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Post by NZBC on May 6, 2008 21:12:45 GMT 12
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Post by NZBC on May 24, 2008 22:49:41 GMT 12
San Francisco's streets echo the sounds and sights of Guangzhou
Guangdong, the province that includes the city of Guangzhou and the thriving border business hub of Shenzhen, has some 110 million people. The most populous province in China as well as the most affluent, it is nevertheless home to less than 10 percent of modern China's 1.3 billion people.
Though it has a small percentage of China's population, Guangdong province was home to the forebears of 50 percent of all Chinese Americans -- about 500,000 of whom live in the Bay Area, according to Him Mark Lai, a San Franciscan widely recognized as a leading authority on Chinese immigration to the United States. Before the more diversified Chinese immigration of recent years, the percentage of Chinese Americans who could trace their lineage to Guangdong province was more than 70 percent, he says.
Nineteenth century poverty and geography account for the prominence of Guangdong as the mother lode of Chinese immigration from the days of the California Gold Rush onward, according to Lai. Located on China's southeastern coast, Guangdong includes the historic port city of Guangzhou. It also borders Hong Kong, a huge embarkation point for Chinese after the British took control of Hong Kong in the 1840s and transformed it into an international seaport.
Visitors to modern Guangzhou -- Canton, in local dialect -- can look in vain, as I did, for a public monument or a history museum commemorating the diaspora that began in and near the city.
However, Guangzhou feels familiar, even to a non-Chinese. The quick, animated, tonal Cantonese a visitor hears in the streets is identical to the Cantonese spoken on San Francisco's Stockton Street. The fare in local restaurants is similar, though more adventurous than dishes in most Chinese American restaurants. The enterprise of local merchants, the heaped street-side displays of food, clothing and other goods -- all are familiar. What Guangzhou and other cities in the province lack in formal acknowledgement of the U.S. connection, they provide informally, organically, in the texture of everyday life.
That newish staple of an American big-city lunch, dim sum, originally came from Guangzhou. But the tasty little morsels have been diversified in America. Traditionally, only about 10 varieties of dim sum existed in Guangzhou, Lai says. Chinese American ingenuity now accounts for many more.
The long-standing Guangdong connection is well-remembered on the American side of the Pacific, and is sometimes institutionalized here.
At San Francisco's Chinese Culture Center, an annual program called "In Search of Roots" selects and sends young Chinese Americans to their ancestral villages and cities in Guangdong province, uniting them with relatives there -- many of whom they have never met. When I recently dropped by the center's refurbished exhibition space at 750 Kearny St., in the Hilton Financial District Hotel across from Portsmouth Square, the third-floor gallery was partly given over to photos, poems, diary excerpts and drawings that Chinese Americans have made about their journeys to Guangdong. Some, it was clear, had had moving encounters with their extended family in the homeland -- a few just couldn't relate, the miles and the years proving too much to bridge.
According to Lai -- a retired Bechtel engineer who made himself into a scholar and co-taught a pioneering Chinese American history course at San Francisco State -- Guangdong's grinding poverty in generations past drove thousands of Chinese to seek a better life overseas.
"The poorest part of Guangdong was on the western side of the Pearl River delta," Lai told me. "The city of Jiangmen and villages near there produced a lot of immigrants. They came through San Francisco, the Western portal to this country, and settled. They were merchants and laborers. Family members came over to join relatives who were already here, and patterns were reinforced."
Famously, Chinese newcomers panned for California gold in the late 1840s and 1850s or worked for men who did. In the late 1860s, they did the back-breaking work of building the western leg of the transcontinental railroad.
All of this is recounted in depth and detail in books, of course. Lai recommends, among others, Peter Kwong and Dusanka Miscevic's "Chinese America" and "The Chinese in America," by the late Bay Area writer Iris Chang.
After restrictive U.S. immigration quotas were finally lifted in the 1960s, there were several surges of immigration to the United States from many provinces of mainland China, as well as Hong Kong, Taiwan and the big overseas Chinese communities in Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. This has diversified the Chinese American community by geography and by language, as more Mandarin speakers arrive on these shores.
However, Cantonese-speaking Guangdong province is still by far the largest single source of Chinese immigration and remains the ancestral site of Chinese America. By going there, we are -- whether we're on a personal pilgrimage or a leisure trip born of travelers' curiosity -- closing a circle.
This article appeared on page F - 5 of the San Francisco Chroniclhttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/02/26/TRGCVHCTS21.DTLe
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