美国华人的历史Chinese Americans
点击：4563 时间：2006-7-15 难度： 来源： 英文荟萃 www.wendangwang.com
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Chinese Americans

　



For many years it was common in the United States to associate Chinese Americans with restaurants and laundries. People did not realize that the Chinese had been driven into these occupations by the prejudice and discrimination that faced them in this country.
在美国，很多年以来，人们通常都把美籍华人与饭馆和洗衣店联系在一起。他们并没有认识到，美籍华人之所以从事这些职业，是在这个国家面临的偏见和歧视使然。

The first Chinese to reach the United States came during the California Gold Rush of 1849. Like most of the other people there, they had come to search for gold. In that largely unoccupied land, the men staked a claim for themselves by placing makers in the ground. However, either because the Chinese were so different from the others or because they worked so patiently that they sometimes succeeded in turning a seemingly worthless mining claim into a profitable one, they became the scapegoats of their envious compatitors. They were harrassed in many ways. Often they were prevented from working their claims; some localities even passed regulations forbidding them to own claims. The Chinese therefore started to seek out other ways of earning a living. Some of them began to do the laundry for the white miners; others set up small restaurants. (There were almost no women in California in those days, and the Chinese filled a real need by doing this "woman's work".) Some went to work as farmhands or as fishermen.
第一批到达美国的华人是在1849年加利福尼亚淘金热期间来到这里的。就像大多数到那里的人一样，他们是去挖掘金子的。在那一大片无人占领的土地上，人们通过在地面上做一些标记来声明自己对土地的所有权。然而，或是因为中国人与其他人太不一样，或是因为他们工作起来很有耐心，以致有时他们能成功地把表面看来毫无价值的开采资格变为有利可图的东西，这使他们成为爱嫉妒的竞争者们的替罪羊。他们受到了多种形式的骚扰。他们经常被阻止在他们的占领地上开矿；一些地区甚至通过了禁止他们拥有自己开采地的条例。因此，中国人开始艰难地寻找其它的谋生途径。他们中的一些人开始为开矿的白种人洗衣服；其他一些人则开设了小饭馆。(在那段岁月，在加利福尼亚几乎没有妇女，因而中国人所做的这些“妇女”的工作确实迎合了当时的需要。)还有一些人做起了农夫或是渔夫的工作。

In the early 1860's many more Chines