Status Updates From Strangers in the Land: Excl...

The focus of Louis’s thesis was the growing native-born Chinese population, which in the 1920 census accounted for 30 percent of the total [number in the US]…The culture and the values of their parents collided with that of the country of their birth, a conflict familiar to European immigrants, but the Chinese Americans there was the added complication of race…The result was a kind of psychic homelessness.

In the aftermath of the [1906 San Francisco] quake, anti-Chinese zealots celebrated the destruction of Chinatown, believing they could finally cleanse the Chinese stain from the city. The Oakland Enquirer suggested that every town in the region could seize the opportunity to ‘do away with the huddling together of Chinese in districts where it is undesirable.’

…bullets rained down on the miners, and ‘one by one the Chinamen were shot down like sheep-killing dogs.’ The outlaws chased after a lone survivor and ‘finished him off’ with a rock. Afterward, the white assailants threw the mangled bodies into the river…(Subsequent reports suggested more than thirty Chinese miners were killed. For years, their corpses washed up along the banks of the river.)