Refined Research Statement

Specifics

In the aftermath of the Chinese immigrant influx and the resultant exclusion acts of the late 1800s, the remaining Chinese would play a major part in every-day life in the formation of early Bay Area history, particularly at Stanford University. Working as servants, cooks and janitors, or running laundries, the early students and residents of the university town would have interacted with the Chinese on a daily basis. How did the cultural interaction play a role in defining the Chinese to the Americans of the time, and vice-versa? Then-Manchu-ruled China dictated aspects of personal presentation and dress, which made the Chinese stand out among any population--sometimes incurring fascination, and other times bringing on ridicule or anger. At a time when many Chinese were discriminated against in big cities such as San Francisco, how did these race-relations play out in the context of the university and the surrounding towns? Based on my former research, the Chinese population declined drastically during the first two decades of the twentieth century, from a height around 1900. What caused this decline? My hypothesis is that the 1906 earthquake was responsible for the major shifts in population at the time, an I'd be interested in finding out if there were also concurrent shifts in perception of the Chinese and cultural interaction.

Significance

The connection between Stanford and the Chinese servants who worked for the senator before the founding of the university was something that didn’t occur to me until encountering some of the primary source documents. The work done by these Chinese immigrants helped start the school, and I think that filling in the background for the cultural aspect of Chinese-American relationships would fill in this gap in early university history. Looking at how the Chinese-American relations shifted during the turn of the century, and with the 1906 earthquake, would be more broadly applicable to race-relations during times of upheaval.

Troubleshooting

Well . . . I can't read Chinese. I'm going to be limited to using English documents, which may either give me a bias for relationships looking Eastward, or limit me to sources that have been translated. Since I'll be looking at American sources, this may not be such a big problem, although the issue of lack of material evidence may itself become a problem. I will also have to deal with small collections at diverse locations, but hopefully telephone and online contact will enable me to narrow down the more likely sources of information.

Sources

I intend to go back to the Census records that I began to look at last time in order to narrow down names and locations of Chinese servants in order to get new ideas of where, or who, to search. I'm also excited to go to the Chinese Historical Society in San Francisco, something I have yet to do during my interest in this subject, since I suspect that a lot of material, even if it doesn’t relate directly to Stanford, will be applicable to Chinese-American experiences of the time. Student letters and memoirs of the early years of Stanford University will also be very important. Green Library has a wealth of second-hand sources regarding the effect of the 1906 earthquake on the Bay Area in general, and since this wasn’t the focus of any of my interests before, this will probably provide quite a bit of information I have yet to see. Historical societies in Menlo Park and Palo Alto, and possibly Portola Valley, will also be valuable.