From the 1860s to the early 1920s, thousands of predominantly male migrants left their dependents in Guangdong, China to seek better fortunes in the “Gold Mountains”, a term that reflected their vision of the North American west coast as a borderless promised land paved with gold. Through these families’ altered but unbroken ties to each other, they created a trans-Pacific society, a transnational imagined community built on economic, social, cultural, and intellectual exchanges and co-dependence.

As early as the 1880s, migrants began creating “Huawen xuetang”, Chinese schools for their children in major cities, especially in the political, economic, and cultural centres of San Francisco, California, and Victoria, British Columbia. These schools are windows into the heart of this geographically dispersed society. An examination of the complex and changing educational landscapes in San Francisco and Victoria reveals that prior to and during this period of migration and settlement, cultures in China, Canada, and the United States were in flux and cross-border influences and movements led to even more significant changes for migrants. More importantly, changing ideas about how to educate the next generation reflected how Chinese North American communities shifted from regional and lineage identities to more culturally-based yet also more inclusive ways of self-labelling, and eventually to explicitly political identities by the early twentieth century. Despite these transformations, these seemingly new identities remained rooted in personal, familial, and native-place ties.

This study is both transnational (in its emphasis on the Chinese diaspora) and comparative (in its examination of Chinese schools in both Canada and the United States). Both approaches challenge a blinkered nation-based narrative and give agency to migrants and their families by reconstructing their histories through their lens and words.