This book is a study of the immigration to the United States of Chinese from Taishan, a coastal county in southern China, from which until 1965 over half the Chinese in America originated. This immigration provides a revealing picture of how individuals raised in rural communities of a fading imperial China interacted with an industrializing, Western-dominated world. Chinese were among the fortune seekers from around the world who hoped to find gold in California in the mid-nineteenth century. Long after the gold ran out and prejudice confined them to dank and narrow Chinatown enclaves, the immigrants' earnings as laundry men, cooks, domestic workers, and Chinatown merchants enabled them to advance their families up the social ladder. Such successes, however, demanded considerable sacrifice, and village communities had to adapt in order to survive the duress of long-term, long-distance separations from primary wage-earners.