Chinese migrants write home
Subtitle: a dual-language anthology of twentieth-century family letters
By: edited by Gregor Benton, Huimei Zhang, Hong Liu = Jia shu di wan jin : er shí shi jì hua ren yi mín shu xìn xuan zhu / Ban Guoruì, Zhang Huimei, Liu Hong
Publisher: World Scientific
Published: 2020
Place of publication: Hackensack, New Jersey
Language: eng
Number of pages: 334
ISBN-13: 9789813274921
Subjects: Chinese; Correspondence; History; Chinese Foreign workers; Emigrant remittances; Migrations; Foreign countries
Other titles: Jia shu di wan jin : er shí shi jì hua ren yi mín shu xìn xuan zhu
Description: "Qiaopi is the name given in Chinese to letters written home by Chinese emigrants to accompany remittances, in the 150 years starting in the 1820s. Qiaopi had numerous functions and dimensions, ranging from economic and social to cultural and political. In June 2013, the Qiaopi Project was officially registered under UNESCO's "Memory of the World" programme, set up in 1992 because of "a growing awareness of the parlous state of preservation of documentary heritage" in the world. This book presents around one hundred letters from Singapore, China, Malaysia, Thailand, the USA, and Canada, including photographic reproductions of the original letters, transcriptions in Chinese characters, and English translations, where necessary with explanatory notes. Most of the letters collected in Chinese and non-Chinese archives, and in this sourcebook, were products of the Qiaopi system as traditionally defined. A few, especially some to and from North America, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, went through the Post Office, and were not handled by Chinese remittance companies. Not all the letters accompanied remittances"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Reasons for emigrating; title: Immigration procedures; title: Emigrants' life overseas; title: Migrant dependants' lives in China; title: Distribution of remittances; title: Household matters; title: Economic issues and politics; title: Education; title: Society; title: Family values, new ideas, and advice to family members