Many Chinese immigrated to the United States during the 1800s, but Chinese-American families were virtually nonexistent or extremely instable during the first wave of Chinese immigration to the US.  Factors preventing a stable and secure Chinese family include blatant racism and laws that blocked a large portion of the Chinese from coming.

            Chinese people immigrated to America for many reasons.  Among those reasons are hopes for a better station in life, the stories of the riches of America, and economic, political, and social instability in China.  The Chinese, according to Haiming Liu’s article “The Social Origins of Early Chinese Immigrants,” were in fact the “first large stream of Asian immigrants in the US.”  Benson Tong describes in her book The Chinese Americans how Chinese immigrants came as early as the 1830s; these first immigrants settled in Hawaii.  However, Haiming Liu says that between 1840-1880, about 370,000 Chinese immigrants came from the Guangdong Province of China and settled on the continental US.  Many Chinese immigrants first settled in California.  Very few complete Chinese families immigrated to America at first, however, because it was extremely hard to leave China, and also, many expected to come to America, make lots of money, and then return to China.  Since men were the breadwinners of the family, that resulted in many more immigrant Chinese men to the US than Chinese women.    

            Many of these Chinese men worked blue collar jobs mining for gold in California, farming, working in factories, or working on the transcontinental railroad.  At first, the Americans welcomed the Chinese people as cheap labor.  However, the California depression of 1876 greatly changed that perception; Americans started viewing Chinese people as a threat.   Chinese people, according to Lee-Beng Chua in his book, Psycho-Social Adaptation and the Meaning of Achievement for Chinese Immigrants, “were categorized as ‘yellow peril’” taking away American jobs.  Chua describes how violence and persecution followed the Chinese, and that ultimately resulted in “anti-Chinese immigration legislation.”  This type of legislation in 1882 and persisted until 1942.

            The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882, barred Chinese workers from the US.  The National Archives site describes how only Chinese teachers, students, merchants, and travelers were allowed to immigrate to the US.  According to Chua, this act not only barred laborers from coming into America, but also prevented many from leaving America.  The unfortunate men were stranded “with too little money to survive”; they could not go back home to China due to lack of money, but they could neither have their families come join them.  In fact, Tong describes how “immigration of Chinese women and children” was feared by “the white-dominated society [who worried it would] lead to family formation and a possible mongrelization of the superior Anglo-Saxon race.”  Therefore, this early period had very few Chinese families living on American soil.

            The racism prevalent against the Chinese, however, caused the Chinese community to stick closer together, as opposed to assimilating to US culture.  This caused the creation of many Chinatowns.  As Tong describes it, Chinatown was an “ethnic neighborhood [that] served as a home and community for those living in a strange land.”  Not only that, but it nurtured traditional lifeways even as it functioned as a defensive response to the larger hostility.”  That would explain why certain traditional Chinese values still have such hold on the Chinese families today: Chinese people could only adapt to the US, early on, with those old traditional ways and values in mind, as opposed to embracing a new culture that blatantly opposed them.

            In 1943, according to the National Archives, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Act to Repeal the Chinese Exclusion Acts, basically ending the Chinese Exclusion Era, allowing for naturalization of Chinese immigrants and for more Chinese immigrants to enter the US.  Chinese wives of Chinese men who had now obtained US citizenship came to America, only to find that having a stable family life was extremely hard.  Since the men had, as Tong describes, “spent years living in an all-bachelor society,” they had “acquired bad habits like gambling and patronizing prostitutes.”  Obviously, many Chinese wives were not happy with their husbands’ lifestyles, and it was a challenge to stabilize conjugal ties.  At this point, says Tong, “many women still lived with the burden of being an unpaid household worker under male authority.” 

            Marital problems were not the only family problems that Chinese-American families faced after 1943.  Many families had problems with their children, who, after coming to America with their mothers, became rebellious and problematic.  The children were faced with many frustrations, such as an unfamiliar land, a strange language, and racial discrimination.  This resulted in many becoming malcontents who “engaged in antisocial behaviors” (Tong).