Chinatown always has been the most significant expression of this alien people dwelling in our midst (p. 2). In Chinese San Francisco, Yong Chen offers us a rare glimpse into this community and its inhabitants, masterfully demonstrating its importance to the Chinese in America and its role as a gateway to a trans-Pacific society, culture, and economy. Because of the ways in which Chinese immigration to the United States elicited such strong public sentiment, especially during the anti-Chinese movement from the 1870s to the 1930s, historians have found ample records written about the Chinese in San Francisco.' However, very few of these sources were written by Chinese themselves. Like many recent studies in Chinese American history, Chinese San Francisco is grounded in a desire to find and recover the Chinese voice. Chen accomplishes this by mining an extensive range of Chinese and English language sources, including diaries, personal collections, Chinese organization records, census manuscripts, newspapers, commentaries, and government reports. Chen's use of numerous Chinese language periodicals from the United States and China is an especially rich and important contribution to the literature. The author's first goal is to understand what motivated Chinese to live, work, and persevere in San Francisco based on their own cultural and historical backgrounds. The book thus begins with an explanation of emigration from South China in the late nineteenth century. This is one of the most novel and interesting sections of the book. The root cause of Chinese emigration to America, Chen explains, was not a desperate, panic-driven flight from poverty in China, as previous studies have emphasized. Moreover, like other immigrants to America, the Chinese who came to the United States were not from the poorest segment of society, but were rather members of the middling classes.