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What trials unite not only Harry Potter or Frodo Baggins but many of literature's most interesting heroes? And what do ordinary people have in common with these literary heroes? Matthew Winkler takes us step-by-step through the crucial events that make or break a hero.

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Feudalism Definition & Facts | Study.com

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Feudalism in Ancient China- Lesson for Kids | Study.com

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Dynasty during the time of the novel

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Kids History: The Tang Dynasty of Ancient China

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Kids learn about the Tang Dynasty of Ancient China. A time of peace, prosperity, and inventions such as gunpowder, printing, and porcelain.

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Kids History: Geography of Ancient China

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Kids learn about the Geography of Ancient China. How the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, mountains, and deserts impacted the early Chinese culture.

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Push and Pull factors of Chinese migration to the USA

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Push and Pull factors of Chinese migration to the USA

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Dragonwings takes place in 1909

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Definition of Push and Pull factors of Chinese Migration to America
This article explains the Push and Pull factors of Chinese Migration to America for kids. What are Push and Pull Factors that relate to China and what do they mean? The push and pull definitions are as follows:

Push factors are the reasons why people left China, such as persecution, fear, natural disasters, poverty and unemployment

Pull factors are the reasons why people moved to the United States of America in search of freedom, safety, stability and new opportunities

Push and Pull factors of Chinese Migration to America for kids: Political, Economic, Social & Environmental Reasons
The push and pull factors of Chinese Migration are dictated by economic, political, environmental and social reasons. Discover specific events in the history of China that prompted Chinese people to leave their homes to start a new life in America.

Examples of Push and Pull factors of Chinese Migration to America

Examples and List of Push and Pull factors of Chinese Migration to America

Push Pull factors of Chinese Migration for kids: Pull Push factors of China
To discover the full story of the Pull Push factors of China go to Chinese Immigration to America for comprehensive facts, laws and history.

Push and Pull factors of Chinese Migration: Political Examples of of Push and Pull factors in China
Find examples of Political Push and Pull factors such as significant historical events in Chinese history such as wars, revolutions like the Taiping Rebellion (1850 - 1864), political autocracy of the Qing dynasty and violent conflicts which prompted the migration of Chinese people to escape political or religious persecution .

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push and pull factors of chinese migration

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Push and Pull factors of Chinese Migration

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Find EXAMPLES of Push and Pull factors of Chinese Migration for kids. List of Push and Pull factors of immigration from China to America. Economic, political, environmental, social Push and Pull factors of Chinese Migration to America for kids, children, homework and schools.

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Migrant amass in Fung Joe Guey

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HISTORY OF CHINESE AMERICANS AND IMMIGRANTS IN THE UNITED STATES | Facts and Details

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Fujian Province was another source of overseas Chinese. So many people left Fujian for Southeast Asia during the late 18th century and early 19th century that the Manchu court issued an imperial edict in 1718 recalling all Chinese to the mainland. A 1728 proclamation declared that anyone who didn't return and was captured would be executed.

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At twilight on a Tuesday evening in September 1909, Feng Ru prepared to test an airplane of his own design above the gently rolling hills of Oakland, California. It was just six years after Orville and Wilbur Wright took to the skies at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, and only a year after their first public flights.

"The big bi-plane, with its four starting wheels tucked beneath it like the talons of a bird, sailed slowly in an elliptical course around the crest of the hill nearly back to the starting point," reported the Oakland Enquirer in its September 23 edition. For an astonishing 20 minutes Feng circled the Piedmont area, never more than 12 feet off the ground. Suddenly, a bolt holding the propeller to the shaft snapped, sending Feng tumbling to earth, bruised but otherwise unharmed.

While Feng Ru is little known in the United States, his fame in China is equivalent to the Wright brothers'. Middle- and high schools are named in his honor, and his childhood home is a museum; China even considers its space program to be based upon the foundations of Feng's work.

Feng immigrated to the U.S. from China sometime between 1894 and 1898, when he was in his early teens, and immediately set to work doing odd jobs at a Chinese mission in San Francisco. "He was staggered by America's power and prosperity. He understood that industrialization made the country great, and felt that industrialization could do the same for China," says historian Patti Gully, who has co-authored a book on the contributions of Chinese living outside their country to the development of aviation in China. "So he went east to learn all he could about machines, working in shipyards, power plants, machine shops, anywhere he could acquire mechanical knowledge."

Feng became well known for developing alternate versions of the water pump, the generator, the telephone, and the wireless telegraph, some of which were used by San Francisco's Chinese businessmen. But upon hearing of the Wright brothers' success, Feng turned his attention to aviation, laboriously translating into Chinese anything he could find on the Wrights, Glenn Curtiss and, later, French aircraft designer Henri Farman.

By 1906, Feng decided to return to California to establish an aircraft factory, building airplanes of his own design. San Francisco's massive earthquake and resulting fire forced him to relocate to Oakland instead, where, funded by local Chinese businessmen, Feng erected his workshop-a 10- by eight-foot shack. Jammed into this small space were tools, books, journals, mechanical projects, aircraft parts-and Feng himself, who rarely finished work before 3 a.m.

In this tiny spot, the self-taught engineer established the Guangdong Air Vehicle Company in 1909, and completed his first airplane that year, according to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. During one test flight, Feng lost control of his airplane (not an unusual occurrence), which plunged into his workshop, setting it ablaze. Feng and his three assistants moved operations to an Oakland hayfield, referred to by the New York Times and the Washington Post as "a hidden retreat."

"They posted guards at the perimeters of the field to discourage the curious," says Gully, "and talked to visitors through a crack in the wall."

So anxious was Feng to keep his invention secret that he had the engine castings made by different East Coast machine shops, then assembled the parts himself. His discretion paid off; Feng's successful test flights were covered by mainstream press, and his work was praised by revolutionary Sun Yat-sen. By 1911, as the New York Times reported on February 21: "[Feng] will leave here for his native land to-morrow, taking with him a biplane of the Curtiss type, in which he intends to make exhibition flights. It is believed that he will be the first aviator to rise from the ground in China.... The machine he is taking to China is of his own construction. The aviator is financed by six of his countrymen, residents of Oakland, who will accompany him on the trip. The first flights will be tried at Hongkong and Canton."

Feng was leaving just in time: anti-Chinese sentiment was on the rise in the American West, and the Oregonian reported of the pilot's latest flight: "Immigration officials and customs inspectors are today said to be gnashing their teeth. They find it hard enough to keep the Chinese out now, without having them dropping in on flying machines."

When Feng arrived in Hong Kong on March 21, 1911, by custom he should have headed immediately toward his ancestral village to pay his respects. But even with his family urging him to come home, the preoccupied inventor was so obsessed with his airplane that it took him two months to fulfill his duties.

On August 26, 1912, Feng was killed while performing an aerial exhibition before a crowd of 1,000 spectators. "He was performing in a plane of his own design and manufacture," says Gully. "He was flying at about 120 feet and had traveled about five miles before the accident. I've read a report that he put his machine into an extreme climb, but his engine seemed to fail and the aircraft fell to the ground. It sounds like a classic stall, but of course no one knew about such things in those days. His aircraft smashed into a bamboo grove, and his injuries included a pierced lung. As he lay dying, he reportedly told his assistants, 'Your faith in the progress of your cause is by no means to be affected by my death.'"

The Republic of China gave Feng Ru a full military funeral, awarding him the posthumous rank of a major general. At Sun Yat-Sen's request, the words "Chinese Aviation Pioneer" were engraved upon Feng's tombstone.

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Feng Ru made history on the California coast, then introduced airplanes to his native land.

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Definition: Important niche industry for Chinese immigrant families

Significance: Chinese laundries developed as a major occupation for the first wave of Chinese immigrants who came to the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. Laundries opened throughout the country and became uniquely identified with this ethnic group. The Chinese launderer stereotype appeared in popular culture and media.

Although the first Chinese had arrived in the United States in 1820, the first significant wave of Chinese immigration did not occur until soon after the California gold rush in 1849. With hopes of making a fortune in "Gold Mountain" and then returning to their families in China, thousands of young men left their impoverished villages in southern China to travel to California. They became contract laborers who worked in the gold mines and on the railroads. However, growing anti- Chinese sentiment and restricted urban labor markets forced the increasing numbers of Chinese immigrants to seek other work.

Growth of Chinese Laundries

In 1851,Wah Lee opened the first Chinese hand laundry in the United States. His small, leased storefront in San Francisco had a simple sign: "Wash'ng and Iron'ng." Within a few weeks, the business had expanded to twenty washermen working three shifts daily. A laundry was an ideal business for Chinese immigrants, since it required no special skills or venture capital, and Euro-American men considered it undesirable work. Typically, laundry work required long days of exhausting manual labor over kettles of boiling water and hand irons heated on stoves. By the 1870's, Chinese laundries were operating in all towns with Chinese populations.

However, as more groups competed for work, prejudice against Chinese immigrants intensified. In 1880, 95 percent of San Francisco's 320 laundries operated in wooden buildings. The city passed an ordinance requiring owners of laundries in wooden buildings to obtain a permit. Two-thirds of the laundries were owned by Chinese people, but none of them was granted a permit. Only one non-Chinese owner was denied.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first race-based immigration law, was designed to prohibit Chinese immigration and deny citizenship to Chinese people for a decade. In 1883, 8,031 Chinese people, including immigrants returning from visits to China, entered the United States. However, in 1884 only 279 entered the country, and in 1887, only 10 entered. In 1892, the act was extended for another 10 years, so for decades there were violent crimes and discrimination aimed at the Chinese, but they found safety in Chinatowns. By the early twentieth century, there were Chinese laundries in every major city. The Chinese persevered, taking actions such as forming the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance in 1933. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943. By then, entire families worked and lived in Chinese laundries, and the new generations of Chinese Americans gradually became assimilated into American society.

Chinese Laundries in Popular Culture and Media

Fromthe 1870's through the 1890's, trade or advertising cards were popular for promoting a service, product, or event. The stereotype of Chinese laundrymen was used to advertise laundry-related products, such as detergents, wringers, and soap. For example, the Lavine Soap trade card showed small, cute, pig-tailed Chinese with the product. A silent film of 1895, The Chinese Laundry Scene, featured the popular slapstick vaudeville act Robetta and Doretto as an Irish police officer and a Chinese laundry worker quarreling.

Family-run Chinese laundry in California around 1910. (California State Library)

In 1922, the Los Angeles Times ran a "Junior Times" section that included a variety of mechanical paper puppets. Along with policemen, animals, a jack-in-the-box, and other figures was "Lee Ling, Chinese Laundry Man." Shockingly derogatory portrayals occurred in Laundry Blues, a Van Beuren cartoon distributed by RKO Radio Pictures in 1930. Because it was so overtly racist, this cartoon was censored and banned.

An ingrained part of popular culture, the old comedic associations were carried into television. A television commercial for Calgon water softener that was popular during the 1970's featured a white woman asking a laundry owner named Lee how he gets his shirts so very clean. He replies, "Ancient Chinese secret." The secret is exposed when Lee's wife sticks her head out from the back room and shouts that they need more Calgon.

The Chinese laundryman stereotype persisted, but by the 1950's the actual traditional Chinese laundries were becoming obsolete. Self-service laundromats proliferated during the 1950's. Generations of children who grew up in laundries pursued higher education and entered other occupations. With the end of the civil war in China in 1949, a new wave of Chinese immigration had begun. These immigrants often came from upper- and middle-class families searching for a better life in America or were well-educated intellectuals pursuing advanced degrees. In 1993, writer Alvin Ang and composer John Dunbar presented the musical The Last Hand Laundry in Chinatown (A Requiem for American Independents) as a homage to Chinese laundries.
Alice Myers Further Reading

Chang, Iris. The Chinese in America: A Narrative History. New York: Viking Press, 2003. Highly readable chronicle of the Chinese American experience through the twentieth century. Includes details about Chinese laundries and the laundry workers.

Jung, John. Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain. Morrisville, N.C.: Yin & Yang Press, 2007. Comprehensive historical, social, and psychological study that includes personal stories from "children of the laundries," as well as newspaper articles, photographs, and historic documents.

Siu, Paul C. P. The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation. New York: New York University Press, 1987. The son of a laundryman, the author presents an intimate but scholarly study of Chinese laundries in Chicago from 1870 to 1940. This classic is a landmark in the exploration of ethnic occupations and the American immigrant experience.

Yu, Renqiu. To Save China, to Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. The complete story of the leftist labor organization that successfully advocated for Chinese laundry workers and other overseas Chinese living in North America.

Yung, Judy, Gordon H. Chang, and H. Mark Lai, eds. Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Anthology of personal stories revealing the political, social, and cultural history of the Chinese American experience. Includes the Declaration of the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of 1933.

See also: Anti-Chinese movement; Chinatowns; Chinese American Citizens Alliance; Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; Chinese Exclusion Cases; Chinese family associations; Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance; Chinese immigrants; Family businesses; Geary Act of 1892; Railroads; Yick Wo v. Hopkins.

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Definition: Important niche industry for Chinese immigrant families Significance: Chinese laundries developed as a major occupation for the first wave of Chinese immigrants who came to the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. Laundries opened throughout the country and became uniquely identified with this ethnic group.

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Watch the earthquake destroy Chinatown

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History of San Francisco's Chinatown - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of History of San Francisco's Chinatown, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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Photograph of Chinese adaptation of the Wright Brother's Model

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Rare Photo of Chinese Apartment and Business

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Rare Photo of Chinese Apartment and Business

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Chinese method of Ironing Clothes

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Photograph of the opium underground in San Francisco

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Film Clips of 1906 San Francisco Earthquak

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Film Clips of 1906 San Francisco Earthquak

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San Francisco before and after Earthquake

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The 1906 San Francisco earthquake struck the coast of Northern California at 5:12 a.m. on April 18 with a moment magnitude of 7.8 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (Extreme). Devastating fires broke out in the city that lasted for several days. As a result, about 3,000 people died and over 80% of San Francisco was destroyed.

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25 Incredible Photos of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

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China believe the kites originated in China

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Kites in Chinese folklore (Hello China #82)

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The Myth of the Golden Mountain - Blog - The Fifth Estate

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Many people in China refer to North America as 'the Golden Mountain'. Patrick Keefe explains what that idea means, and why migrants are willing to sacrifice so much for it.

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Map showing location of San Francisco in California

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california state map county road highway city river lake physical

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California maps showing counties, roads, highways, cities, rivers, topographic features, lakes and more.

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Brief History of San Francisco's Chinatown - 1931

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Former San Francisco Police Chief Jesse Cook details gambling and vice in Francisco's Chinatown during the late part of the ninteenth century.

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History of San Francisco Chinatown - The largest chinatown outside of Asia

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History of San Francisco Chinatown - The largest chinatown outside of Asia. SanFranciscoChinatown.com provides information to locals and tourists about points of interest, culture, history, and events in Chinatown. Come vist San Francisco Chinatown today.