Aside from the potential rewards of mining, the highest wages in the world were to be had in the mining communities of California, by launderers and railway workers as well as other laborers. The money drew a flood of Chinese immigrants, attracted by the high pay ($30 a month for a railroad job in 1860s America, in contrast to $3 to $5 a month for a job in South China). The immigrants were almost exclusively male. In China, a woman was raised to "obey her father as a daughter, her husband as a wife, and her eldest son as a widow. As a daughter-in-law, she was expected to take care of her husband's aging parents" (Takaki, pp. 36- 7). So married women stayed home, while single women were taught not to travel to faraway places alone.
Coming to America. Hong Kingston's mother arrives in the United States in 1940, sixteen years after her husband. The Woman Warrior is, in fact, full of arrivals Hong Kingston's father and mother, her uncle, her cousin, and her aunt all arrive in America at different times. Historically, the conditions of immigration differed during these various periods. Apart from the years immediately following the gold rush of 1848, it has not been easy for Chinese people to immigrate to the United States.
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