living in San Francisco , where a sizable Chinatown had developed . Elaine Kims book Asian American Literature:An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context expands on the idea that people also feared the Chinese because of exclusionary policies, that segregated the Chinese from mainstream life, set forth from the American government . Many of the Chinese stereotypes existed well into the twentieth century and even persist in todays culture because most Americans were more likely to have gotten their knowledge of Chinese-Americans from archetypal entertainment characters such as Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, or Suzy Wong. People unfamiliar with the Chinese culture learned about it from television rather than from actually encountering Chinese-Americans in real life. As recently as 1960, the Chinese population in the United States was only 237,292 out of the total U.S. population of 179,323,732, or only 0.132 of one percent. Thus, very few American could come in close contact with the Chinese because of their locality and instead learned about the Chinese through various mediums. Since people knew so little about the Chinese immigrants, when they first began arriving in the United States in the late 1840s drawn by the prospects of gold in California, they immediately became exotic, novelty objects of curiosity who differed greatly from Anglo Americans. P.T. Barnum capitalized on such alien demeanor and initiated the Chinese pigeonholing the as mysterious, which had not yet taken on its negative connotation. He purchased a "Chinese Museum" in 1850 to be displayed at his American Museum at Ann Street on Broadway in New York. Tens of millions of Americans were estimated to have visited Barnum's museum, taking away with them Barnum's circuslike and perhaps fraudulent images and portrayals of Chinese as curiosities, exotic and different from the Anglo American. While none of these characterizations appeared to be overtly negative...
