GUM SHAN vs TAN HEUNG SHAN:

19th Century Chinese in California and Hawaii

by

Brian Dervin Dillon, Ph.D., Richard H. Dillon, M.A., and John Dervin Yi An Dillon, M.A. 

Part 1: (Introduction, and California)

California Territorial Quarterly, No. 100: 6-47, Winter, 2014

Part 2: (Hawaii, and Conclusion):

California Territorial Quarterly, No. 101: 6-30, Spring, 2015

The 19th Century Chinese experience in Hawaii was completely unlike that of California.  Two different Chinese ethnic groups encountered very different host societies:  one was shunned, the other welcomed. Despite differences of culture and motivation, Chinese, Hawaii, and California history have been intertwined for more than 150 years.  For too many years the Chinese were invisible within mainstream American history.  If no longer the case, too many studies of the California Chinese still fail to take notice of parallel developments in Hawaii, and many if not most are of narrow focus:  overly recent, and overly urban.  The present study is a ground-breaking comparison of Chinese ethnohistory, both Punti and Hakka, in three widely-separated places:  South China, the Hawaiian Islands, and California. Its focus is both chronologically early and non-urban, or rural. It was written by three generations of scholars, two historians and one archaeologist, within a single family.  The Dillons have close connections to Chinese history and culture in both California and Hawaii, through study, intermarriage, and ancestry.    Part 1 is written from the outside, looking in, and is the product of more than 60 years of documentary research.  Part 2 is written from the inside, looking out, and is derived from forty years of oral history interviews. This two-part study corrects misunderstandings and misinterpretations about Chinese-American history embedded in the literature, in some case, since the 1850’s.