Chinese in the woods

"Building on her path-breaking work on Chinese in mining areas of the American West, Sue Fawn Chung takes up the topic of Chinese in the nineteenth century lumber industry in this new book. Chinese immigrants were key participants in logging and lumbering, in some cases constituting as much as 90 percent of the lumbering workforce. Chung sets out the background of interest in logging in China and examines the Chinese and American labor contractors, the community organizations and networks that supported them, and some of the reasons Chinese were attracted to logging in the west. She explicates their work, lifestyle, and wages, the lumber companies that employed them, their relationship with other ethnic groups, and the reasons for their departure from this occupation, including tightening immigration restrictions. Among other findings, Chung shows that Chinese performed most of the tasks that Euro-American lumbermen did, that their salaries for the same type of work in some places were not necessarily lower than the prevailing wage for non-Asian workers and in some cases even higher, that although some were separated in their work from other ethnic groups, some developed close relationships with their fellow workers and employers, and that Chinese camp cooks were valued and paid equal or better wages than their Euro-American counterparts. When they were treated unfairly, Chinese often brought their cases before the American courts and through the legal system won the right to buy and sell timberland and to obtain equal wages in logging. Based on exhaustive archival work, this project will expand understandings of the Chinese in the West and in working class history"--Provided by publisher.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.