The Golden Gate: A Novel

Amy Chua sets The Golden Gate in 1944 Berkeley, California, a city transformed by World War II into a crucible of racial and class conflict. The war effort drew a massive influx of workers to the San Francisco Bay Area’s shipyards and factories, creating a tense, segregated society. Job opportunities were unequally distributed and racially segregated, reinforcing rigid social hierarchies. White newcomers from the Midwest were labeled as “Okies” irrespective of their actual state of origin and faced class prejudice. African and Asian Americans were entirely excluded from many employment and housing opportunities.

Chua, a legal scholar whose nonfiction works like Political Tribes analyze group conflict, uses this historical backdrop to explore themes of tribalism and social hierarchy. The novel depicts a world shaped by policies like Executive Order 9066, which led to the forced internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast. President Roosevelt signed the order in 1942 following the attack on Pearl Harbor, in response to the belief that Japanese Americans might act as spies for Japan. This context is central to the novel’s plot, as Cassie Bainbridge risks prosecution to hide her friend Yuko Sasaki and other Japanese Americans from the authorities. Their decision to pass as Chinese to avoid internment highlights the racialized nature of American wartime policies.

Furthermore, the era’s systemic racism is evident in practices like housing covenants, which enforced residential segregation. Detective Al Sullivan reflects on this when shopping for a house, noting that Berkeley’s neighborhoods are color coded, with green areas reserved for “Pure Caucasians” (119). As a mixed-race man of Mexican, Jewish, and “Okie” heritage who can “pass as white” (366), Sullivan embodies the psychological cost of navigating these rigid boundaries. His personal history is shaped by the mass Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s, during which up to a million people of Mexican descent, many of them US citizens, were deported. This context grounds the novel’s murder mystery within a larger story of American identity, prejudice, and belonging.