Book Review: Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882–1943

This book is a deeply researched, richly textured account of the Taishanese diaspora that interrogates both the underpinnings and consequences of migration between Taishan County in Guangdong and the United States across the exclusion era and into the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing upon Chinese- and English-language archival sources and oral histories, as well as a sophisticated engagement with theoretical models of migration and identity, Hsu’s work is a model of transnational scholarship—one that bridges the sometimes siloed fields of Asian American and Asian studies to present an elastic, multidirectional history of migration, rooted at once in local tradition and global mobility.

The introduction establishes the theoretical and historical foundation for the book and advances the idea of an “elastic community” that transcends national boundaries. Hsu highlights the remarkable significance of Taishan, a single county that contributed more than half of all Chinese immigrants to the United States before 1960. She shows how local social and demographic pressures—overpopulation, poverty, land scarcity, political instability—intersected with external economic opportunities, such as the California gold rush and the expanding urban economy of the American West, to catalyse mass migration. Against a backdrop in which both Chinese and American states sought to regulate and restrict mobility, Taishanese migrants developed intricate networks of kinship, commerce, and local loyalty. These networks sustained survival and created a transnational social field maintained through remittances, correspondence, and repeated journeys.

The first substantive chapter, “California Dreaming: Migration and Dependency,” situates the reader in pre-migration Taishan, wracked by insecurity but also grounded in long traditions of clan organisation. Hsu shows that the lure of “Gold Mountain” was not simply mythical but yielded tangible benefits: houses and schools were built, and entire villages sustained by remittances. Yet dependency created new tensions, from conspicuous consumption and inflation to vulnerabilities linked to global crises such as the Great Depression. The emergence of Gold Mountain wives controlling remittance flows and the shifting roles of returnees reveal how local expectations were continually shaped by global opportunities.

“Slipping Through the Golden Gate: Immigration Under Chinese Exclusion” turns to the legal and social challenges confronting Taishanese migrants after the Chinese Exclusion Act. Hsu avoids reducing this story to victimhood, instead illustrating how migrants mobilised kinship networks and native-place associations to evade the American state. Coaching books, paper-son identities, and collective preparation enabled entry into hostile conditions. The chapter also reframes the so-called “bachelor society” of American Chinatowns. What is often depicted as social pathology is instead analysed as the product of exclusionary laws and the enduring primacy of Taishan-based families. Migration to the United States was less about settlement than about sustaining households at home.

The following chapter, “Surviving the Gold Mountain Dream: Taishanese American Families,” examines family life under the strains of forced sojourning. Drawing on oral histories and Chinese-language sources, Hsu challenges stereotypes of perpetual bachelorhood by demonstrating the persistence of extended transnational families. Separation reshaped gender roles, with wives gaining autonomy and managing property, finances, and education. Children were raised in households where fathers were often absent but remained vital providers from afar. Through chain migration and return, village economies and social structures were constantly reconfigured. Hsu’s account makes clear that absence and mobility were not exceptions but central features of Taishanese family life.

In the chapter “Magazines as Marketplaces: A Community in Dispersion,” Hsu makes a significant contribution to our understanding of diasporic identity and communication through her analysis of qiaokan overseas Chinese magazines. These publications connected Taishan not only to dispersed communities in North America and Southeast Asia but also facilitated a continuous dialogue of news, philanthropy, and solidarity. They functioned as marketplaces of information, forging alliances and testing the limits of local and national interests. Subscription fees, distribution networks, and editorial content—meticulously documented—revealed the ambitions of both clan and district associations, cultivating migrant loyalties, soliciting contributions, and sustaining moral and ideological ties to native place. The dynamism of these mediated networks challenges any easy assumption of assimilation or the loss of tradition.

The penultimate chapter, “Heroic Returns: The Railroad Empire of Chen Yixi, 1904–1939,” offers perhaps the most compelling case study. Through the career of Chen Yixi—a merchant, labour contractor, and engineer who built wealth in Seattle before returning to Taishan with grand modernising ambitions—Hsu probes the potential and the limits of transnational entrepreneurship. Chen’s efforts to construct the Xinning Railroad, intended to integrate Taishan into global trade, were ultimately thwarted by local resistance, state corruption, and the broader turmoil of Chinese history. Yet his story gives the abstraction of “return” a human face, embodying both triumph and failure, and prompting critical questions about the meanings of change, loyalty, and modernity in the diasporic imagination.

The concluding chapter, “Unravelling the Bonds of Native Place,” brings together the themes of mobility, identity, and transformation. World War II, the Communist Revolution, and the 1965 U.S. immigration reforms marked decisive ruptures. The traditional circuits of return and loyalty weakened: Taishanese migrants and their descendants increasingly invested not in the prospect of going home but in futures as Americans. Rituals of remittance, the mythos of sojourning, and hopes of return gradually receded. Hsu interprets this not as loss but as a historical shift shaped by personal choices, global politics, and economic pressures.

Throughout, Hsu avoids sentimentality and resists romanticisation. Her analysis both engages with and complicates the migration-history paradigm of loyalty to native place, warning against reductive readings. She portrays migrant strategies as products of both necessity and agency, and insists that assimilation and exclusion are not opposites but conditions negotiated within transnational lives. In doing so, she presents a subtle, layered image of identity—where sojourning, marginalisation, autonomy, and reinvention are not aberrations but central to migrant experience.

Ultimately, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home is not only a landmark in transnational history but also a model of social history. Hsu equips readers with new tools to grasp the legacies of migration by rejecting narrow national frameworks and embracing the multi-layered realities of communities spanning generations and oceans. Her chapters are more than thematic studies; each serves as an analytic prism through which the contradictory, creative, and often painful processes of diaspora are revealed. This balance of archival depth, theoretical precision, and empathetic storytelling ensures the book’s continuing significance for Asian American history, migration studies, and the wider humanities.