人前风光人后沧桑背后的故事 富人的沧桑故事 A Ragged Tale Of Riches

富人的沧桑故事 A Ragged Tale Of Riches  

THE Chinese
President Grover Cleveland proclaimed in 1888
are "an element ignorant of our constitution and laws
impossible of assimilation with our people
and dangerous to our peace and welfare." That decade
with its acts excluding fresh Chinese immigrants and even blocking re-entry to those Chinese who had temporarily returned home
broke the myth that the United States was an all-embracing haven for the world's huddled masses. But what of the story of the Chinese in America themselves?
Because of anti-Chinese hysteria-from the race riots in western mining towns in Cleveland's time to the nasty late-1990s witch hunt by the Clinton administration and the New York Times of Wen Ho Lee
a Taiwanese-American scientist at Los Alamos who was falsely accused of passing nuclear warhead technology to China-the Chinese in America have generally chosen to keep a low profile. It is time their story was given a wider airing. The strength of Iris Chang's book is that she is steeped in her subject
but it has weaknesses.
Narrative history often paints individual lives with too epic a sweep. The turmoil in China that has so often been the backdrop to emigration in the past 150 years is described rather too broadly here to be of much help. The importance among new Chinese arrivals of local clans and identities back in mainland China is not sufficiently emphasised. Why
for instance
do the wealthy snakeheads who anise much of the illegal immigration into America e from one small district in Fujian province? Ms Chang does not travel there-or not obviously even to New York's Chinatown-to find out.
叙事体历史经常倾向用一种伟大的方式去讲述个人的故事。在过去的150年里，中国的混乱形势一直是移民的一大背景，但张女士的书对这个背景的描述却过于概括，对读者的理解帮助不大。那时刚刚到达美国的中国家庭与个人又被送回中国大陆，但这本书却没有给予这件事足够的重视。还有例如，为什么那些组织中国人非法移民去美国的富有蛇头无一不来自福建省的小地方？张女士并没有亲自去福建省探个究竟，她甚至连纽约的唐人街也没有去过。
Her descriptions of the early Chinese in America battling blizzards
mudslides and mistreatment in the mining and railroad camps have the flavor of an old newsreel. It is not a format for insight
or irony of the intended sort. Thus
where the reader wants to know more about the consequences of the sexual frustration of all-male Chinese munities far from home (there was prostitution and violence
of course
but also an intriguing round of Chinese-Irish marriages)
Ms Chang's vagueness is unintendedly funny. "Entrepreneurs in the world's oldest profession
" she writes
"rode furiously on horsebock from camp to camp
trying to fit as many clients as possible into their schedules."
Similarly
she fails to look closely at the role of the Chinese in America in the growth
if not of globalization
then of a ring of economic connections and population shifts that have turned the Pacific into a flourishing and unified economic space. What of Chinese-America's equivalent of Yip Sang
an early example of what Felipe Fernandez-Armesto calls "Pacific man"? In the late 19th century he left Fujian province for San Francisco and then Vancouver
where he became an agent of the Canadian Pacific Railroad; by the early 1900s
his own pany had a flourishing international trade beeen San Francisco
Vancouver
Yokohama and Hong Kong.
Ms Chang does not delve into the Pacific ties that might have made such a man. She does say that
during the gold rush
many Californians shipped their laundry to be cleaned in Hong Kong
at $1 a shirt. If this is true-and it is a staggering proposition
given that the Pacific Mail Steamship Company made just a dozen sailings a year
taking 33 days-then the subject deserves a chapter
not just the briefest of mentions.