Chinese Immigration to New York

The Chinese Immigrant Experience in America. Unit designed by Liz Wong, PS124, Manhattan.

• Intended Audience: 5^th grade
• Established Goals:
  • Standard 1: #3 Study about the major social, political, economic, cultural, and religious developments in NYS & U. S. history involves learning about the history of the U. S. and NY
  • Standard 1: #4 Explore different experiences, beliefs, motives, and traditions of people living in their neighborhoods, communities

Understandings

1. Ethnic communities/neighborhoods are formed for a variety of reasons (anti-immigrant sentiments; emotional support; longing for the familiar such as eating familiar foods, celebrating traditions & holidays, speaking the same language, etc.)
2. The character, lifestyle, and experiences of an ethnic community is shaped by economic opportunities and laws passed by the government.
3. Immigrants find ways of meeting their needs (opium addiction to address loneliness, paper sons to gain citizenship status, San Francisco earthquake led to citizenship documents being destroyed allowing Chinese to claim they are citizens, family/kinship associations that provided support for new immigrants such as assisting in communication between Chinese in America and their families in China)

Essential Questions

1. What were the experiences of Chinese-Americans throughout their history in the U. S.?
2. What acts/laws affected the Chinese in America, and how did this lead to the formation of a Chinatown?
3. What have been the contributions of Chinese-Americans to the U. S.?

Knowledge

• 1882 - The U. S. passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, suspending the immigration of Chinese laborers to the U. S. and denies Chinese the right to become American citizens. It is the first U. S. restriction on immigration based on race & nationality, and stops large scale Chinese immigration for 60 years.
• 1898 - In "Wong Kim Ark v. U. S.", the U. S. Supreme Court concedes that a child of Chinese descent born in the U. S. is an American citizen.
• 1943 - Repeal of Exclusion Laws. Quota of 105 Chinese per year set.
• 1965/68 - Racial quotas system for immigration is abolished. Beginning of a new influx of Chinese immigrants and expansion of New York's Chinatown.
• Students will know what a primary document is and how historians use primary documents to construct stories of history
• Students will investigate some of the ways that immigrants joined together in social groups to help make their lives in a new culture easier.

Vocabulary

ghetto, bachelor, society, exclusion, quota, influx, nationality, citizenship

Skills

1. Students will be able to name several different kinds of primary documents (i.e., photographs, legal texts, diaries, etc.)
2. Students will learn how to ask critical questions of a variety of primary documents (visual and textual documents) and consider different opinions and perspectives presented in primary documents
3. Students will learn to draw conclusions from studying primary documents and nonfiction texts.
4. Students will determine the cause and effect of acts passed by the government barring and limiting Chinese immigration.

Stage 2: Assessment Evidence

Performance Task

1. Create a museum exhibit of photos, paintings, etchings by collecting them from various books and websites. Write your own captions for each illustration telling what it depicts of the history of Chinese immigration.
2. Drama activity: Create a dialogue between two Chinese immigrants who are living in NY's Chinatown in 1890. What would they discuss about their lives in America compared to their lives in China? Act out dialogue.
3. Write a letter home from the perspective of a Chinese immigrant telling your family about your experiences in the "Gold Mountain". What hardships and successes have you experienced? Explain why the Chinese moved from the west to the eastern part of the U. S.

Other Evidence (quizzes, observation tools, journals, etc.)

• Students write a journal from the perspective of a Chinese immigrant in the 1880s. Describe a typical day (your work, what you do in your free time, who you spend time with, etc.)

Learning Activities

• Looking at a photo circa 1890. Describe what you see: who is in the photograph, what objects are in the photograph. Based on what you see, make a guess about what life was like for New Yorkers in 1890. Look at several different photographs of Lower Manhattan, especially Chinatown, and describe each of them. Then, using the information from these several photographs, draw a conclusion of who lived in Chinatown in 1890. Can you tell what kinds of jobs Chinatown's residents held? Were they men, women, children? Families or individuals?
• Using the internet, find images of Manhattan's Chinatown today. (Or, if you happen to live in New York City, take your students on a tour of Chinatown and have them take photos of the place themselves.) Then, place these contemporary photos side by side with the photos from the 1890s. Compare and contrast what Chinatown looked like in 1890 and what it looks like now. How did the buildings change? How did the streets change? Can you tell lives in Chinatown today? Men, women, children? Families? Individuals? Can you tell what kinds of jobs residents of today's Chinatown hold?
• Look at the photo of a man smoking an opium pipe and read its caption. Look at photos and read journals regarding Chinese interracial marriages. Describe the Chinese-American experience from these primary sources. Tell how Chinese immigrants in America felt about living here. Describe how they coped and how they met their needs of combating loneliness.
• Describe how they fought back against unfair laws towards the Chinese through court cases. (Wong Kim Ark v. Supreme Court, Fong Yue-Ting v. U. S.)
• Read Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (may have to be rewritten into kid-friendly language). Determine the cause of this act. Determine its effect on the Chinese
• Construct a timeline of the events/acts that are crucial to the Chinese-American immigrant experience.
• Write a play/skit about a single event/act and how the Chinese and the Americans may have reacted to it.

Shared Reading

• We Are Americans: Voices of the Immigrant Experience pp. 120 - 121 (quote from Chinese immigrant expressing the importance of Chinatown), 125 (bachelor society), 95 - 96 (anti-Chinese immigrant sentiment leads to Exclusion Act of 1882),107 -108 (paper sons, 1906 San Francisco earthquake), 148 - 149 (1943 quota came about because China was an ally of the U. S.)
• Coming to America: The Chinese-American Experience pp. 40 - 41 (Chinese-American Women & "bachelor societies"), p. 54 "End of Exclusion" (1943 quota)
• The Peoples of North America: The Chinese Americans by William Daley, Chelsea House Publishers: 1987. pp. 13 - 15 (formation of Chinatown, reasons women stayed in China), pp. 57 - 67 ("Life in America" - 1888 Scott Act, Paper Sons, Familiar Associations, Christina Missionaries, Breaking the Grip of Prejudice); Photos: p. 32 (Panning for Gold), p. 36 (Chinese mining), p. 38 (violence directed towards Chinese laborers), p. 39 (Building the Railroad)

Videos and Web Resources

• CNN video: Richard Lui's "Paper Sons" aired May 17, 200
• Video of Angel Island from Angel Island website (www.aiisf.org)
• Museum of the Chinese in the Americas (http://www.moca-nyc.org/MoCA/content.asp.

Resources Needed

1. We Are Americans by Dorothy & Thomas Hoobler
2. Coming to America: The Chinese-American Experience by Dana Ying-Hui Wu and Jeffrey Dao-Sheng Tung
3. Chinatown Historical Map & Guide A New York Chinatown History Project Production (http://www.moca-nyc.org/MoCA/content.asp?cid=12 )
4. Timeline: 400 Years of History of Chinese in the Americas (http://www.moca-nyc.org/MoCA/content.asp?cid=12 )
5. Videos: CNN & Angel Island
6. Coolies by Yin and Chris Soenpiet (picture book about Chinese building the railroad)
7. Dragon's Gate by Laurence Yep (novel about Chinese building the railroad)
8. In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Bette Bao Lord (explores the idea of citizenship, Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, the Chinese immigrant experience)
9. Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation: http://www.aiisf.org/
10. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=47 )
11. Chinese American Portraits (Personal Histories 1828 - 1988) by Ruthanne Lum McCunn
12. The Peoples of North America: The Chinese Americans by William Daley

Oral Histories of a Young, Post-1965 Immigrant

This lesson uses a series of drama exercises in combination with text from Janet Bode's book New Kids in Town: Oral Histories of Immigrant Teens (Scholastic, 1991) as a way to get students thinking about the experiences of immigrants who cam to the US in the aftermath of the federal immigration reforms of 1965. Developed by Dr. David Montgomery with assistance from Rachel Mattson and Terri Ruyter.

• Purpose: Students will examine the reasons why immigrants left their countries and the challenges and successes they faced in coming to America by looking at one young person' story: the oral history of a teenage from India named Amitabh.
• Standards:
  • NYS Social Studies Standard 1 Elementary: The study of NY State and US history requires an analysis of the development of American culture, its diversity and multicultural context, and the ways people are unified by many values, practices, and traditions.
  • H1: know the roots of American culture, its development from many different traditions, and the ways many people from a variety of groups and backgrounds played a role in creating it.
• Materials: Copies of "The Story of Amitabh" for each student. The link to the handout of the text that will be used in this session is at the end of this document.
• Number of class periods needed: 1-2

Connection

Explain to students the purpose of the lesson and how it links to what they have been learning in this unit so far.

"So far in our study of immigration, we have learned that.... Today, we are going to read an oral history and engage in some drama exercises that will help us consider the challenges and successes real families face when they immigrate to the United States. In this drama, you will need to use all that you have learned about immigration so far, and maybe draw upon some ideas you have inferred from our study so far."

Procedure:

• Hand out section of oral history of Amitabh. The class reads the following passage aloud, with each participant taking one sentence. Note that each segment of text is broken into chunks on the handout for easier reading. (5 minutes)

  "I couldn't always understand why we had come here. Why would my parents leave a country where they had been born, where their children had been born? Bhaunagar was a modernized city on the northwest side of India. It had a lot of factories, apartment houses, and private homes. Our home was three stories high and we lived together with my uncle, my aunt, and my grandparents. My grandparents had another house in a small city called Mehsana. Every summer and during other vacations we'd go there."

  "The weather was very warm. In the winters it would get cool enough to wear sweaters, but that was it. No snow. It also used to rain quite a bit. There was a dry and rainy season, with monsoons that occurred every year at a certain time. We had a good life there."

  "I know that people think that in India everybody is poor, that everything is backward. It's not that backward, and probably improved since I've been here. We had electricity and running water and traffic jams. I went to a good school. They taught the same subjects as over here, like art, general science, and math and also some of the different languages of India. I think there are fifteen or sixteen languages. At home we spoke Gujarati and I learned how to speak Hindi too. I was happy. I knew the way things were done in India. I knew the food. I loved cooked okra, the vegetable, and pouri, the bread. I had a favorite kind of curry. I knew my future. My parents said, though, that we were going to move to America because..."

• Then, Turn and Talk with a partner: Why do you think Amitabh's family decided to come to the United States? Participants will discuss possible reasons; i.e. lack of opportunity, financial hardship, and the pursuit of better living conditions. (3 minutes)
• Then the facilitator reads two sentences about what really happened to Amitabh's family:

  "My parents said that we were going to move to America because us kids would have more opportunities for the future. This was a long time planning."

• Pairs are grouped with two other pairs to form a group of six. Because each pair has discussed possible reasons why the family left India, they should have enough information to improvise the following scene:

  Groups improvise the moment Amitabh's parents tell him and the rest of the family they are going to move to America. In a group of six, there will be the mother, the father, Amitabh, and three more siblings or other family members. Groups improvise simultaneously for 3 minutes. Stop. Decide on 10 to 30 seconds of the improvisation you just did to share with the rest of the class. Each group shares their 10 to 30 seconds. This entire section should last no more than 7 minutes.

• Give a second hand-out which will be read aloud with the following bit of information from Amitabh on it:

  "It was really bad for us in the beginning. We were six in a two room apartment. Every day my parents would get up and go out to look for jobs. They knew they had to start all the way at the bottom, that people here didn't count experience from India. But my father had been a biologist. My mother was a chemistry professor at a university. In India they were both making good money. Now, though, they would come home every evening and they wouldn't have found anything. They would be very, very sad. They didn't know the bus systems or the subway systems here. They'd get lost. They'd get to some place and it would be too late. The job would be gone. They'd go another place and the answer would be no. One day my parents said, "This is a dead end. We can't find jobs. We don't have any more money. Nothing. We're going to have to jump into the river." I want to think that they were not being serious, but I still would feel so sad for us." (5 minutes)

• Brainstorm what kinds of jobs Amitabh's parents might be able to get in NYC? Elicit conversation about what factors go into the task of finding and getting a job. Altogether go through the information we have about the parents' educational status, their ability to speak English, and various other things we know about the world at large that might affect the sorts of jobs they might seek and find.
• Role-play a job interview in pairs (A and B). Amitabh's mother or father (A) applies for a job. B is the interviewer. Afterwards, ask the A's of the pairs to stand up while the B's remain seated. Ask the A's to walk to the next seated B partner and sit down next to them. Now, B will be the Amitabh's mother or father applying for a job, while A is the interviewer.
• Facilitator says: "Eventually both parents got a job. Can we see how this happened? Improvise the interview where the mother or father is offered a job for another two minutes, and then decide on 10 to 30 seconds to share with the class." (15 minutes)
• Discussion: What did it feel like to be interviewed? What were some of the themes or issues that emerged? (5 minutes)

• The participants receive a third hand-out and read about what really happened to Amitabh's family (5 minutes):

  "My father worked as a messenger, more a job for a boy than a man. He delivered letters and carried packages all over the city. Again, he would get lost the way he had when he was looking for work. He lasted about three or four months doing that until he found another job and another job. All small jobs. Then he met an Indian man who owned a laboratory who hired him. Now he's sort of back in the area of biology, where he used to work. My mothers started working at a store. She had to fold clothes, mostly. Then she got a better job watching patients at a senior citizens' home. Eventually, she became the dietician there. Now we live in a house with four bedrooms. I have my own bedroom and my middle brother and I have a computer. I'm in the tenth grade, and my older brother is in college the University of Maryland. He wants to be a surgeon. My father wants to become a U.S. citizen. My mother wants to stay Indian. Still, we are all changing...."

• Discussion: How are the members of Amitabh's family changing? (5 minutes)
• Ask students to create a tableau with their groups to show how your group thinks they are changing. Share. (10 minutes)

• Afterwards, facilitator hands out a fourth and final passage to read aloud (5 minutes):

  "Still, we are all changing. When we lived in Bhaunagar, my mother wore a sari. She used to put a bindi, that little dot, on her forehead. Now only when we go to some festival, like every August 15 is Indian Independence Day and there's a big parade, then she will wear her sari and have a bindi. Mostly, she just wears pants and a blouse. I'm more Americanized than my parents. I still speak Gujarati at home, but now there's English mixed in a lot. I'm trying to get out of my accent as much as possible. And now I have what I guess you could call an American mouth. I have braces. I'd never seen braces in India. I hate wearing them!!! Just like American kids." 

Assessment

Listen in to student conversations for evidence that students:

• are identifying reasonable challenges faced by Amitabh and his family
• are drawing upon prior knowledge of immigration issues in their interpretation of the narrative
• are making connections to and deepening understandings of the diverse stories and experiences that make up the community in which they live

Written Assessment:

Students can draw or create a written comparison chart of how Amitabh's family changed as a result of their immigration to the US and how they held on to their traditions.