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.

Chuimei Ho received her PhD in archaeology and history from the University of London. A founder and first president of the Chinese-American Museum of Chicago, she now specializes in the history of Chinese families and culture in the state of Washington and neighboring states and provinces.

Bennet Bronson received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. He is an emeritus curator of Asian archaeology and ethnology at Chicago’s Field Museum. Like his coauthor, his current research focuses on Chinese groups in the Pacific Northwest.

Ho and Bronson have written extensively on the archaeology and history of Southeast and East Asia. Together, they authored Chinese in Chicago: 1870-1945 and Chinatown in Chicago: A Visitor’s Guide to Its History and Architecture. They also coedit the Chinese in Northwest America Research Committee’s website, a leading resource for students of early Chinese American and Chinese Canadian history.