This isn't my specialty by any means, but I can give a short answer while we wait for one that's more detailed.

The shortest answer is: not good. I know more about Chinese immigrants to America than I do about any other groups. The first Chinese immigrants attested to arrived in the last decade and a half or so of the eighteenth century, but immigration from China became much more common around the middle of the nineteenth century, particularly to the western part of the country, where the men could find work as laborers. This was largely an immigration of men - women were rare even into the 20th century, where in the 1920s they supposedly made up less than ten percent of the Chinese community in the United States. There are numerous articles on this sex imbalance and the resulting 'bachelor' community of Chinese, where large numbers of women, at least in California, are known to have engaged in sex work or polyandrous unions.

Chinese men were paid a pittance for their work compared to their white counterparts. They were targeted by both nativists <i>and</i> racists, unlike European immigrants from Germany and Ireland in the same period, and Chinese were massacred in 1871 in LA, in 1885 in Rock Springs, and in Hells Canyon in 1887. Anti-Chinese legislation, a reaction to what was perceived as high Chinese immigration and what was certainly a cheaper labor force, was enacted by the US government beginning technically in the 1860s and 1870s, but most notably with the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. This banned the immigration of laborers, but also the naturalization of many Chinese as US citizens, a state of limbo for the Chinese community that would become permanent in 1902 and would only to be repealed in 1943. White women could even have their citizenship revoked if they married an Asian man.