Children of Chinatown: Growing Up Chinese American in San Francisco, 1850-1920 »

Wendy Rouse Jorae teaches history at St. Francis College Preparatory School in Sacramento, at the University of California, Davis, and at California State University-Sacramento.

Jorae challenges long-held notions of early Chinatown as a bachelor community by showing that families--and particularly children--played important roles in its daily life. Facing barriers of immigration exclusion, cultural dislocation, child labor, segregated schooling, crime, and violence, Chinese American children attempted to build a world for themselves on the margins of two cultures. Their story is part of the larger American story of the struggle to overcome racism and realize the ideal of equality.