What had Chinese Americans been associated for many years in the United States?

M: Good morning, Professor Zhou. Welcome to our program.
F: Good morning.
M: As a Professor in history and also a Chinese American yourself, can you use a word to describe the history of Chinese Americans?
F:  Bitter. You know for many years it was common in the United States to associate Chinese Americans with restaurants and laundries. People did not realize that the Chinese had been driven into these occupations by the prejudice and discrimination that faced them in this country.
M: But why? I remember the first Chinese to reach the United States came during the California Gold Rush of 1849. Like most of the other people there, they had come to search for gold, hadn’t they?
F:  Yes, they had. In that largely unoccupied land, the men staked a claim for themselves by placing markers in the ground. However, either because the Chinese were so different from the others or because they worked so patiently that they sometimes succeeded in turning a seemingly worthless mining claim into a profitable one, they became the scapegoats of their envious competitors.
M: So they were harassed in many ways? Were they prevented from working their claims, or were there any regulations forbidding them to their claims?
F:  Both. The Chinese therefore started to seek out other ways of earning a living.
M: Like doing the laundry or setting up small restaurants?
F:  Yes. There were almost no women in California in those days, and the Chinese filled a real need by doing this woman’s work. Some went to work as farmhands or as fishermen.