This article was first published in 2020. In the summer of 2021, Laura completed her dissertation at Stanford. Dr. Laura W. Ng has gone on to teach anthropology at Grinnell College in Iowa.
Laura W. Ng knows almost everything about Gom Benn Village – and she’s working to learn even more. She’s a PhD candidate at Stanford, whose exhaustive research for her dissertation thesis has sent her Gom Benn to collect surface artifacts in village alleyways and historic trash dumps. Her treasure is fragments of chinaware. Her art discoveries are frescos and poetry painted over the doorways of 100-year-old homes in the Wo Hing grouping of Gom Benn.
The title of her dissertation is “An Archaeology of Chinese Transnationalism.” She is focusing on the late-19th and early 20th century story of dozens of Gom Benn villagers, mostly all men, who journeyed to America made their “fortunes” and returned to build homes in Wo Hing Le. Her research includes ongoing oral histories with our Gom Benn Village members in America.
It’s a somewhat familiar history for Laura. Her parents immigrated to Los Angeles in the 1980s from the Toisan (Taishan) area of China, not far from Gom Benn. Her great-great-grandfather had come to America many years earlier but didn’t bring his wife or children.
After growing up in the Lincoln Heights area of Los Angeles, Laura went on to earn a B.A. in Anthropology with a minor in Ethnic Studies from the UC San Diego and a M.A. in Historical Archaeology from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her fieldwork includes archaeology at Manzanar National Historic Site and field projects in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Massachusetts and Iceland.
As a Stanford graduate student, Laura traveled with a team of researchers to excavate Cangdong village in Guangdong Province, China. The aim at Cangdong is to learn more about the transnational relationship that existed between China and the United States during the 1800s. In an interview with Stanford News, Laura said, “It’s pretty amazing how people from these tiny, seemingly isolated villages have connections to places across the world.”
For her dissertation, Laura was drawn to another village, Wo Hing in Gom Benn, that had a rich history in America, particularly in San Bernardino and Riverside. Wo Hing village was built in part by migrants living in both the Riverside Chinatown (1885-1940s) and San Bernardino Chinatown (1878-1940s).
Her research has focused on archaeological surveys, architecture, genealogical data, and oral history interviews with Wo Hing’s families. She is examining how the transpacific movement of people, goods, money, and ideas impacted the Chinese community in the Inland Empire and villagers in Wo Hing.
“It’s inspiring to do research that could help explain what it was like for Chinese migrants to be a part of two worlds back then,” Laura said. “By examining artifacts in China and the United States, we can get a better idea of how communities on both sides of the Pacific influenced each other.”
