Laura Ng

LAURA WAI NG, then a graduate student at Stanford University, Stanford, California, was awarded a grant in October 2018 to aid research on ‘Transpacific Chinese Villages and California Chinatowns: The Archaeology of Chinese Transnationalism, 1878-1943,’ supervised by Dr. Barbara Voss. This project seeks to understand the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transnational linkages between Chinese living in their home villages in southern China and migrants living in Chinese settlements in the United States. Specifically, the work examines two diasporically connected areas: two Chinatowns in the Inland Empire region of California, and Wo Hing, a new village in Taishan County, Guangdong, China that was established in 1902. From 1850 to 1943, thousands of Chinese from Taishan County immigrated to America to labor as miners, railroad workers, cooks, farmers, laundrymen, and merchants. Both the Riverside Chinatown (1885-1930s) and San Bernardino Chinatown (1878-1920s) were populated by migrants from Wo Hing. This study uses multiple lines of evidence — artifacts collected from archaeological survey, museum collections, architecture, archival documents, and oral histories — to examine how the transpacific movement of people, goods, money, and ideas impacted Chinese living in the Inland Empire and villagers in Wo Hing. The research creates a more complex picture of Chinese migration from Guangdong by exploring the material impacts of transnationalism at both the home site and diasporic sites. The results of this project will contribute to refining anthropological theories of diaspora and transnationalism, which have often overlooked the materiality of migration.