Sam Miller’s Reviews > The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics > Status Update

How is this?

Brag wrote: "How is this?"

The beginning (the first 3 or 4 chapters) is rough, just from a writing standpoint. Way more typos than I would have expected for an award winning history book, and written in a conversational tone that veered into just being flat to read. However, after that start, it considerably improves, and the sections on Chinese labor in Australia and South Africa are the best by far. The chapters on Chinese labor and Chinese exclusion in California do include extensive sections citing from and referring to the direct accounts of Chinese laborers and businessmen in America at the time, including a chapter on a specific court case with a Chinese defendant, but Ngai doesn't do a great job of making a larger picture out of those parts other than gesturing in the direction of racism in the white labor movement. Maybe not the best book on the subject (I haven't read The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California, which I've heard is one of the best works on anti-Chinese racism in the California labor movement, something which is gestured at but not gone into detail when compared with Chinese exclusion in Australia and South Africa), but, despite what I would have said if you asked me this ~100 pages ago, worth reading! The quotations from Chinese laborers and leaders alone is valuable, even if Ngai's writing sometimes isn't great.