Becoming american the chinese experience. program 1 gold

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Chinese -- United States -- History -- 19th century. Chinese Americans -- History -- 19th century. Chinese Americans -- California -- History -- 19th century. Railroad construction workers -- United States -- History -- 19th century.

In every immigrant group, each generation finds a balance between the values and practices of its heritage, and the mores of its adopted country. What is lost and what is gained, both personally and culturally, when one sheds part of one's heritage to make way for a new self-identity? As civil war and famine ravaged Southern China in the midth century, word of the California Gold Rush reached the port of Canton.

The prospect of making a fortune in America proved an irresistible lure to young Chinese men. They set sail across the Pacific hoping for a better life. Part Two tells the story of hostile years when Chinese Americans existed in a kind of limbo, denied the rights of their new country and no longer at home in their former one.

Series Producer Thomas Lennon, who has explored America's historical struggle with race and ethnicity in a number of his prior productions, recognizes the ambivalence about becoming American that many Chinese immigrants carried with them.

He says, "So much American ethnic history is told as a sentimental romance. Or a litany of the wrongs done to a people. We were determined to tell this story from the inside out: why the Chinese first came, the excruciating human dilemmas they faced once here and the tug-of-war between the old world and the new. In Western cities and frontier settlements as far away as Idaho and Oregon, Chinese men also saw opportunity in the economic activities undesirable to white men.

For the more limited number of Chinese women in America in the last decades of the 19th century, both the new country and their native culture offered few options and little hope. Even after the Civil War, most of the Chinese women in the U. When the gold strikes tapped out and hard economic times loomed in California, Chinese immigrants faced a wave of violence, terror and discrimination. Anti-Chinese labor leaders like Denis Kearney, himself an immigrant, rallied Americans against these "almond-eyed lepers.