To paraphrase Kipling: East is East and West is West; they have met, but seldom as equals. The tone for this uneasy relationship was set centuries ago when Britain developed an unquenchable thirst for tea, spices, porcelains, textiles, and other things Chinese. Finding they had little that China would accept in trade, the British decided to export opium as payment. (Americans were also involved in the trade, and the video notes that a list of family fortunes made from opium reads like a who's who of 19th century America.) When the Chinese finally fought to free their people from the grip of this deadly drug, they were subjugated in a series of "opium wars." On another front, when the Atlantic slave trade ended in the mid-1800s, the Americas turned to Asia as a cheap and plentiful labor source. Peasants were tricked, cajoled, and shanghaied from their native lands to perform "coolie" labor in North and South America and the Caribbean. These immigrants rarely returned, and succeeding generations still populate the Americas today. This video series chronicles the long hard road Asian-Americans--formerly a silent minority, often invisible to the mainstream--have traveled. Using scholarly interviews and first person narratives, this "documemoir" tries to promote a new view of an often undocumented past. The second volume, Chinese in the Frontier West: An American Story, describes the Chinese experience in the American West, while the third volume (due in late 1999), Crossing the Continent, Crossing the Pacific, will take the epic story into the 20th century. Though the first tape is a bit overlong and repetitious, the trilogy should be useful in academic libraries, and is therefore a strong, optional purchase. (Vols. 1 and 2 may be purchased for $499 together, and libraries buying both volumes now may purchase Vol. 3 for $199 when it is available.) Aud: C. (S. Rees)
Ancestors in the Americas, Vol. 1: Coolies, Sailors, Settlers
(1997) 60 min. $265. CET Video. PPR. Color cover. Vol. 14, Issue 5
Ancestors in the Americas, Vol. 1: Coolies, Sailors, Settlers
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