indigenous Hawaiians, hundreds establishing families with Hawaiian wives. Other migrants brought Chinese wives to the Islands. Though many early Chinese families lived in the section of Honolulu called "Chinatown," this was never an exclusively Chinese place of residence, and under Hawaii's relatively open pattern of ethnic relations Chinese families rapidly became dispersed throughout Honolulu.Chinatown was, however, a nucleus for Chinese business, cultural, and organizational activities. More than two hundred organizations were formed by the migrants to provide mutual aid, to respond to discrimination under the monarchy and later under American laws, and to establish their status among other Chinese and in Hawaii's multiethnic community. Professor Glick skillfully describes the organizational network in all its subtlety. He also examines the social apparatus of migrant existence: families, celebrations, newspapers, schools-in short, the way of life. Using a sociological framework, the author provides a fascinating account of the migrant settlers' transformation from villagers bound by ancestral clan and tradition into participants in a mobile, largely Westernized social order" -- Book jacket.
