Returning Home With Glory

Employing the classic Chinese saying “returning home with glory” (man zai rong gui) as the title, Michael Williams highlights the importance of return and home in the history of the connections established and maintained between villagers in the Pearl River Delta and various Pacific ports from the time of the Californian and Australian gold rushes to the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Conventional scholarship on Chinese migration tends to privilege nation-state factors or concepts which are dependent on national boundaries. Such approaches are more concerned with the migrants’ settlement in the destination country, downplaying the awkward fact that the majority of the overseas Chinese (huaqiao) originally intended to (and eventually did) return to their home villages (qiaoxiang). Williams goes back to the basics by considering the strong influence exerted by the family and the home village on those who first set out in order to give a better appreciation of how and why many modest communities in southern China became more modern and affluent. He also gives a voice to those who never left their villages (women in particular). Designed as a single case study, this work presents detailed research based on the more than eighty villages of the Long Du district (near Zhongshan City in Guangdong Province), as well as the three major destinations—Sydney, San Francisco, and Honolulu—of the huaqiaowho came from this region. Out of this analysis of what truly mattered to the villagers, the choices they had and made, and what constituted success and failure in their lives, a sympathetic portrayal of the huaqiao emerges. Returning Home with Glory inaugurates the Hong Kong University Press book series “Crossing Seas”. “From the very local qiaoxiang or home village of migrants to the transnational destinations in America and Australia, this book is a model of how to write ‘diaspora’ into modern Chinese history. The Cantonese Pacific comes alive in this highly readable book that is sure to capture our imagination.” —Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Brown University “A perceptively conceptualized and well-researched case study of an emigrant community in the Pearl River Delta that extended its reach to Sydney, the Hawaiian Islands, and San Francisco. Williams offers a refreshing qiaoxiang perspective through which to understand the experiences of Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” —Yong Chen, University of California, Irvine “This welcome study of Chinese mobility among settler societies of the Pacific places the family and the village at its heart, just as its subjects did over the century under review, to 1949. A path-breaking study based on first-hand research.” —John Fitzgerald, Swinburne University of Technology

English translation and appreciation by Peter Chen and Michael Tan Reviewed by Chan Chiu MingAn original English translation from the Chinese text:A companion edition of the book in Chinese is available — the original classical text translated into modern Chinese and profusely annotated by Associate Professor Dr Chan Chiu Ming of National Institute of Education, Singapore.

Written in the form of satire, this tragic story begins with a false report of two signal flares fired by a class enemy in a small town in South China during Mao Zedongs Cultural Revolution. From 1966 to 1976, a haze of persecution, confusion, and hate befell China. The so-called class enemies were paraded through the streets, and schools were closed. Domestic calamities went head to head with political rebellions while spies ran rampant and property was cruelly confiscated. There was an eventual fight for power as brothers mistreated brothers, wives were stolen, and families murdered. Now, decades later, these silenced voices are remembered in order to avoid the repetition of history. A Decade of Nightmares reminds us of what is true, good, and beautiful but also what is false, evil, and ugly. This book dissects the soul of a nation from a historical cross-section. It calls for the return of dignity and reveals the brutal persecution of the soul. From the vicissitudes of fate, we see clearly the extent and depth of the devastation caused by a decade of disaster.

The Blackburns' improbable journey from bondage to freedom pulsates with the breath-catching urgency of a thriller, yet this remarkable story is true . . . An invaluable testament to resistance, resilience, and a once-denied but unalienable right to life and liberty.--Rene Graham, "The Boston Globe."

David Eisenhower delivers a warm, personal recollection of the retirement years of his grandfather, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where they lived.

American by Birth explores the history and legacy of Wong Kim Ark and the 1898 Supreme Court case that bears his name, which established the automatic citizenship of individuals born within the geographic boundaries of the United States. In the late nineteenth century, much like the present, the United States was a difficult, and at times threatening, environment for people of color. Chinese immigrants, invited into the United States in the 1850s and 1860s as laborers and merchants, faced a wave of hostility that played out in organized private violence, discriminatory state laws, and increasing congressional efforts to throttle immigration and remove many long-term residents. The federal courts, backed by the Supreme Court, supervised the development of an increasingly restrictive and exclusionary immigration regime that targeted Chinese people. This was the situation faced by Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco in the 1870s and who earned his living as a cook. Like many members of the Chinese community in the American West he maintained ties to China. He traveled there more than once, carrying required reentry documents, but when he attempted to return to the United States after a journey from 1894 to 1895, he was refused entry and detained. Protesting that he was a citizen and therefore entitled to come home, he challenged the administrative decision in court. Remarkably, the Supreme Court granted him victory. This victory was important for Wong Kim Ark, for the ethnic Chinese community in the United States, and for all immigrant communities then and to this day. Though the principle had links to seventeenth-century English common law and in the United States back to well before the American Civil War, the Supreme Court’s ruling was significant because it both inscribed the principle in constitutional terms and clarified that it extended even to the children of immigrants who were legally barred from becoming citizens. American by Birth is a richly detailed account of the case and its implications in the ongoing conflicts over race and immigration in US history; it also includes a discussion of current controversies over limiting the scope of birthright citizenship.

'...this adept treatment of Homeric diction successfully bridges the gap between the technical aspects of oral poetics and literary analysis.'-RELIGIOUS STUDIES REVIEW