Donaldina Cameron (July 26, 1869 – January 4, 1968) was a pioneer in the fight against slavery as a Presbyterian missionary in San Francisco's Chinatown, who helped more than 2,000 Chinese immigrant girls and women escape from forced prostitution and indentured servitude. She was known as "Fahn Quai," or the “White Devil” of Chinatown, as well as the "Angry Angel of Chinatown." The body of the book -- which tells of daring raids, hair breadth rescues, the innumerable legal battles, the war on the Tongs .... belongs to a time and place in colorful San Franciscana.

Focusing on the local history of the Chinese in Oakland, California, this study examines common stereotypes in the early Chinese community and Chinatown organizations.

Rich in data collected from gang members, gang victims, community leaders, and law enforcement authorities, this book offers a systematic study of New York City's Chinatown gangs. "Chin's ethnographic study should be on the shelf of anyone interested in the comparative study of gangs and the role of gangs in American society."--Jerome H. Skolnick, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

This book explores the history, the reality, and the complex fantasy of American and European Chinatowns and traces the patterns of transnational travel and traffic between China, South East Asia, Europe, and the United States which informed the development of these urban sites. Despite obvious structural or architectural similarities and overlaps, Chinatowns differ markedly depending on their location. European versions of Chinatowns can certainly not be considered mere replications of the American model. Paying close attention to regional specificities and overarching similarities, Chinatowns thus discloses the important European backdrop to a phenomenon commonly associated with North America. It starts from the assumption that the historical and modern Chinatown needs to be seen as complicatedly involved in a web of cultural memory, public and private narratives, ideologies, and political imperatives. Most of the contributors to this volume have multidisciplinary and multilingual backgrounds and are familiar with several different instances of the Chinese diasporic experience. With its triangular approach to the developments between China and the urban Chinese diasporas of North America and Europe, Chinatowns reveals connections and interlinkages which have not been addressed before.

Ethnic enclaves as an alternative means of incorporation into the larger society.

Revealing the untold stories of a pioneer generation of young Chinese Americans, this book places the children and families of early Chinatown in the middle of efforts to combat American policies of exclusion and segregation. Wendy Jorae challenges long-held notions of early Chinatown as a bachelor community by showing that families--and particularly children--played important roles in its daily life. She explores the wide-ranging images of Chinatown's youth created by competing interests with their own agendas--from anti-immigrant depictions of Chinese children as filthy and culturally inferior to exotic and Orientalized images that catered to the tourist's ideal of Chinatown. All of these representations, Jorae notes, tended to further isolate Chinatown at a time when American-born Chinese children were attempting to define themselves as Chinese American. Facing barriers of immigration exclusion, cultural dislocation, child labor, segregated schooling, crime, and violence, Chinese American children attempted to build a world for themselves on the margins of two cultures. Their story is part of the larger American story of the struggle to overcome racism and realize the ideal of equality.