Collection of essays by Chinese-American scholar Him Mark Lai; published in association with the Chinese Historical Society of San Francisco.

Founded during the Gold Rush years, the Chinese community of San Francisco became the largest and most vibrant Chinatown in America. This is a detailed social and cultural history of the Chinese in San Francisco.

Chinese American Transnationalism considers the many ways in which Chinese living in the United States during the exclusion era maintained ties with China through a constant interchange of people and economic resources, as well as political and cultural ideas. This book continues the exploration of the exclusion era begun in two previous volumes: Entry Denied, which examines the strategies that Chinese Americans used to protest, undermine, and circumvent the exclusion laws; and Claiming America, which traces the development of Chinese American ethnic identities. Taken together, the three volumes underscore the complexities of the Chinese immigrant experience and the ways in which its contexts changed over the sixty-one year period.