Gom Benn Village (甘边村) is located among the hills, about four miles north of Taishan (or Toisan in Cantonese), in the Guangdong province of China. It’s about 70 miles west of Hong Kong.
Today, it’s pronounced in Mandarin or Pinyin as Ganbien Cun. (The Gom Benn Scholarship Fund is legally the Kan Pien Scholarship, another version of its Mandarin pronunciation).
This Taishan region is regarded as the “First Home of the Overseas Chinese in America.” An estimated half a million Chinese Americans are of Taishanese descent.
The 1842 Treaty of Nanjing that ended the First Opium War opened China to greater foreign trade, much of it centered in Canton or Guangdong. A few years, later, the California Gold Rush in 1849 attracted impoverished Chinese laborers from the Guangdong region and Taishan, in particular.
That was followed by construction of America’s Transcontinental Railroad, where the Chinese made up 80% of the workforce that laid track over the mountains and deserts of the western United States. By 1870, there were 63,000 Chinese (most from the Guangdong region and nearly all men) in the United States, almost all in California.
The Chinese men would endure decades of discrimination, including the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act prohibiting immigration from China — the only U.S. law to bar immigration and naturalization by race.
After World War II when the U.S. and China were allies, the restrictions began to end, allowing families to reunite, including those from Gom Benn. Large-scale Chinese immigration, however, was possible only after passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 lifted national origin quotas.