Surviving on the Gold Mountain is the first comprehensive work on Chinese American women's history covering the past 150 years. Relying on archival documents (many of which have never been used), oral history interviews, census data, contemporary newspapers in English and Chinese, and secondary literature, it unearths an unknown page of Chinese American history—the lives of Chinese immigrant women as wives of merchants, farmers, and laborers, as prostitutes, and as students and professionals in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America.