As the largest API American group in the United States, Chinese Americans numbered 3.54 million, with Filipino Americans close behind (3.05 million) and followed by Asian Indian Americans (2.77 million), Vietnamese Americans (1.64 million), Korean Americans (1.56 million), Japanese Americans (1.22 million) and Native Hawaiian & Other Pacific Islander (1 million) as the largest API American communities according to the 2007 Census.

After Native Hawaiians, the Chinese were the second API group to began arriving in America, coming to California in the 1850s. Most came from the province of Guangdung (Kwangtung) in southern China, an area afflicted by poverty and famine. News of gold in the Washington territory later brought many to the Northwest. By the 1870s, thousands of Chinese had been contracted to work on Northwest railroads. By 1880, there were 3,176 Chinese in the territory (about 4% of the total population). This number may be low given the difficulty of locating and identifying the transient Chinese laborers, who worked in Washington, Idaho, Montana and Utah. In the early years, Chinese also worked in agriculture, mining and other construction projects.

In 1882, the United States passed the first of several exclusion acts against Asians, this one preventing Chinese laborers from coming to America. This was the first time the U.S. government had ever enacted immigration legislation specifically excluding a group of people based upon their ethnicity. Many of those who were already here were forced to live out their remaining years as bachelors, as this law prevented them from returning and/or sending for their wives. Those who were able to claim merchant status were exempt from the law and able to bring over wives and family members. Many Chinese were subject to rigorous questioning and detained for many months by the Immigration and Naturalization Service when they tried to enter this country.

Few women emigrated to the U.S. until after World War II, when the exclusionary immigration laws were lifted (in 1943). Thus, the Chinese American community was largely shaped by the anti-Asian legislation of the late 1800s and the early 1900s, and the study of early Chinese immigration warrants examination on how racism affected the immigration and settlement patterns of the first and second generations from China.

This curriculum provides lesson plans based on literature and oral histories of the people who have experienced the challenges of coming to a new country and adapting to huge cultural changes. It is hoped that through their own words, the students will understand the impact of assimilation and the need for cultural identity and preservation. And it is through their perspectives that we all can construct a more complex, multicultural view of our own society and world. Teachers are encouraged to scale this content up or down depending on their own classes.