- I'd like to look at the influence made by the Chinese servants in Palo Alto at the turn of the 20th century. While Leland Stanford's servants were some of the first to come to the area, they later took up positions as cooks and janitors on the University campus starting in 1891; more servants accompanied incoming faculty, and still more arrived with the boom of Palo Alto and neighboring Mayfield. By 1900, there was a full-fledged Chinatown on El Camino, not far from where Stanford Avenue connects to it today. However, due to many Palo Alto residents objections against the Chinese, the "shanty town" was demolished not long after, and by 1910 even the number of employed servants in Palo Alto had dropped significantly. And few were left at all by 1920. I'd like to continue to research this more fully, and maybe concentrate on race relations rather than looking just at what the Chinese servants were doing and where they worked.
- I'd also be interested in looking at the movement of Chinese servants and residents in San Francisco leading up to and immediately following the San Francisco earthquake. This subject came up peripherally to my research last year, but I was interested to find out more about the forging of immigration documents, or the claim that they were "destroyed in the fire" in 1906, and the creation of "Paper Sons" or "Paper Daughters"—illegal immigrants who were able to stay based on these false documents and the pity or confusion following the earthquake.
- (You'll notice a theme among these topics . . .) I'm very interested at the artificial creation of China that took place in Chinatowns, particularly in San Francisco or San José (which was destroyed by fire and only recently excavated as an archaeological project through Stanford). My conception of China as a little kid was influenced heavily by what I saw in Chinatown, and its only relatively recently that I discovered many of my conceptions were based on hold-overs from the 19th century, during which time China was under Manchu, rather than Han Chinese, rule. I'd like to look specifically at those hold-overs, whether through architecture, food, spoken language or origin among Chinatown residents, and the surrounding neighborhood's reaction or conceptions of them.
See you all in class tomorrow!
Hi, Chris,
ReplyDeleteSo I think you have a lot of really interesting possibilities for archival research here! I think your first two are particularly interesting, and I think you could focus it by looking regionally (for instance, at Palo Alto) or at individual families' experiences. Your last one seems like it might be much harder to do: it might be really difficult to get an accurate idea of architecture and food and so forth, not to mention that this means that you will have to get a very clear idea of the architecture and food and so forth of many different points of origin in China.
Chris--
ReplyDeleteYou're in the enviable position of having an idea of what information is out there for you to work with. Personally I find your third idea the most interesting in the sense that what does Chinatown mean to Chinese immigrants? It's obviously not China but if it isn't even an accurate representation of China and current Chinese realities, why is that? Is it because they depend upon their image as Chinatown to draw outside tourists/visitors, or is it simply that it doesn't matter to them what it looks like? You could have a really interesting analysis of the role Chinatown plays with its residents and visitors. Essentially it would be a discussion of the "identity" of Chinatown.
Hi Chris,
ReplyDeleteI really like your idea of how Chinatown remained as something of a relic of a China that no longer existed.
This is sort of random, but your topic idea made me think of this:
http://www.pem.org/sites/yinyutang/
I happened to visit a couple years ago, it's sort of an interesting idea to think of keeping something exactly in its original form but transporting it to a new space. Williamsburg/Sturbridge Village could be an interesting contrast.. these are obviously artificial, historical relics, and how do they compare to how Chinatown was something of a living relic (<--paradox?).
-Sylvie