The first wave of Chinese immigrants came to Chicagoland in the 1870s, after the transcontinental railway connected the Pacific Coast to Chicago. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act prevented working-class Chinese from entering the U.S., except men who could prove they were American citizens. For more than 60 years, many Chinese immigrants had acquired documents helping to prove that they were born in America or had a parent who was a citizen. The men who bore these false identities were called "paper sons." A second wave of Chinese immigrants arrived after the repeal of the Act in 1943, seeking economic opportunity and to be reunited with their families.

Inspired by recent work on diaspora and cultural globalization, Adam McKeown asks in this new book: How were the experiences of different migrant communities and hometowns in China linked together through common networks? Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change argues that the political and economic activities of Chinese migrants can best be understood by taking into account their links to each other and China through a transnational perspective. Despite their very different histories, Chinese migrant families, businesses, and villages were connected through elaborate networks and shared institutions that stretched across oceans and entire continents. Through small towns in Qing and Republican China, thriving enclaves of businesses in South Chicago, broad-based associations of merchants and traders in Peru, and an auspicious legacy of ancestors in Hawaii, migrant Chinese formed an extensive system that made cultural and commercial exchange possible.

Numerous studies have documented the transnational experiences and local activities of Chinese immigrants in California and New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Less is known about the vibrant Chinese American community that developed at the same time in Chicago. In this sweeping account, Huping Ling offers the first comprehensive history of Chinese in Chicago, beginning with the arrival of the pioneering Moy brothers in the 1870s and continuing to the present. Ling focuses on how race, transnational migration, and community have defined Chinese in Chicago. Drawing upon archival documents in English and Chinese, she charts how Chinese made a place for themselves among the multiethnic neighborhoods of Chicago, cultivating friendships with local authorities and consciously avoiding racial conflicts. Ling takes readers through the decades, exploring evolving family structures and relationships, the development of community organizations, and the operation of transnational businesses. She pays particular attention to the influential role of Chinese in Chicago's academic and intellectual communities and to the complex and conflicting relationships among today's more dispersed Chinese Americans in Chicago.

Introduction: Defining the Asian American heartland and its significance -- Transnational migration and businesses in Chinese Chicago, 1870s-1930s -- Building "hop alley" : myth and reality of Chinatown in St. Louis, 1860s-1930s -- Intellectual tradition of heartland : Chicago School and beyond -- Family and marriage in heartland, 1880s-1940s -- Living heartland : 1860s-1950s -- Governing heartland : on Leong Chinese Merchants and Laborers Association, 1906-1966 -- The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and the formation of cultural community in St. Louis -- The tripartite community in Chicago -- Conclusion: Convergences and divergences.