“Huping Ling’s book is a testament to the growing maturity of Asian American historical literature in
the last several decades…Aside from being the first book on Chinese American women to cover an
expansive time frame, this study is also pathbreaking because it details this female experience in a
number of different geographical regions…Ling’s coverage of the Midwest is particularly laudable.
Ling has integrated her knowledge of the larger multiethnic American immigration past with the
Chinese American narrative and found similarities and differences between these multiple histories…
Ling’s work is perhaps the first to offer an in-depth examination of the lives of these women students…
This work… will be highly useful for classroom instruction in classe related to tshe U.S. immigration,
Asian American Studies, and Women’s History. Scholars would also find the wealth of previously
untapped information, particularly those culled from the National Archives and Chinese-language
newspapers, augmented by an annotated bibliography, useful for furthering their research agendas.”
—Benson Tang, Wichita State University, (American Historical Review June 1999).
