Asian American history is American history.

 

Even though it hasn’t been discussed much, if at all, in our education system, Asians have always been an integral part in America’s development, dating all the way back to its initial colonization and founding as an independent country. Asian goods, ideas, and bodies brought overseas through trade and travel have shaped the way Americans have perceived and presented themselves throughout history. Take, for instance, the acquisition of material goods from the Asian continent by white Americans to demonstrate their wealth or the reliance of the agricultural industry on Asian laborers to create fertile soil on Californian swamplands. While Asians have been able to find footholds in American society through these cultural exchanges and experiences, the circumstances around these instances were often conducted on unequal terms, resulting in the exploitation of Asians for the advancement of a white American society.

 

The term Asian American itself is a loosely defined term, created through the political activism of college students like Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee in the 1960s to demonstrate solidarity within the different Asian communities after decades of exclusion, scapegoating, and incarceration pushed forth by the American government. When using the Asian American label, there runs the risk of overrepresenting certain groups over others as seen in the fixation and prominence of East Asians within the American imagination. Each Asian community holds its own individual history and background that makes its relationship with the United States a different one. Therefore, it’s unfair to use the label as a general term without making a note on what specific communities are being represented in its application.

 

The stories presented within my project Gold Mountain Dreaming provide only a brief glimpse into the lived experiences of the Taishanese, residents of the Guangdong Province in Southern China. For their stories, I chose to focus on the context by which Taishanese immigrants came to experience the United States, which takes place in the decades around the 1889 Chinese Exclusion Act, an act which officially established the United States as a gatekeeping nation. While there exists other Asian groups that came to the United States, I limit my focus to Taishanese experiences due to their prominence in American immigration records during this time period.

​

It must be noted that the terminology and language used in Gold Mountain Dreaming are not historically accurate given that this project attempts to take on a modern tone around the lived experiences of Taishanese immigrants at the time.

 

In my previous projects around Asian American identity, a visual narrative and choose-your-own adventure game, I often focused on portraying the contemporary individual in response to larger societal phenomena. While these stories are important to share, I’ve come to find them to be the most powerful when they’re placed in conversation with each other, illuminating shared threads and differences among our own experiences, reflecting the important archival work done by historians and scholars in both the past and present. This is the narrative framework that I hope to convey through Gold Mountain Dreaming and within my future work.

 

Liana Lau is an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, pursuing a Business major with a minor in Writing and (tentatively) American Culture. Her work explores the formation of identity and culture within a globalized world, focusing on Asian American experiences and online communities. Consequently, she enjoys utilizing multimodal platforms and interactive fiction to tell intimate stories and explore the nuances of society. When she isn’t busy working across disciplines, Liana enjoys talking about comfort food with internet strangers and adding film recommendations to her constantly growing to-watch list.

 

You can find more information on her professional experiences on LinkedIn or her musings on storytelling techniques, genre formats, and communication contexts on Arts at Michigan.