Chinese have been in the United States for almost two hundred years. In fact, theChinese had business relations with Hawaii prior to relations with the mainland when Hawaii was not yet part of the United States.But United States investments controlled the capital of Hawaii at that time. In 1788, a ship sailed from Guangzhou to Hawaii. Most of the crewmen wereChinese. They were considered the pioneers of Hawaii. The ImmigrationCommission reported that the firstChinese arrived in the United States in 1820, eight in 1830 and seven hundred and eighty in 1850. TheChinese population gradually increased and reached 64,199 in 1870. For many years it was common in the United States to associateChineseAmericans with restaurants and laundries. People did not realize that theChinese had been driven into these occupations by the prejudice and discrimination that faced them in this country. The firstChinese to reach the mainland United States came during theCalifornia Gold Rush of 1849. Like most of the other people there, they had come to search for golD、In that largely unoccupied land, the men staked a claim for themselves by placing markers in the grounD、However, either because theChinese 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 the scapegoats of their envious competitors. They were harassed in many ways. Often they were prevented from working their claims; some localities even passed regulations forbidding them to own claims. TheChinese therefore started to seek out other ways of earning a living. Some of them began to do the laundry for the white miners; others set up small restaurants. (There were almost no women inCalifornia in those days, and theChinese filled a real need by doing this "woman’s work".) Some went to work as farmhands or as fishermen. In the early 1860’s many moreChinese arrived inCaliforniA、This time the men were imported as work crews to construct the first transcontinental railroaD、They were sorely needed because the work was so strenuous and 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, theseChinese were almost all males; and like them, too, they encountered a great deal of prejudice. The hostility grew especially strong after the railroad project was complete, and the imported laborers returned toCalitbrnia--thousands of them, all out of work.Because there were so many more of them this time, theseChinese drew even more attention than the earlier group diD、They were so very different in every respect: in their physical appearance, including a long "pigtail" at the back of their otherwise shaved heads; in the strange, non-Western clothes they wore; in their speech (few had learnedEnglish since they planned to go back toChina); and in their religion. They were contemptuously called "heathenChinese" because there were many sacred images in their houses of worship. When times were hard, they were blamed for working for lower wages and taking jobs away from white men, who were in many eases recent immigrants themselves.Anti-Chinese riots broke out in several cities, culminating in arson and bloodsheD、Chinese were barred from using the courts and also from becomingAmerican citizens.Californians began to demand that no moreChinese be permitted to enter their state. Finally, in 1882, they persuadedCongress to pass theChineseExclusionAct, which stopped the immigration ofChinese laborers. ManyChinese returned to their homeland, and their numbers declined sharply in the early part of this century. However, during the World War II, whenChina was an ally of the United States, theExclusion laws were ended; a small number ofChine
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