Coming Home in Gold Brocade: Chinese in Early Northwest America

Although most historians of Chinese immigration to the United States focus on California, Coming Home in Gold Brocade delves into the contributions, trials, and daily lives of the Chinese living in the Pacific Northwest and adjoining Canadian provinces between 1788 and 1911.

Coming Home in Gold Brocade is a detailed, comprehensive, and wonderfully illustrated history of the early Chinese in the Pacific Northwest. Through extensive use of historic images and documents in both English and Chinese, this book offers new insights into potentially controversial topics such as opium use, secret societies, Chinese women’s rights, and interethnic relations, as well as economic life, community structures, and the private lives of Chinese American citizens.

While this book does not shy away from addressing the vile anti-Chinese laws, racist attitudes, and horrifying violence experienced by many immigrants, it avoids adding another victim narrative to the Chinese American story. Instead, Coming Home in Gold Brocade presents the early generations of Chinese immigrants as people to be admired for the strength, courage, and intelligence they showed in adapting to a rich but often hostile foreign land.