Lived experiences of the early Cantonese immigrants: A glimpse from San Francisco Chinatown’s Gold Mountain songs and the poetry on Angel Island

This event will be hosted by the Chinese American Student Association (CASA). The lecture will take place during the first part of the evening, with some related activities following it. 

Marjorie K.M. Chan
The Ohio State University

The California Gold Rush (1848-1855) attracted hundreds of thousands of people from within the U.S. and beyond to California, including many from China who settled in San Francisco. They joined those who, back in 1838, had travelled north from Mexico to the city. In 1853, San Francisco’s Chinese neighborhood (“Little Canton”) was given the name “Chinatown” by the press.[1] These residents, who came mostly from Cantonese-speaking counties in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province in southern China, refer to their enclave as “Tangren Jie” 唐人街 (‘Tang people’s Street’).[2]  

This talk has two main objectives. The first objective is to provide some historical background on early Chinese immigration to the U.S., and on Angel Island Immigration Station (1910-1940) in San Francisco Bay. And the second objective is to present the lived experiences of these immigrants in the early 20th century of those seeking to enter the U.S. and those living in San Francisco Chinatown. This is accomplished through two main sets of poetry: (1) Angel Island poems that were carved by detainees into the walls of the barracks on Angel Island, many having been translated by Lai et al. (1980, 2014). And (2) Gold Mountain songs in two volumes (金山歌集, 金山歌二集 ) with many of them having been translated by Hom (1987). The poems offer a glimpse into not only the lived experiences of the immigrants, but also into family and loved ones left in China and those who were denied entry into the U.S. and were deported. 

Select References

Hom, Marlon K. 1987. Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jinshan Ge Ji (金山歌集, Gold Mountain Songs Collection). 1911. San Francisco: Daguang Shulin (大光樹林). 

Jinshan Ge Er Ji (金山歌二集, Gold Mountain Songs Collection 2). 1915. San Francisco: Daguang Shulin (大光樹林). 

Lai, Him Mark, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung. 1980. Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940. First edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Lai, Him Mark, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung (eds.). 2014. Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940. Second edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press. [This second edition more than doubled the length of the first edition. It added poems from two other immigration detention sites, Ellis Island and Victoria, Canada, and replaced short, translated excerpts of oral histories of Angel Island detainees recorded in the 1970s with a focus on 20 full-length translated interviews.]

Short Bio:

Marjorie K. M. Chan is an Associate Professor in the East Asian Linguistics component of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (DEALL) at The Ohio State University. Daughter and granddaughter of “paper sons,” she was born in the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong Province in southern China, and grew up in Vancouver Chinatown. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Linguistics from the University of British Columbia, and her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Washington. She was a post-doctoral fellow for two years at UCLA’s Phonetics Lab before joining OSU. Her teaching and research in DEALL focus on Chinese Linguistics: phonetics and phonology; dialectology; historical linguistics, especially historical phonology; the Chinese writing system, including dialect-writing; socio-pragmatic issues pertaining to language and gender, as well as to humor. The culture component of her teaching and research pertains to Chinese opera, with particular interest in regional operas, and Cantonese operas in particular. 

URL: https://u.osu.edu/chan.9/