About the Book
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
The Call of the East is the first book-length study of the Chinese Telephone Exchange, a historic site in San Francisco’s Chinatown that connected phone calls for Chinese diasporic communities from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Through richly layered archival work and deeply attentive analysis, Xin Peng reveals how the infrastructure of modern telecommunications was profoundly shaped by the intimate, gendered, and racialized labor of elite and working-class Chinese American men and women across generations. Excavating Chinese telephone operators as both historical figures and a recurring trope in American popular culture, Peng examines how their figurations of exoticism and modernity mediated fantasies and anxieties around technological connectivity.