Researching the influx of Chinese laborers who arrived in California during the Gold Rush, I have found little mention of Chinese women. Surely some must have accompanied the men, as an enduring Chinese community came to be formed, but how many did, and what did they do for employment? Were they the wives of the miners and did some come on their own to escape life back home? Were some forced into prostitution, or perhaps even rose to influential places in the community? Thanks for any information you can provide.
You might also want to look at a chapter by Sue Fawn Chung on Chinese women in Virginia City/ on the Comstock: it appeared in a book I co-edited - Comstock Women: The Making of a Mining Community (1998). Sue Fawn argues that there was an over-documentation of Chinese women as prostitutes, in part because wealthy Chinese men immigrated with second or third wives, and in Victorian-era North America, such a woman was seen as a prostitute, whereas in Chinese society, the role of a second or third wife was perfectly respectable. She documents several instances of wealthy merchant or doctor's families with wives and children, and yet census enumerators recorded them as prostitutes.
Priscilla Wegars, one of the foremost academics who has worked on the biography of Polly Bemis (a Chinese immigrant to Idaho, through Oregon), has a book chapter that might pique your interest: "Besides Polly Bemis: Historical and Artifactual Evidence for Chinese Women in the West, 1848-1930," in Wegars (ed.), Hidden Heritage: Historical Archaeology of the Overseas Chinese (1993). I'm sorry I don't have access to it myself, but given the starting time frame, I expect it might have some information for you beyond the wild myths of prostitution. (Which, for what it's worth, Wegars mentions in her research on Bemis that she considers to have happened, but to have been significantly less frequent than concubinage).