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The History of Chinese Americans Chinese have been in the United States for almost two hundred years. In fact. the Chinese had business relations with Hawaii prior to relations with the mainland when Hawaii was not yet part of the United States. But United States investments controlled the capital of Hawaii at that time. In 1788,a ship sailed from Guangzhou to Hawaii. Most of the crewmen were Chinese. They were considered the pioneers of Hawaii. The Immigration Commission reported that the first Chinese arrived in the United States in 1820. eight in 1830 and seven hundred and eighty in 1850. The Chinese population gradually increased and reached 64,199 in 1870. 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. The First Chinese to reach the mainland 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 markers 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 che scapegoats of their envious competitors. They were harassed 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 che laundry for the white miners; others set up small restaurants. Some went to work as farmhands or as fishermen. | 
