“A Great Wall”

Angel Island is an island located in the San Francisco Bay. Between 1910 and the 1940’s, Angel Island was the location of a US immigration station that was designed to control the entrance of Chinese immigrants into the country. With the existence of US laws that allowed foreign-born children of US citizens into the country, many Chinese tried to use false identities to claim legitimate reason for entrance in to the US. These imposters were called “Paper Sons and Daughters”. Angel Island served as a detainment center where Chinese immigrants would be held for examination in order to prove valid reason for their entrance into the US. Approximately 10% of all Chinese immigrants that arrived in Angel Island were sent home. By 1943, approximately 50,000 Chinese immigrants entered the U.S. through Angel Island.

The Boxer Rebellion started in June of 1900 when peasants from northern China invaded Beijing.  These people were aggravated by western powers forcing Christianity upon the Chinese, favoring Christian converts and causing social and economic troubles in China.  Their uprising in Beijing killed approximately 300 European and American missionaries, and tens of thousands of Chinese-Christian coverts. Approximately 500,000 rebel peasants were killed when Western relief efforts retaliated. These peasants were later called “Boxers” because their main form of combat was boxing and martial arts.

The Burlingame Treaty was signed in 1868 between China and the United States. It was a friendly treaty between the two countries, revising the 1858 Treaty of Tienstsin.  The amendment included agreement between the two countries to allow free immigration with both temporary and permanent intents. America had a high demand for laborers, so this agreement encouraged Chinese immigration to full-fill that demand. Heavy influxes of Chinese laborers, however, led to the establishment of Chinese Exclusion Act in America in 1882.

Attitudinal Orientation of Images

Attitudinal orientations are the three ways people perceive a new culture, or cultural experience. The first orientation is the cognitive orientation, meaning the person obtains a general knowledge of a certain culture or cultural aspect. The second orientation is the affective orientation, which is when the person forms general feelings towards the culture. The final orientation is the evaluative orientation, the point where the person makes a final judgment towards the culture. These orientation categories are significant because they create an understanding of how people perceive cultures.

Culture as a Three-Layer Cake

Concept of culture as having three layers. The first layer is the instrumental layer which is composed of large generalizations that are first apparent, like the Statue of Liberty as part of New York, or the highways network in Los Angeles. The second layer is the institutional layer, which are laws and the governmental system that organize and regulate the culture and society. The third layer are the core-values – intangible elements and ideologies. This is what people believe and how they are use to living traditions. A country may have laws but the citizens have to have the mentality to follow those laws. Like in America, we are programmed to follow the laws so that people will stop at the stop sign even when it is not necessary.

Pearl S. Buck

Peal S. Buck is author of “The Good Earth”, published in 1931.  She was born in  West Virginia to an American missionary family. She moved to China at the age of 3 months and lived there most of her life, which gave her the material to write her novel.  The images of the Chinese as benevolent and hard-working people that were expressed in  her book shed new light on Americans' views of China. This novel helped facilitate the Age of Benevolence which  lasted from 1931 to 1941. Buck was awarded the  Nobel Prize  and a  Pulitzer for her novel and its human rights message.