The early Chinese immigrants in America

The anti-Chinese movement and its impacts

In the 1870s, Chinese immigrant workers were viciously crowded out by the American workers, because the employers prefer the highly productive Chinese workers, who asked for relatively lower salaries to those native workers, who strived hard for higher wages. Many American workers lost their jobs after the arrival of Chinese workers. Due to the anger of American workers, the Chinese exclusion act was enacted and Chinese immigrants were looked down upon by many Americans. Therefore, the American stereotype of Chinese developed--Chinese were characterized as a group of ugly, servile and treacherous people who took away the American workers' work opportunities.However, just as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie contends in her TED talk that " the consequence of the single story robs people of dignity, " the Americans' single story of Chinese immigrants brought injustice to the Chinese. What the Americans back then did not see was how the Chinese immigrants worked day after day, trying hard to incorporate into the local communities in the U.S.. Most Chinese came to America, the land of opportunities, out of the same purposes as many Americans' ancestors did in the past--all of them wanted to have a better life, but the single story only emphasizes how the Chinese were different from Americans rather than how they were similar. According to Foucault, true history is made in the way that the facts "are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities." (129) I hold that the history of America is not not complete without the exclusion of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century, and it is time for the world to see how the early Chinese immigrants suffered from social injustice after their arrival in the U.S..




 

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