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Labor Migration

A street in Honolulu's Chinatown, Hawaii, with shops and signs under tropical sun.
Diaspora History Labor Migration

Chinese in Hawaii: The Sugar Plantations That Built the Pacific’s First Chinatown

Chinese in Hawaii: The Sugar Plantations That Built One of America's Oldest Chinatowns Before the gold rushes, before the transcontinental railroads, before the coolie ships that carried laborers to Cuba and Peru, one of the oldest Chinese communities in the United States was forming on a chain of volcanic islands in the middle of the…
September 6, 20260Comments

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Yunhuan Lou and Qiuanjulu Mansion in Zili Diaolou Village, Tangkou Township, Kaiping — the destination at the end of the last-mile road.
Labor Migration Wuyi Diaspora

Chinese Railroad Workers: The Wuyi Villages That Built the Transcontinental

Chinese Railroad Workers: The Wuyi Villages That Built the Transcontinental Between 1865 and 1869, approximately 12,000 Chinese workers laid the track that connected America from coast to coast. More than eighty percent came from a cluster of four counties in Guangdong province — an area smaller than Connecticut. Their wages built diaolou towers, their letters…
July 23, 20260Comments

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diaspora Labor Migration Southeast Asia Women's History

The Women Who Refused Marriage: Amahs, Sworn Spinsters, and the Wuyi Domestic Workers Who Built Lives Across the South China Sea

The Woman at the Pier n nIn 1934, a fourteen-year-old girl stepped off a coastal steamer at Singapore's Clifford Pier. The humidity wrapped around her like a wet cloth. The harbor smelled of salt, diesel, and copra — nothing like the mulberry groves and fish ponds of home. She wore the simple cotton clothes of…
June 15, 20260Comments

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